How Danielle Girdano’s cross-country bike tour for equality led to a successful personal training business
PUMPED UP | Danielle Girdano didn’t like the impersonal feel when she went to a trainer at a gym, so she empowers people to achieve goals with her mobile personal trainer business. (Anna Waugh/Dallas Voice)
Like anyone who’s struggled with weight loss, Danielle Girdano has a personal story of how she took off the pounds.
But unlike most people, Girdano tied her weight loss goal to biking 6,400 miles cross-country to raise awareness for LGBT teen suicide and marriage equality in 2010.
In 2008, Girdano was morbidly obese and joined a gym to get healthy. She set up a fitness assessment test with one of the gym’s personal trainers, who ended up telling her she had a long way to go and made her feel inferior in the large gym setting.
“It’s something that has always stuck with me,” she said.
So she began taking a cycling class to shed the weight. And in 2009 she approached her cycling coach about biking across the country and doing it for LGBT rights, mainly the high suicide rates among youth and marriage equality.
“He almost tried to talk me out of it,” Girdano recalled. “I started very aggressive training.”
The route she chose was among the most difficult, with only two people having completed it before, one in the spring and one in the fall. So she chose to embark on the journey in summer, taking off at the tip of Canada in early August and reaching Dallas in September in time to lead the Dallas Pride parade that weekend.
“I knew that I wanted to do something as difficult as I could find because I wanted to mirror the struggle of the community,” she said.
Along the way, she added stops to little towns and universities to share the story behind her journey and the fight for LGBT equality. But the trip had many obstacles. While biking through the Ozarks, Girdano wiped out and dislocated her hip and shoulder, but she carried on.
“All I kept thinking was, I can’t not finish this,” she said.
Throughout the 6,400 miles, the heat and the exhaustion, Girdano said she kept thinking about her own struggle growing up gay, how isolated she felt and her suicide attempts.
And how she never wanted other LGBT youth to feel that way.
“That’s what drove me,” she said. “I think it made me feel like I was doing something.”
Girdano was running on a treadmill when June’s U.S. Supreme Court rulings on marriage equality came down. She said she heard the news and started crying, thinking that her Ride the Arc journey had a small part in the victory.
“There was a really small part of me that felt like I did something to help that,” she said.
After the ride ended in September 2010, Girdano decided to make fitness her career. She became certified as a personal trainer and started training people out of the back of her car.
She launched D’fine Sculpting & Nutrition LLC in 2011 and still attributes Ride the Arc to her branching out and starting her business.
D’fine’s focus is on personal training in areas of weight loss, nutrition, and strength and endurance. Her mobile trainers specialize in various areas from childhood obesity and diabetic weight management to pregnancy and senior fitness.
Girdano said her company uses mathematical concepts for programs that focus on body composition, not Body Mass Index, which she called outdated and misleading since its creation in the 1800s and is too focused on pounds.
But D’fine is also about empowerment as much as it’s about weight loss and weight management. Girdano has always remembered how she was treated by the personal trainer years ago when she joined a gym. And she wants her clients to feel appreciated and encouraged that they can do anything.
Last year she helped oversee a five-week challenge that brought five obese participants together, each with different physical limitations, and helped them train to complete a 5K after the five weeks.
She also launched a corporate wellness program that focuses on a fitness, nutrition and work life balance.
It’s the first of its kind in the nation and has won acclaim from leading fitness experts. Girdano has expanded her business to Atlanta and Chicago. Her next expansion would likely be in Texas, mainly Houston, but not until 2015.
Girdano is one of 12 worldwide professionals that sits on the prestigious Personal Training Advisory Board for The Cooper Institute in Dallas. She also serves as fitness adviser for Synergy Worldwide based in Utah.
Her programs won her a spot in the Dallas Business Journal’s 2013 40 Under 40, which recognizes top business leaders in their fields. She was also nominated for the 2013 Chicago Innovation Awards.
“It means a great deal because it’s recognition by other business leaders,” Girdano said about the DBJ’s recognition. “It’s also people saying this program returns your money.”
Amid busy days running her company, Girdano still thinks about the days she spent biking across the country and educating people about LGBT issues. She said she’s thought of doing another ride in the future and would use it to bring attention to transgender issues.
“There are still areas like the great state of Texas that are still lagging,” she said. “Maybe it takes someone riding through West Texas to change it.
“Let’s get it on the calendar and start fundraising,” she added. “If someone is ready to do it with me, I’m ready to get it on the calendar, because I know it changed lives.”
For more information about D’fine Sculpting & Nutrition, visit DfineYourHealth.com.
This article appeared in the Dallas Voice print edition September 13, 2013.