News Photo by Alyssa Ochss Cristi Johnson stands outside The Alpena News last week in this photo.

ALPENA — Cristi Johnson has a passion for body positivity and helping women learn how to properly sustain their bodies through fitness.

Johnson, who formerly owned Family Enterprise, owns a personal training studio in downtown Alpena called skellaFiT. Here, she trains one on one with women and helps others connect with each other through online Facebook groups.

She said the studio also has monthly in person meetings with groups of women and they’ve been extremely supportive of one another.

She is also the founder of the local roller derby team, The Shipwreck Alley Rollers, and serves on the Alpena Downtown Development Authority Board of Directors.

The fitness industry as a whole can be toxic, Johnson said, but with the right environment it can be very positive.

“I’m kind of on a mission to create a beautiful environment where people can be proud of themselves and grow and become stronger and stop worrying about the things associated with fitness that don’t really matter,” Johnson said. “There are so many different ways we can improve ourselves without being overly concerned about a number on a scale which you know has been the focal point of fitness forever.”

Johnson said as a kid, she hated fitness and wanted nothing to do with it.

“I played two years of soccer so I wouldn’t have to take swim class, because in gym class we had to wear swim suits and I hated the idea of wearing swim suits in front of my fellow students,” Johnson said. “I had that much self body shaming going on at such a young age that even when I was at my thinnest I was ashamed of how I looked you know and that only got worse as I got older.”

Johnson said the majority of women who visit her studio have the same issue with fitness and body image in general.

“The majority of women who come to me have a similar relationship with fitness,” Johnson said. “They don’t like it. They have participated in classes and different programs and things that they didn’t particularly like and they’re coming to me and saying ‘I know I need to exercise, but I struggle doing it, I don’t like it, I don’t find it enjoyable, but my friend told me that you make her not hate fitness or you’ve helped her to not hate fitness. I want in on this.'”

At skellaFiT, body positivity is a main area of focus and Johnson helps women get past mental blocks to ultimately be happier with their bodies.

“I have a lot of women who come to me who are just concerned about losing weight and I inspire conversations with them to really think about what’s living below that because if a person is wholeheartedly unhappy with themselves and they haven’t start to become a friend to themselves and working towards their own best interests, then they are starting from a place with really bad energy,” Johnson said.

If you start from a place of hating your body and start doing hardcore workouts and calorie counting, Johnson said, it’s not a healthy mindset to start off in.

“So that’s where I start with folks to make sure they’re in the right place mentally a place where they’re maybe not ecstatic or over the moon about how they feel about their body, but at least coming from a place of neutrality and moving towards love,” Johnson said.

Along with her other activities, Johnson also donates to charities in the area. She’s set up a challenge for herself and her studio; if they raise $1,000 for Friends Together to help them reach their $50,000 goal, she will shave her head.

Friends Together was originally given until the end of the month to raise $30,000 to match a donation from an anonymous donor. Friends Together topped that goal, raising $35,000 as of Thursday morning, prompting the donor to increase their donation to $50,000 if Friends Together could match it by the end of the month.

“With the anonymous donor now offering to match up to $50,000 I want to do anything I can to help them reach their goal,” Johnson said in an email.

This story has been updated after Cristi Johnson’s name was misspelled in a photo caption in an earlier version of this story.