HEALTH

REDEFINING FITNESS

Ohio University alums and fitness trainers Katie Filippi and Stefana Avara share their stories of social media success.

BY HELEN WIDMAN | PHOTOS PROVIDED BY KATIE FILIPPI AND STEFANA AVARA

Maintaining a healthy lifestyle can be a challenge for many college students — even without a global pandemic. For Katie Filippi, an Ohio University alumna, and Stefana Avara, a master’s student at OU, the obstacles are well worth it.

Filippi, who graduated with a bachelor’s degree in food nutrition and science in 2018, now lives in Hawaii and runs her own virtual fitness company, Nutrition Clearly. She also works part-time as a clinical dietician.

Filippi filed an LLC for Nutrition Clearly before making the move to Hawaii with her husband in 2019, but she didn’t move forward with the business until months after they got settled. When the coronavirus shut the world down in early 2020, Filippi noticed the demand for virtual fitness training was increasing.

Filippi says that although Nutrition Clearly was meant to be virtual from the start, she was worried about starting her virtual training during a time when so many people were struggling financially and losing jobs. “And I was like, is this even a good time? But it really didn't affect anything at all once I was doing it. People were still interested and still signed up to work with me,” she says.

When she started at OU, Filippi says she was introverted, but becoming a Supplemental Instruction (SI) leader and a teaching assistant helped her get out of her shell. She started her fitness Instagram, now called @katiefilippi_rd, her sophomore year at OU, and the account has grown tremendously since then, especially during the pandemic. As of this March she has 119,000 followers.

Although Filippi didn’t initially envision running a company, Nutrition Clearly has allowed her to be more creative in her career.

“I think there's something that draws me to it, like the flexibility and doing it your own way [and] creating what you want,” she says. “You can really do what makes you happy.”

Like Filippi, Avara has grown her social media presence during the pandemic. Avara completed her undergraduate degree in 2020 and is currently studying for a dual master’s degree in business and sports administration. Avara has amassed a significant following on Instagram and TikTok under the name @defining.fitness. Her Instagram account currently has more than 70,000 followers.

Avara originally started her fitness account on Instagram when she was a freshman at OU in 2017. She wanted to hold herself accountable during her fitness journey, but she deleted it because no one else was filming and posting fit-

“I think there’s something that draws me to it, like the flexibility and doing it your own way [and] creating what you want. You can really do what makes you happy.”

KATIE FILIPPI OHIO UNIVERSITY ALUMNA FOUNDER OF NUTRITION CLEARLY

Katie Filippi in Hawaii

ness content at the time. She remade the account in 2019 and started using TikTok in February of 2020 to post more fitness content.

“That was before the pandemic, there wasn't a huge market for it,” Avara says. “And then, I remember I had my first ‘viral video,’ and I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I think that this could really grow.’”

Although many of her TikToks have at least tens of thousands of views on them, the first time she broke a million views occurred in March 2020 with a video titled, “Grow Your Booty & Lose Weight at Home,” which gained more than 2.8 million views. Nearly a year later the TikTok account now has 370,000 followers and 5.7 million likes totaled across all videos.

Aside from her role as a student and social media entrepreneur, Avara also is a certified personal trainer. Avara has worked with clients from 30 different countries since becoming certified in her sophomore year at OU.

“I try to get my workout done in the morning and do all my filming in the morning and then I have my clients,” Avara says. “I work with about an average of 50 girls a month on a

Stefana Avara

rolling basis, and I do daily check-ins with them and just kind of make sure that they're doing okay every day. But it all comes down to time management and prioritizing the things that really matter.”

Avara connects with her clients through various Facebook fitness communities every other month in order to create her own Facebook fitness group with them.

“The Facebook program offers a community-based approach to fitness and motivation,” Avara says. “The women in the group get to communicate, connect and motivate each other during the month program. The program offers workouts, giveaways, recipes, one-on-one Facetimes with me and more.”

She also offers personalized training online and in-person.

“The personal training plan offers an individualized, wholistic approach to health,” Avara says. “The fitness guides are specifically tailored to each individual client and incorporate any equipment or goals the client has. People can register for personal training on my website.”

Her website, definingfitness.org, has training and recipe guides available for purchase.

Filippi working out at Ping

Filippi also works with her clients on a monthly basis. Her virtual bootcamps are available to purchase each month through the Nutrition Clearly website.

“The whole drive behind what I do and the kinds of programs I offer, the services, it's very much for realizing [a client’s] potential and understand that they don't have to fit into what other people are doing to be successful,” Filippi says.

“Health can be so many different things, and I don't think people can really understand that with how much diet culture there is, especially on social media,” she says. “ I think the vision is to just help people find their version of healthy and what that looks like for them.”

Filippi also strives to focus on helping her clients break the cycle of doing things that aren’t working for them in order to figure out what does work.

“It's easy to think of it as just, ‘What foods should I eat? What workouts should I do?’ And I think people do themselves a lot of disservice by just thinking about it [in] that way of what you should or shouldn't do,” Filippi says. “Because ‘should’ and ‘shouldn't’ means there's a right or wrong way. And when you think you're doing something wrong, you think you're failing, and that's what sabotages yourself, and you think you can't do it. I really work hard with my girls to say there is no ‘should’ or ‘shouldn't,’ it's just your way.”

During the past year, Avara has also been able to foster an encouraging fitness community on her growing social media platforms.

“I would say that the pandemic significantly helped my social media growth. And it definitely is a direct result of people looking for home alternatives, and just realizing that they have a lot more time on their hands,” Avara says.

She says that the pandemic has given her the ability to create fitness content geared toward those looking for home workouts. It has also given her more time to connect with clients since she doesn’t have to work somewhere in-person.

Posting content authentically and consistently also plays a factor in Avara’s social media success. Avara says that while it is important to be yourself and keep it real with your follow-

Filippi working out now

Avara at Ping Recreation Center at OU

ers about going out and enjoying life, you wouldn’t want to give them all the details about blacking out on Court Street. She advises smaller accounts to remember that there is a fine line between being transparent and maintaining a professional attitude and that posting content consistently is another essential.

“Social media content creation for me is literally a full time job, I spend a lot of time creating my content, but it pays off,” she says. “You just have to be consistent.”

Avara says she has been working on a project she plans to release in the near future and feels optimistic about it.

“On top of that, I'm continuously increasing the amount of personal training clients I take each month, and also doing brand deals with bigger brands, which has been definitely a learning process to learn how to communicate professionally with companies on your own terms because no one teaches you that in undergrad,” she says.

In terms of growth, Filippi also hopes to expand her virtual training programs in the next year to be accessible to a wider range of clients. Her objective is to give her clients the option to train at their own pace, since all of the virtual bootcamps are currently based off of Filippi’s availability and schedule.

As for living a healthy lifestyle in college, Filippi says, “Just going through college in general, I think people need to use that time to really think about the person that they want to be, because you're going into college, out of high school. And you're not going to be the same person when you go in and when you go out, so it's really thinking about what version of yourself do you want to be, what does that look like and what is it going to take for you to accomplish that.” b