Carrie Levesque is another Bond Wellness Center (BWC) staff person who has been with the center since it first opened in 2000. She describes herself as “very competitive” in athletics at a young age and had, early on, decided she was going to be a doctor. With an eye toward the amount of stress that career entailed, she changed her mind and went the physical therapy route instead. Now at the Wellness Center, her official title is Wellness Coach.
Carrie signed on at the Wellness Center while she was still a graduate student at the University of New Hampshire. At that time, her now husband, Dan Levesque (more about him in a later FitNotesNH post) came to interview at the new Wellness Center and learned positions were available for which Carrie was qualified. The rest is history. They both were employed and, shortly after that, got married.
Carrie started out as an instructor, staffing the fitness floor and making sure that members were using the exercise machines correctly, for example. She also did health assessments and orientations and helped members build their exercise programs based on their goals.
Soon she morphed into a supervisor of the Center’s interns and developed a training program for them. She also worked as the exercise physiologist in the diabetes rehab program, then filled in for the cardiac rehab department and soon was doing the exercise stress testing for the hospital’s cardiology department.
All that changed in 2004 when she gave birth to the first of three children. After that birth, she returned for 12 hours a week, working 4-hour shifts in the evenings. “But that was too quiet.”
She’s now back working 30-hour weeks and she and her husband are able to alternate shifts so that usually one of them is home with their children.
These days she spends the bulk of her time as a coach in the SmartWeight program that focuses on nutrition and setting individualized goals for the enrollees. She runs the 8-week program along with Donna Poe. Participants attend weekly 2-hour sessions.
She also serves as a Wellness Coach on a one-on-one basis with members who choose to sign-up for that service. “Members who do that come to coaching because they feel like they’re stuck or they need a change for whatever reason,” Carrie said.
The most common question she gets asked by new members or new students in the SmartWeigh program is “Which fitness machine is the best for losing weight.”
Her answer is always the same: “The one you will stay on and use. The one you enjoy,” she says. “Of course, the cardio machines are going to burn more calories, but not if you don’t use them.”
As with most people, it’s tough for Carrie to fit her own exercise into her work and family schedule. With three children, she had to determine how it was going to happen. After a period of adjustments, she did carve out three specific days where her own time to exercise became set in stone.
“I had to overcome that obstacle, that saying to myself that there was no way I could do it with my schedule,” she said. “The victory was in the doing it. Figuring it out.”
Eventually, that exercise time led to running her first 5k with a team from the hospital. And that experience led her to try a half-marathon last November, which she completed in less than 2 hours. “Doing that has given me confidence in other areas of my life,” Carrie said.
Carrie admits to a weakness for ice cream and potato chips. The chips have become an evening treat for her. “I wait until the kids are in bed and I can really enjoy them,” she says. “Then I pour out this little snack size of Cape Cod Potato Chips and I savor every one of them. All things in moderation, as they say.”
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