August 14th, 2012. The first blog post ever published on Hungry & Fit back when it was a wordpress.com site. Now, or rather for quite some time we’ve been wordpress.org; it was a requirement when we started to monetize the blog. As some of you may know, we thought of the blog on our cross-country trip from New York to Boulder, Colorado. We stopped in Mason City, Iowa for a week or so along the way. At the time, it was just the two of us, but the pack, or pride, has grown since then. Hungry & Fit has also grown.
Back in 2007, when I (Hungry) first started training clients in sports performance, I created KING’s Physical Performance, better known as KING’s. It was a brand but it wasn’t very strong. It was an easy way to keep track of the extra money I was making with that side hustle. It wasn’t insured, licensed, or registered with any governmental bodies because I didn’t know better. Fit started training friends in the gym a few years later and decided to get her personal training certification through NASM around her time of graduation.
When we left the New York area in the summer of 2012, we left behinds dozens of clients. I had a lot of swimmers, of all levels and ages, that I was coaching as well, and it was hard to leave them when we had made so much progress, and had so much more to make. Not only were they growing at athletes, but I was growing as a coach. Many educators say that there is no better way to learn your craft better than to teach it and I think in many ways that is true.
We’ve never been fond of remote coaching, since making corrections, manipulating movements, observing closely and many other important aspects can really only be done properly in person. Online coaching also wasn’t the massive industry then that it is now, and barely anyone was even using Instagram. We felt like we couldn’t provide enough value to charge those individuals who we were leaving, so we thought of the blog. We figured that we’d provide general health/wellness/exercise/eating advice to anyone who wanted to read it.
Many of the first readers were those clients we had, and most of those posts were questions that they asked us. We wanted to address those questions in a way that many could benefit from the answers, but still have it be specific enough for those clients, so while remaining anonymous in our approach, we offered lots of variations for other populations. There were alternative recipes that were vegetarian and healthy. There were workouts for the average person or those who had injuries. It started to catch on and our much-more-personal blog started getting a little popular.
We miss the wordpress.com community a lot. Back then, bloggers would support, follow and comment on each other’s posts. When we moved to wordpress.org, even though we were able to monetize the site, we lost that community and also lost some comments, followers, etc, in the reformat. That change cost a nice chunk of money, too, but I think that in the end it was worth it because the blog continued to grow in other ways. We started developing partnerships with other brands, were being given free products to review, some of which hadn’t been released to the public yet. We started getting invited to exclusive events. It was definitely an unexpected yet enjoyable surprise.
Fast forward through a long story and many years, and the blog started losing popularity. Blogging was becoming less relevant as vlogging gained popularity. Instagram, Snapchat and other forms of social media might have helped some of the top bloggers, but it seemed to hurt most of us. Our views and SEO went down. We went from top search results for certain recipes to non-existent. At the same time, we were to blame since we started working on other projects and the blog dropped drastically on our daily and overall priority list.
Nevertheless, we kept chugging on and tried to keep producing some content. At one point, we were somewhere around 900,000 lifetime readers and it seemed as though we’d never reach 1 million. Just the other day, as I was applying for a new partnership, I was checking site stats and noticed that without even realizing, we hit 1 million views! We’ve been so incredibly busy the last 6-7 months, that we soared right past it. If the stats are right, we’ve had 1,042,401 readers, as of right now!
We’d just like to thank everyone for their continued support. We don’t know what will happen with Hungry & Fit, but we’re looking forward to what the future has in store. No matter what happens, always remember to stay hungry and fit!
Congratulations!!