Asian-American fitness influencer Cassey Ho on losing weight, overcoming haters and being true to herself

Even though she had devoted the previous several years of her life to fitness, Cassey Ho had hit a wall.

The celebrity fitness personality – she has 4 million subscribers on You Tube and 1.5 million on Instagram – realised in August that she wasn’t happy with how she looked and felt. She’d gained 14lb (6.4kg) during a year, lacked motivation and social media trolls were beginning to get to her.

“I felt lost,” Ho, 32, said during a recent chat in a coffee shop near her home in Los Angeles’ Encino neighbourhood.

“I had built this whole thing, and yet it didn’t feel like I was truly being authentic to myself. As my brand gets bigger, criticisms come in on every little thing, and I started modelling myself to appease the people who were criticising me.”

So on August 16, Ho embarked on an extensively chronicled 90 Day Challenge, during which she pledged to exercise six days a week, adopt a diet plan she describes as “lazy keto”, and work on stress levels.

By the time the three months is over in mid-November, she aims to have lost about 16lbs and be at 20 per cent body fat – around pro-athlete level.

She blogs and posts videos and photos every day about where she worked out and what she ate, down to calorie and carb counts. She writes about how she feels, and what the day brought. The idea, she says, is to get people to follow along, as much or as little as they are able.

But a lot of Ho’s followers aren’t having it. Fans who subscribed to her peppy, self-accepting doctrine suddenly saw her as a traitor, someone who wanted to look like every other taut and toned fitness influencer out there.

“I’m heartbroken you feel like you want to do this to yourself,” said one fan. Another wrote: “Setting an arbitrary number as a ‘goal’ seems to fly in the face of all the great and meaningful self-love that you’ve been teaching us.” More people chimed in about how Ho was now “demonising larger bodies” and “idolising” thin ones.

“My content is not even offensive, but people were finding ways to make me feel like I’m doing something wrong,” Ho says. “I wanted to go on this journey to get really fit. It’s crazy, but people have a problem with it.”

Midway through her challenge, Ho came to terms with her haters. She now proceeds unencumbered, charting her progress on her website blogilates.com and her social media channels.

Ho has a lot of experience silencing naysayers and pushing on – this despite not becoming familiar with the concept of fitness until she was 16.

Ho was born in Woodland Hills, a neighbourhood in Los Angeles, to Vietnamese immigrants.

“My mother escaped from Vietnam on a boat, getting first to Malaysia then Canada and finally the US. She was on that boat for a week without food or water. Both my parents left Vietnam midway through college. They had to stop and start over and learn a new language.”

When she was five, her father accepted a tech job in the San Francisco Bay Area and the family relocated. Her father was also a tennis coach, and pushed his daughters into the sport. Ho hated it.

“He trained us really hard. He was an Asian father in that kind of way. I just had to get used to being yelled at on the court by my dad.”

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It didn’t help that she was considered a chubby kid, although she never saw herself that way until she was six, and a boy at school pointed at her and called her fat.

“I ran into the bathroom and cried,” she says. “My whole image of my body changed at that point.”

When she was 16, Ho came across an infomercial from Pilates guru Mari Winsor, and begged her father to get her the DVD set.

“That is the woman who helped me discover fitness,” says Ho, who practised the deliberate moves in her bedroom. “I never even thought of fitness as a thing. There was only tennis and I didn’t like it and that was that. Pilates was something I could do just for me – not for my team or a coach or a dad or to beat anyone.”

She went on to university to study biology and business, and kept the Pilates going in her dorm room, attracting the attention of fellow students who wanted to learn. She devised a system called Pop Pilates – Pilates moves to pop music – which she has since trademarked.

She got her teaching certification and started teaching in local gyms. Moving to Boston after she graduated, she got a job in the fashion business, but began putting her Pilates-to-music videos on YouTube so she wouldn’t lose touch with her students in LA. She was stunned by how quickly her following grew.

When she realised she couldn’t find a yoga bag that could hold everything she needed, she designed one, got some media exposure and quit her job.

“I decided to go for it 100 per cent,” she says. “I went to [China’s Canton trade fair in] Guangzhou, found a manufacturer for the bags, but when I came back to Boston realised I had no way to pay the rent.” She taught 12 Pilates classes a week and then moved back to Los Angeles.

She now sells athletic wear, planners and yoga mats under her brand Pop Flex. Her Pop Pilates classes are taught by instructors in 8,000 locations around the US. And her constantly updated fitness videos on YouTube have been seen by more than 500 million people.

Still, despite her celebrity, Ho says it’s the small things that are the most meaningful to her.

“The really amazing thing is that now, girls all over the world use my YouTube videos to discover fitness in their own bedrooms,” she says. “Just the way that I did years ago.”