I’ve been on both sides of transformation.
The woman who knew exactly what to do — and the woman who couldn’t understand why she wasn’t doing it.
I started coaching in 2011.
Back then, the work looked like most of the industry: programs, plans, before-and-afters. I was good at it. I competed, earned my IFBB Bikini Pro card, and built a coaching practice that eventually reached more than three thousand women.
Discipline was never my problem. For a long stretch, I could out-work almost anyone.
And then my own life kept changing.
I gained weight and lost it. I got extremely fit and then lost the season that made it possible. I became a mother. I built a business. My priorities moved, my body changed, and the version of health that had worked at twenty-five didn’t survive contact with the life I actually had.
There were seasons I felt strong and seasons I quietly lost confidence. I know what it’s like to have all the knowledge and still not be living it.
Knowing what to do and knowing how to live it are two different skills.
Everyone finished. Almost nobody stayed.
Women would follow the plan, lose the weight, train consistently, feel incredible — and complete the challenge. Then, over the following months, most of them drifted back toward the behaviors they’d had before.
It wasn’t a discipline problem. These were disciplined women. Something else was missing.
What happens after the challenge ends?
Why were we teaching women how to get results without teaching them how to build a life that could sustain those results?
That question reorganized my entire approach. I stopped designing challenges and started studying patterns — what triggers the drift, where it begins, which behaviors actually hold under pressure, and what makes someone return instead of quit.
That became Beyond Habits.
Not another plan to follow. A way of understanding the patterns underneath your behavior, building the few anchors that hold, and learning to adjust when life interrupts — because it will.
The goal was never to make you perfect at staying on track. It was to make you skilled at returning.
Faith is the foundation, not the framing.
My faith is at the foundation of how I live, lead and coach. I believe lasting change goes deeper than what we do — it begins with renewing the way we think, understanding who we are becoming, and learning to steward our health and our lives with intention.
My goal isn’t to tell you who to become. It’s to help you uncover the patterns keeping you stuck and build the rhythms that support the woman you’re called to be.
Beyond Habits is for women from every background. This is simply where my own conviction comes from.
“Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”Romans 12:2
The training behind the coaching.
More than a decade of practice, and the certifications that structure it.
Beyond Habits provides health and behavior-change coaching. Marcela is not a physician, therapist or registered dietitian, and coaching is not medical care.
Bigger than weight loss.
Mission
To help women stop cycling between motivation and starting over, and instead develop the awareness, skills, support and self-trust required to create healthy rhythms that last.
Vision
Women who understand their patterns, know how to care for their bodies, trust themselves, and model a healthy relationship with food, movement, rest and growth for the next generation.
Longer term, I want to build a mentorship initiative for young girls — teaching identity, patterns, choices, self-respect and self-trust early, so they don’t reach their thirties or forties before learning the tools most of us wish we’d been given.
This doesn’t exist yet. It’s the direction I’m building toward.
Change the woman. Change the pattern. Change the generation.
Start your journey.
You don’t need to fix everything today. You just need a place to begin.