- Samantha Bryant has been sharing her fitness journey on TikTok and has already lost 100 pounds
- After reaching this milestone, she set her sights on a new goal: learning how to jump
- Bryant credits people in her comments section for giving her the advice she needed to learn how to jump in a week
It is never too late to start over and learn something new. Samantha Bryant, a 37-year-old woman living in Texas, is leaning into this.
Bryant has been sharing her weight loss journey on her TikTok since she made the decision to take care of herself more than a year ago. She says she became the full-time caregiver for her mom, and there was an incident where her mom fell, and Bryant, who was sitting right next to her, wasn’t able to catch her.
She tells PEOPLE exclusively that this was her wake-up call: “That’s the exact moment I realized I needed to work on my health to be a better caregiver,” Bryant recalls. “I decided to go on a weight loss journey, starting March 2024, and I thought, let me just post about my weight loss and this journey, and maybe I can find people who are trying to lose weight, and maybe I can just get some encouragement along the way.”
One of the things that Bryant realized along her weight loss journey, now over 100 pounds down, is that there were many things she lost the ability to do or didn’t realize she couldn’t do.
“When I first started, reaching my ankles was hard. Mobility was hard. Everything was hard, and I had adapted myself to do without many things,” Bryant shares. “When I started, it would have been really easy to give up. I learned that if you just keep going and keep trying, if you just show up, that will make progress.”
She confesses that she realized jumping was one of the things that she couldn’t do. She wanted to learn how to do it, but didn’t know where exactly to start. The first time she tried, she fell.
“I made a list of all the things I realized I couldn’t do. A huge hurdle was getting off the floor. I couldn’t,” she recalls. “Jumping is such a random thing, but I physically couldn’t do it. If something happened, it was hard for me to jump up and get to something — my body physically couldn’t move that fast.”
Bryant keeps her mom in mind when she thinks about changing her mobility. By learning how to jump, she hopes it’ll “help me react faster for my mom,” preventing future moments like the one that sparked her initial decision to lose weight.
She has been sharing her fitness journey on TikTok, where she has over 68k followers. Her jumping video went viral when she shared it, amassing 28.4 million views.
She admits that she’s surprised by the number of people who are cheering for her through her weight loss journey. While she acknowledges some people make fun of her, those comments don’t bother her. She tells PEOPLE that while she’s made significant progress, she’s also gotten insurmountable advice from those looking to help her along her journey.
“People gave me so much advice, and I really worked on it. It hurts. I’m still 333 pounds. It takes a lot of effort to get my body off the ground. My knees are in pain. But it was fun. I kept practicing and kept listening to the tips,” Bryant shares. “If you don’t invite people into your journey, you will miss out on so much. I probably would not have gotten there that fast if I didn’t have so many people giving me great tips, and I was able to get it in a week.”
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“They’ve given me so much,” Bryant continues. “Random strangers have been so helpful to me, whether it’s food or physical advice, like the way they’ve helped me even figure out how I can get off the floor better — they have helped me so much and are helping me correct things that I can’t see, but also encouraging me for just trying.”
In sharing her journey with the internet and, in turn, the world, Bryant hopes to inspire others.
“I wish I knew earlier how much of my life I was going to be able to get back by losing weight. I wish I knew earlier, but I’m here now, and I am so excited for this year, because I really want to just live in a big way,” she says.
Bryant shares that she walks five and a half miles every day, and her goal for the summer is to replace one of those walking miles with a running mile. This is something that she’s never been able to do. For those looking to follow in Bryant’s footsteps, she shared a few tips and advice.
“Take your time. For a lot of us who are bigger, we want results quickly, and we can give up easily. Just taking your time and realizing that sustainable weight loss has to come at a slower pace, or else it’s more statistically likely to come right back on,” Bryant encourages. “I started celebrating every single pound that came off, no matter if it was one or two pounds. Take it slow and be okay with the uncertainty, which is hard.”
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