A Stranger at a Bar Poked Me in the Stomach and Called Himself Funny. Here's What Happened Next.

Shane Kokas
Aug 23, 2018
4 min read

A few summers ago, my friend Anna and I were at a party, sitting at the bar, laughing and catching up the way you do. Two men nearby made small talk. Eventually one of them asked what I did for work.

I told him I was a personal trainer.

He looked me up and down — and I mean that literally — then said in a tone I recognized immediately, "You're... a personal trainer?" And before I could respond, he reached over and poked me in the stomach.

Not a joke between friends. A stranger. Assessing me. Deciding, in about four seconds, that my body didn't match his idea of what a personal trainer should look like and feeling completely entitled to say so physically.

I laughed at him. Told him I wasn't in the habit of lying about a decade-long career. And that was the end of it. I had a great night. I didn't carry it home with me.

But for two days afterward, I kept thinking — not about him, but about myself.

About the distance I'd travelled to get to the place where a moment like that could roll off me and land in the garbage where it belonged.

Because it wasn't always like that.

What That Same Moment Would Have Done to Me 10 Years Earlier

In 2008, a classmate told me I wasn't fit enough to be a personal trainer. We were talking about career paths. He said it casually, like it was obvious.

In 2011, after my first employer posted an ad announcing I was taking on new clients, I received an email from a complete stranger. It said I'd probably get more clients if I lost weight.

I want you to sit with that for a second. A stranger. Took the time. To email me. To tell me my body was the problem. I was 21 years old.

There were incidents between those two moments, and incidents after them, right up to the party that summer. Comments from people who had decided, based entirely on how I looked, what I was worth and what I was capable of.

And for a long time, I let them decide.

I hid. I questioned myself. I made myself smaller in rooms where I should have been confident. I carried other people's opinions of my body around like they were facts — like they belonged to me.

They didn't. They never did.

What This Has to Do With You

I'm telling you this because I know I'm not alone in it.

I have worked with hundreds of people in Edmonton over 15 years — the majority of them women and almost every single one of them has walked through my door carrying a version of this same weight.

Not always from a stranger at a bar.

Sometimes from a doctor who said something dismissive.

A parent who made a comment at the dinner table thirty years ago that never quite left.

A partner. A friend. A magazine.

A mirror moment that went sideways and stayed with them for decades.

The specific source varies. The damage it does is remarkably consistent.

It shows up as apologizing for your body before a session even starts.

As prefacing every conversation about your health with "I know, I know, I've let myself go."

As believing, somewhere underneath everything, that you don't deserve to take up space in a gym — that fitness is for a different kind of person, a smaller person, a person who somehow already has it together.

That belief is not yours.

It was handed to you.

And you are allowed to hand it back.

The Work Nobody Talks About

Here's what I've learned from both sides of this — as someone who did the personal work myself and as a coach who has watched clients do it in real time:

The mindset work is not separate from the physical work. It is the work.

You can have the best program in the world.

You can train three times a week, eat well, sleep enough.

But if you spend every session quietly believing you don't belong there — that your body is a problem to be fixed rather than a vehicle to be strengthened, the results will always feel hollow.

The most powerful shift I watch happen with my clients isn't when they hit a new personal best on a lift or lose the first ten pounds. It's when they stop apologizing for showing up.

When they walk in and start the session instead of spending the first five minutes explaining why they haven't done enough, eaten well enough, been consistent enough.

When they start measuring themselves by what they can do — carry groceries, play with grandchildren, hike a trail, climb the stairs without thinking about it — rather than by what they look like doing it.

That shift changes everything.

And it doesn't happen overnight. I'm over fifteen years into my own version of it and I'm still working.

But it's worth starting. I promise you it's worth starting.

Your Body Is Yours

Not your doctor's. Not your family's. Not the stranger at the bar who thought his opinion was a gift.

Yours.

It is not an invitation for commentary.

It is not a before photo waiting to happen.

It is not evidence of your failures or your lack of discipline or your inadequacy as a person.

It is the thing carrying you through your life. And it deserves to be treated that way — by the people around you and by you.

The comments you've absorbed over the years, the ones that still surface on hard days — those are not facts. They're other people's insecurities, projected outward.

You don't have to keep them.

You're allowed to decide what the narrative is from here.