Monica Di Giacomo weighed 320 pounds and no trainer would take her on. Now, after 10 years of work, the Miami woman takes the stage for bodybuilding competition.
The after photo is the one that gets all the likes, the congratulations, the one where everyone tells her how great she looks.
But it’s the before photo that makes Monica Di Giacomo the proudest.
That’s the woman who at 37 had wanted to kill herself, the woman who felt she was unlovable, the one who at 320 pounds thought she was worthless.
That’s also the woman who walked into a gym to ask for help. All the trainers said no.
She was too big. She was too much of a health risk. She would quit soon enough anyway.
But that was also the woman who didn’t give up.
That’s the woman who kept showing up and found a coach that would change her life in more ways than one. That’s the woman who returned the next day when she was sore and tired.
That’s the woman who came back again, the woman who didn’t give up.
In September, 10 years after that photo, she will compete in her first bodybuilding competition. She will walk across the stage of a convention center in Fort Lauderdale in a royal blue sparkly bikini, a spray tan highlighting each muscle. Her husband and friends will cheer for her. And a photographer will capture the moment.
But it’s the Day 1 photo − the before − that makes her smile.
“She’s the reason I’m alive,” Di Giacomo says. “She did the work. She’s why I’m here.”
Fitting into a world that celebrates tiny women
Di Giacomo grew up in Miami in the 1980s in a world that told girls that tiny was better.
She never was small and struggled to fit into the neon miniskirts and off-the-shoulder tops girls wore at school.
She read magazines that promised thinner thighs in 30 days, worked out with Jane Fonda on a VHS tape, and tried to find her buns of steel. Like many women, she starved herself.
And then she binged. (Like many who hid that, too.)
She found comfort in food when her grandfather killed himself in front of her, when she held her mother as she died of cancer, and later when her decades-long partner never introduced her to his friends. An entire package of Oreos at 2 a.m. made the pain go away, at least temporarily.
She hid behind black baggy sweatpants and oversize T-shirts and hoodies. Her weight kept going up, in a way she almost didn’t notice.
“You get to be a size where people don’t see you as a person because you are so big, so fat,” she says.
She felt as if she no longer mattered.
“I thought about suicide. I was so unhappy. I felt so worthless and like I added no value to anything or anyone in my life,” she says.
The 320-pound truth
On her 37th birthday, Di Giacomo was about to leave her annual physical after a routine blood draw.
“See you in three months, doc,” she said.
“I won’t see you next visit,” she remembers her longtime doctor telling her in the fall of 2015.
“Are you moving?” she asked.
“No, you are going to die if you don’t make changes,” her doctor told her.
Her cholesterol was in the 400s, more than double a healthy range. Her blood pressure was sky high at 155/110. She was prediabetic. She weighed 320 pounds.
The statistics weren’t new, but her doctor’s bluntness was.
“That was when I knew. My doctor told me she was afraid I was going to have a heart attack,” she says. “She told me that if I didn’t do something, this was it.”
They discussed a plan. Di Giacomo needed to work with a registered dietician, undergo gastric sleeve weight loss surgery, and change her lifestyle.
By spring, she had surgery.
Like any medical intervention such as weight loss drugs or surgery, they won’t work without lifestyle changes. Coupled together, they can be more effective than diet and exercise alone.
“People think oh it’s just have the surgery and you’re good,” she says. “But that’s not the way it goes. It’s not some magic surgery you have and then everything is fine. You need to change your life.”
‘Everything I knew about food and dieting was a lie.’
Di Giacomo walked into to a Miami gym to try to find a trainer.
Amid the blaring reggaeton and techno music in the background, “each one said no,” she says.
“They were afraid to work with me. I was this morbidly obese woman with high blood pressure, all the bad conditions.”
She started working out two days a week − riding a stationary bicycle and walking on a treadmill.
“My goal wasn’t to look good,” she says. “I just wanted to be alive.”
Finally, she found a coach to take her on.
She arrived quiet, reserved. She hid not just her body, but her emotions.
“She barely said a word,” her coach says. “She didn’t smile for maybe the first year, until she lost 100 pounds. But she kept showing up.”
He asked for lab work and created a plan – from lifting weights to nutrition. It would go against everything that Di Giacomo and women had been taught for years.
“Everything I knew about food and dieting was a lie,” Di Giacomo says. “I had this perception that ‘oh you lift weights; you’re going to look like a man.’ I thought you needed to eat like a little bird.”
Now we know that weight loss is more complicated; it’s more than eating less and exercising more.
Back then, it felt like her own personal failure.
For decades, women would undereat, still gain weight and blame themselves. Di Giacomo would find out what more women in midlife are now learning: Food could be her friend.
More women are counting macros (protein, carbohydrates and fat) instead of calories. They are learning they shouldn’t skip meals, that overly simplistic calorie deficits don’t always lead to weight loss. And, that they certainly aren’t always synonymous with health.
Cardio might lead to an energy expenditure that triggers weight loss, but it won’t make their bodies looked toned. To look like the women they dream of, they have to push like Olympian Ilona Maher who squats twice her bodyweight.
So, instead of spending hours on treadmills and elliptical machines, women are lifting weights. Gyms are taking notice, with some reducing their cardio equipment by 40% in some locations to make room for more free weights.
Her coach taught her about strength training. Some weeks it was about building muscle. Sometimes building a belief in herself.
The lessons came slowly. Instead of eating a package of Oreos, her coach told her to eat two cookies before bed and put two cookies on her nightstand. If she woke up with cravings, she could eat two.
After a few weeks, there were still two cookies on the nightstand in the morning.
Instead, she learned to eat real food − and in copious amounts. Several meals a day of chicken or beef, veggies and fats like avocado. All of this also meant becoming friends with women’s biggest foe: carbs.
Most days Di Giacomo eats 147 grams of protein and 321 grams of carbs. She eats around 2,500 calories, a number most women would be afraid of.
Eat more − not less − to get lean is what the science says. It’s key to balancing hormones and staving metabolic issues. Protein keeps people fuller and supports fat loss. Carbs fuel workouts and protect lean muscle. Women who aren’t bodybuilders, still often need to eat more.
Crying at the gym
Still, there were days Di Giacomo would cry through reps.
She doubted herself. She saw the girl in high school who couldn’t fit into the tiny miniskirts. There were days she would leave the gym mad, when she measured everything in pounds lost instead of muscle added.
Her coach reminded her that small progress was progress. It moved her forward.
She kept showing up, through a break up with her partner, through a job loss. It was just her and the barbell, which doesn’t care if you are grumpy or got yelled at during work. It showed her she had the strength to build herself a new life, one she’d been too afraid to deserve.
The time in the gym became the alone time she needed to think, time she looked forward to, time she could see progress. It became as important for her mental health as it was her physical health.
Underneath the Smith machine, she learned to love the person who had always been there, who’d always needed it the most: herself.
There was also something innate to showing up to take care of herself that broke with everything she had been taught. Discipline was the purest form of courage.
Over several years, slowly, she lost 120 pounds and gained muscle. She had her excess skin removed and her stomach tightened. She no longer needed blood pressure medication, diabetes medication or a statin.
She shed the hoodies and more weight. She kept training. And after falling back in love with who she was, with the Monica who was always there, she fell for the person who had stood by her side the entire time, the one who saw something in her that none of the others did.
Her coach. In the summer of 2022, she married Marino Di Giacamo.
“She was my heaviest client and now she is my fittest,” Marino Di Giacomo, coach of Marino’s Body Lab says. “And now she has my heart.”
‘Even my stretchmarks are cute’
Monica Di Giacomo thinks about how she grew up trying to make herself smaller, to take up less space, to make herself more palatable to others.
She looks at that before photo. She sees the baggy sweatshirts, the way she didn’t smile often. She thinks about the days she wanted to kill herself. On those days, her coach told her that when she felt dark, she should go to a spin class.
There were days she went to three classes.
But Di Giacomo also sees someone else in these photos: a woman who was scared but started something new anyway, a woman who was exhausted, but didn’t give up.
“I wish I could tell her, ‘You are going to change more than you know. … Your world is going to get so much better – you health, your relationships, you,” she says. “I wouldn’t be here today without that girl.”
And she would tell her about who she is now: the woman who dances to Stevie B on the treadmill (at a 10.5 incline!) in a cropped tank top and bike shorts, the woman who supports her husband’s clients on their own journeys, even when that means getting on the StairMaster so they get their cardio in.
“I’m so happy now. I don’t just love myself. I really love myself,” Di Giacomo says. (“Even my stretchmarks are cute!”)
She is competing in the bodybuilding event to show not only herself, but other women in midlife that it’s important to take care of themselves. That they matter.
Today, as she prepares for the show − meaning she is upping her workouts and tightening her nutrition − she is down to 137 pounds and 14% body fat.
During her upcoming competition, her body glistening under the lights, she will know that the least important transformation is the one you can see on stage.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, contact the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988 or visiting 988lifeline.org
Laura Trujillo is a national columnist focusing on health and wellness. She is the author of “Stepping Back from the Ledge: A Daughter’s Search for Truth and Renewal,” and can be reached at ltrujillo@usatoday.com.