BALANCING ACT:
As Fitness Queen And Working Mom,
Kathy Smith Exercises Her Right To Have It All

By Sheri McGregor 

At a café in Brentwood, Calif., fitness diva Kathy Smith wraps slender fingers around a mug of tea and inhales the aroma. The impression is of comfort food in a place where everybody knows your name. Only here, everybody really means everybody: At Smith’s “local hangout”---a trendy little health food place---you’d know the names of Dylan McDermott and David Duchovny, who are also today’s guests.

While ordering a garden omelet made with egg whites, Smith listens sympathetically to a waitress who tells her that she has gained back the 10 pounds she had worked so hard to lose through exercise. “She had such a glow about her,” Smith says afterward. “Then she started feeling down about things in her life and gave up the activity. I want to encourage her. People seem to pull away from exercise when it would help them.” 

To women from all walks of life, Smith has been a friend in fitness for the last several decades. Women in no less than 16 countries rely on her musically themed videotapes (26 at last count), books, cassettes, and fitness products to burn calories and build muscles. Over the years, such devotion has allowed Smith to build a pretty muscular fitness empire; one that’s estimated to be worth some $500 million.

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One has to look no further than Smith’s lean body, tight jawline, and columnar neck; all earned the hard way---through exercise and healthful eating---to know the meaning of truth in advertising. The 49-year-old blond exercise queen definitely practices what she preaches, and preaches, and preaches: an hour or so of vigorous exercise a day works, for herself and other busy women. 

Of course, most busy women aren’t blessed with Smith’s income, or her “I’ve never had a weight problem” genes. So why is Smith someone they listen to? Confide in? Exercise with? 

Friends and acquaintances all say it’s her ability to reach out to people, that she truly, genuinely cares. Even with all of her success, Smith still teaches fitness classes, and because her fan base is, like her, getting older, she’s included a visualization exercise in her routine that has her clients refocusing their negative images of themselves 10 years down the road into healthy, positive ones. 

“I didn’t do anything physical when I met Kathy,” says pal Laurine DiRocco, a recently retired schoolteacher. “I was out of shape, and wanted to be fit by 50.” The next thing DiRocco knew, Kathy had her using her WalkFit programs and was taking her hiking every weekend. “And you know what?” says DiRocco, “I was fit by 50.” 

“She is an amazing woman,” says Tracy Katzer, a professional organizer who works for Smith. “I think of her as a mother, friend, and boss, all rolled into one.”

To wear so many hats in today’s hectic world isn’t easy. No matter how hard you work to keep everything in balance, life can suddenly knock everything askew as it recently did for Smith when her husband, Steve, an adventure travel planner, suffered a bout of severe depression. Suddenly, says Smith, “My world felt as if it were out of control. It was complete chaos and very frightening. I felt like I was drowning and carried the weight of the world on my shoulders.” 

Although in the beginning Smith put on a brave face and kept quiet, she finally found the strength she needed to get through the crisis by addressing the problem head on---by confiding in others as they’d been confiding in her. “The situation taught her that it’s okay to be real,” says DiRocco. “We’re all faced with different challenges. It’s part of being human.” From her husband’s illness, Smith says she was reminded that “we’re all in the same boat. Whether dealing with depression, a teenager’s problems, or some other issue, you have to learn to become a solid person so you’re not part of the problem but part of the solution. 

Putting Smith’s life on rewind, one gets to the roots of her strength and compassion. She was just 17 and living in Bellevill, Ill., when her father, who was in the military, died suddenly from a heart attack. Two years later, her newly remarried mother and her husband were killed when his private plane crashed in a snowstorm. 

Making matters more acute, such deeply personal tragedies were played out against a tumultuous national backdrop. “With Vietnam and the Kent State riots, there was a lot of upheaval in America,” Smith recalls. “The climate in the ‘70s involved a lot of experi-mentation with drugs and alcohol. And there I was: In college in Hawaii, lost and all alone. It wasn’t a great time not to have guidance.” 

The structure Smith lacked to forge her life came in the form of a college boyfriend who introduced her to jogging. After each run, Smith says, she came back seeing more and more light at the end of a very dark tunnel. For a long time she had been asking herself, “Why bother if life can be taken away just like that?” 

“Jogging,” she says, “grounded me mentally.” Exercise, she says, “became my ticket to clarity.” 

Not that Smith hadn’t been an active child. A self-described tomboy in an era when girls’ sports weren’t popular, she remembers getting in trouble in ballet class for monkeying around on the bars. Her antics, though, primed her for gymnastics during her 8^th through 10^th grade classes in Texas. In a way, gymnastics proved to be a metaphor for the demands of a career and home life. “I was good at the balance beam and the uneven bars,” she says.

In the mid ‘70s, holding a business degree from the University of Hawaii, Smith moved to Los Angeles. There, poor air quality and traffic made jogging less satisfying. So instead she took dance at UCLA, and joined a fitness class whose cast included Goldie Hawn, Jane Fonda, and Barbra Streisand. “We did leg lifts till our legs dropped,” recalls smith.

After earning certification by the International Dance & Exercise Association and the American Federation of Aerobics Instructors, Smith began teaching her own classes. That’s when she knew she’d found her life’s path. “It was so blissful to connect with people in that face-to-face setting. People would come up after class and say, ‘You’re changing my life. I’m a brand new person,’” Smith says. And it wasn’t just about their physical changes. “These people told me incredible, sometimes painful stories about their lives and their families. That’s where we really connected.”

Because Smith was the child of a peripatetic military man, she could empathize all too well with what it was like to not fit in, to adjust to a new school every few years. Following the deaths of her parents and stepfather, she said family members were struggling with issues that needed to be dealt with. So when women in her fitness classes began to confide in Smith, she naturally listened. “I could relate to these people who told me they had no confidence, felt lost, unloved, and all alone,” she says.

In 1980, Smith created her first fitness record album. Two years later, a second album hit gold and platinum sales levels almost immediately. Fan letters flooded in, and Smith felt like she was really making a difference in people’s lives. “It’s a great feeling,” she says, “to finally discover where you belong.” Thousands of letters later, she says she still reads every one.

Smith conducts her business from an office in guest quarters behind her house in Brentwood, which allows her to maximize her time. “I don’t have to look a certain way,” she says, and more importantly, “it allows me to easily switch hats.” As a wife and mother, she can run back into the house and get dinner ready or help her girls with their homework.

Concerned that in Los Angeles too many children are attending movie premieres and already worrying about their public image, Smith makes sure that her girls, despite their privileged address, maintain an active life so they don’t grow up too fast. They play soccer and basketball, and go to bed early. Team sports definitely enhance family together time: Smith coaches.

Smith blames the inability of children to get out and play---as she was free to do in the 1950s and ‘60s---as a reason for the epidemic of obesity among kids in America; that, and the availability of fast food.

Referring to a recent issue of Newsweek, Smith is saddened by the depiction of average Americans being overweight and relying on several drugs to get through the day. “People have become detached from their body’s cues,” she says. “We’d rather eat whatever we want and take an antacid when our stomach is upset than stop and look at the connection between what we eat and how we feel.”

Although Smith hasn’t taken an antacid or even aspirin in almost 20 years, she isn’t the Bionic Woman. She requires daily medication for hypothyroidism, and has to use inhalers when her asthma acts up.

Nor is she Saint Kathy. After filming a TV spot in New York recently, she had to make a stop on the way to Kennedy Airport for a chocolate fix.

In order to balance her roles as best she can, Smith says she has to rely on household help, though not a lot. She says she pays someone to cut up veggies each week so her nightly dinner preparation is simpler. “Hiring help doesn’t have to mean all or nothing,” she says. “Women can’t do it all.”

For Smith, having it all doesn’t include hobnobbing with Hollywood clients. Because Smith says she can’t fully function if she skimps on downtime, she regularly declines evening activities. She worries that women today are sleep deprived. “If you’re tired, you won’t have the willpower it takes to plan healthy meals and exercise,” she says.

So just how much exercise a day does she do? Less than you might expect from a professional: An hour a day. In a typical week, Smith’s workouts range from hiking the Santa Monica Mountains with friends (“I love making exercise social”) to “treading” (a group treadmill workout) with another group of girlfriends. “It doesn’t just happen,” Smith says. “You have to plan for exercise just like anything else. If I’m carpooling with the kids, I know I’ll have to get up earlier to get in a workout. If I’m traveling, I know I’ll be experimenting with a hotel gym.”

The key to keeping fit, Smith says, is finding activities you enjoy. “If you hate what you’re doing, you won’t keep it up.” She believes in “Honest self-assessment: Are you a loner or do you need to be around people? Do you like to run? Are you more of a bicyclist? When women say things like ‘I could never use a video because I’m not disciplined enough to exercise on my own,’ or, ‘I can’t stand the idea of a sweaty gym,’ then they obviously know enough about themselves to know what will work.”

As she nears the half-century mark Smith may have proven she can stay motivated, but she admits she doesn’t wake up each day raring for a workout. “If you get up and do it anyway, at least you can feel good about it later,”

It’s the psychological empowerment women achieve from feeling strong that raises Smith’s mellow voice to an excited pitch as she sips her tea. “Although as people get older most think about slowing down, having less energy and more fatigue, it doesn’t have to be that way,” she says. “What you begin to lose in skin or muscle tone, you gain back in so many other areas. You stop worrying about what everyone’s thinking. I’m so much more at ease now, and confident in my own skin.”
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Sheri McGregor is a freelance writer and romance novelist who lives in Southern California.