Through the cloudy glass wall of Taylor's office, I could make out a tall Asian man with a cinder block chest pacing the floor in red sweatpants. Before I could knock, he was holding the door open and ushering me inside. The handshake was agony. Taylor's thumb pressed into the back of my hand like the barrel of a hole-punch. I stopped squeezing back right away, which was obviously the point.

When he asked why I wanted to be a personal trainer, I took a manila envelope out of my backpack. Inside was a stack of pictures, which I removed and slid across the desk.

"This was me two and a half years ago," I announced.

Taylor inspected the top photo. It was me at my abject worst, weighing over 300 pounds. The whole family was standing in a row together, but I appeared to take up half the frame: face too big for my head, eyes like perforated squint-pockets, sweat on my arm thick as Doberman drool, shirt absolutely epic.

As Taylor flipped through the photos, one from the following year caught me by surprise. In it, I was stuffed inside of a suit, my arms extended broadly as if awaiting princely robes from menservants. Although my cheeks looked like they might be smuggling acorns, my smile was electric. Charged by the thrill of a life-changing weight loss, I had actually wanted to be photographed for the first time in years. I remembered feeling as though I were finally out of the woods. Sitting in Taylor's office now, I couldn't fathom how I'd ever felt that way when clearly I'd still had so far to go.

At the bottom of the stack was my most recent photo: kelly-green polo shirt (size L), exposed tuft of chest hair, lazy summer smile. Surely this version of me would be unimpeachable by future standards.

I lightly tapped at the pictures and explained that they were the reason I was qualified for the job. I knew how frustrating it was to be motivated for a weight loss that never quite came together, and I knew how to get over that. I knew everything.

Taylor put the final picture aside and steepled his fingers.

"Most of our guests think they burned off five pounds just filling out the membership forms," he said. "If you start working here, you have to keep that feeling up all the time. Belief is a powerful thing, and it's a big part of this job."

I nodded. I'd been nodding continually like my head was on a pivot. Taylor told me more about the job. I would start off at minimum wage, but once I got some clients and got certified, I'd quickly move up to $20 an hour. It sounded so easy. Before I left, he got up from his seat, held out his hand, and I stuck mine back in that steel trap.

Job training at Bally partly involved learning how to blast clients' quads and nuke their glutes, but mostly it was centered on sales strategy and rebuttals. I had to learn how to convince people that I was the essential ingredient in making their gym membership work. This entailed stalking the sweatiest denizens of the gym floor and trying to rope them into a trial session with promises of achieving the same progress I had.