Carrie Underwood, the seven-time Grammy award-winning singer and songwriter who came to fame as the winner of “American Idol” in 2005, has written her first book. But it’s not about music. It’s focused on one of the multifaceted star’s other passions: fitness and healthy living. In “Find Your Path: Honor Your Body, Fuel Your Soul, and Get Strong with the Fit52 Life,” Underwood (with help from her writing partner, Eve Adamson) shares her fitness philosophy, called “Fit52.”
While Underwood juggles her careers as a country singer, businesswoman and designer with motherhood, she also maintains a healthy lifestyle. That doesn’t mean being perfect every day, she tells USA TODAY. The book “looks at health as an overall balanced approach to things and being good,” Underwood says. “It’s more about what your week looks like instead of trying so hard to be super-strict every single day.” To do this, she had to find her path and stick to it. Now, she wants to help others do the same.
Underwood’s launch coincides with the debut of her Fit52 app, which launches Monday, one day before her book hits shelves on Tuesday. And the Underwood fitness empire goes beyond her two newest endeavors – she also has a line of fitness apparel, CALIA, which she created with Dick’s Sporting Goods. “It all started with a love for health and fitness and has blossomed into lots of things,” she says. “I live and breathe and sleep and eat all of this,” she adds, noting that she’s dressed head-to-toe in CALIA at that very moment.
Underwood shares healthy food options, recipes and journaling practices in addition to her Fit52 workout program, which involves picking from a deck of cards to determine exercises. “In the book, we tell people about exercises and give everyone the tools that they need,” she says. “We mapped out different paths for people to choose – can be beginner, intermediate, advanced.”
The fit52 app is an extension of the book, she says. It’s engineered to make fitness fun, almost like a game. The app is free to download, and subscribers are eligible for a two-week trial period. Monthly subscriptions cost $7.99, quarterly subscriptions cost $19.99 and annual subscriptions cost $51.99; subscriptions are billed at the end of the trial period.
In the book, Underwood also shares her own journey to healthy living. “I was always lucky to be able to go play outside as a kid,” she says. “But you know, I’m from a small town kind of in the South in the middle of the country, and health really wasn’t a priority,”
When she was in her early 20s, she started to feel her metabolism shift. “I hadn’t really started paying attention to nutrition,” she explains. “It got to a point where I didn’t feel good.”
Then she made some changes and began zoning in on nutrition and exercise. She feels lucky she was able to turn it around – she called it a “reset” to her life. Now, she’s staying on that path. “I remember what that felt like to feel slow and tired, and I don’t want to go back,” she says.
Underwood dealt with the pressures of the spotlight too, and was focused on her weight – it seemed like a numbers game. She eventually shifted her mindset from what clothes she could fit into to focusing on nutrition and what made her feel better. She made sure her goals would allow her “to operate this machine called ‘the body’ in a way that I felt good about.”
Focusing on healthy living in a big-picture way has helped her to enjoy life. “I still feel good in what I have on, even if I eat half a pizza when I’m watching the Super Bowl,” she adds.
Her biggest tip? “Just keep going,” she says. “It shouldn’t be a chore, which is why we tried to make the app fun and keep you on your toes. We encourage people to just start something – we literally have one-day-a-week workouts.”
Small steps can make a really big difference. “I feel like it’s all about practical choices, nothing in the book or in the app or anything is weird or unattainable, it’s practical,” Underwood says. “That’s what it’s all about.”
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