Michael Torchia 60 connections

I was an overweight Italian kid in a rinky-dink town in New York. My father berated me, my loving mother stuffed me full of Sicilian delicacies, and my peers shunned me. After a string of particularly humiliating experiences, I became determined to change the way I looked and felt. I discovered lifting weights, and everything changed. My bulk turned into muscle, I constructed a weight training room in my basement. I thrived on it. One day, during an argument with my father, he took a sledgehammer to my weight machines, destroying them, calling me nothing but a “gym bum.” Instead of crushing my spirit, he only fueled my convictions. I became Teenage Mr. New York State and started a personal training business at age 17.

Lifting weights put food on my table. It was like I’d found a doorway into another world. I’d spent my childhood and early teenage years overweight, out of shape and lonely. Through weightlifting, I started to become the person I always knew I was. As my body changed my sense of who I was and what I could accomplish grew stronger as well. My chunky frame toned up and transformed to muscle; women began to turn their heads and drop their jaws as I walked by. Things only snowballed from there; I had received the Teenage Mr. America title, Mr. New York title, and Mr. California title.

Eventually, I moved to Los Angeles and over time I became a personal trainer to some of the most powerful and famous people in the movie industry. I had a booming business and more elite clients under my belt than I had ever dreamed possible. I had become an integral part of the machinery that turns the wheels of Hollywood.

So many people had told me I was a fool to pursue bodybuilding. The real thrill was that people looked at me with respect. They valued my time with them, and valued how I was able to motivate them.

Action stars don’t get those physiques overnight. It takes time, sweat, and discipline. That’s where I came in. I was the guy behind the scenes who maximized their time at the gym, took their phone calls in the middle of the night when they had a question about what to eat from the catering service on a movie set halfway across the world, and convinced them to put in the extra effort that transformed them into the superheroes they portrayed on screen.

Over the years, I became bored of my life and felt unfilled. I knew something had to change and I was willing to do whatever it takes to change my life. That was the day I decided to create a health and fitness program for children. The rest is history, since then I have devoted my life to preventing children from going through the suffering of being of unhealthy and unhappy, as I did for many years. To learn more about my children's program visit: OperationFitness.com