Meet Jen
Hi I’m Jen Whitehouse, founder of Jen Whitehouse Fitness & Styling and owner of Zoe Clare Leura, a ladies boutique located in the Blue Mountains NSW.
Thank you for taking a moment to meet me. I’d really like you to get to know me, and to understand how I arrived at the place I am today – as an owner of multiple businesses aimed at helping people to achieve personal health and confidence, and a passionate believer that people can feel good and look good, no matter what stage of life they are at.
I wasn’t always the fitness and styling coach you see before you today. Before this, I raised three beautiful children while supporting my husband in a 20+ year defence and private sector career that saw us travelling extensively and living in a number of locations around Australia and world. I also held positions in a number of different industries including Corporate Event Management, Paralegal for the Department of Defence and Recruitment.
Although I loved my life, and the experiences my family and I were having overseas, it was while we were living in the United States in 2013 that I developed a serious health issue that made me stop and assess how I was living, and realise that I needed to make some major lifestyle changes if I wanted be healthy and do all the things my husband and I had planned for ourselves in the future, as well as see my children grow up and have families of their own.
While living in Texas, and with the support of my husband, I started running and going to the gym. I made wellness a priority. This included changing the way I was eating and spending my free time. My husband and I started exploring the outdoor activities that Texas had to offer and we discovered a love for running events that we continue to this day, as well as other adventure activities such as mountain biking and hiking.
During this time, I decided to become a Personal Trainer. I felt so motivated by how I was feeling physically, and the positive results I was getting from my healthy lifestyle changes, that I wanted to inspire and help others who were in the same situation as I had been.
After becoming accredited as a Personal Trainer with the highly regarded Nation Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM), my husband and I decided to return to Australia to start a new life in the beautiful Blue Mountains in New South Wales. I found my first job as a personal trainer, working across multiple gyms and with a large number of clients throughout the area.
During my experience as a Personal Trainer, I started to find myself naturally coaching my clients on matters that went beyond just physical fitness. Often acting as a life coach, body positivity supporter, and confidence builder I realised that physical fitness was just ‘one part of the puzzle’ in helping people to build positive self-image and feel inner confidence. My clients were fitter and felt healthier, but they told me that they didn’t know how to dress and present themselves to the world in a way that reflected the new found confidence that arrived as a result of being fit and healthy.
In 2018 I became a Certified Style Coach™ registered with the Association of International Style Coaches™, having completed my course in the global style capital, the United Kingdom. To date I am the only Australian certified Style Coach™ working in Australia.
Becoming a Certified Style Coach™ was the achievement of a long held dream for me, and has been the missing piece of the puzzle in terms of fully helping people to feel good about themselves. Achieving health and fitness can make you feel good and look good, but knowing how to express that by dressing to suit your body shape, personality, and sense of self can be a challenge for many people. It certainly was for me until I learned that there was a theoretical framework behind it that can be taught and used to guide your own style choices!
I founded Jen Whitehouse Fitness & Styling in 2018 not long after my husband and I decided to take a leap of faith and became owners of our very own high end gym here in the Blue Mountains.
In 2022 I made the decision to open my own retail outlet and named it after my beautiful daughter Zoe Clare. The decision to open a boutique that offers many different designers at a few different price-points was opened out of frustration from what the chain retail stores were offering.
At Zoe Clare we also very aware of the issues around sustainable fashion and how we all have a part to play in the production and disposal of our unwanted items.
Opening our business was the culmination of many conscious decisions we have made since 2013 about the type of lives we want to lead now that our children have grown up, and what our priorities and goals are for our future, both as individuals and a couple.
For me, it is about being the best mother, wife, daughter, sister and friend I can be. It is also about being a successful business owner, and a socially minded member of my community. I also want to help people. I want to help people feel good about themselves. I want people to be healthy, and to live the life they want to lead. I want people to feel confident and to put their best foot forward in the world, no matter what stage of life they are at. I believe that what I am offering through Jen Whitehouse Fitness & Styling can be a useful tool in helping people to achieve this.
Thank you for coming to meet me, and to hear a little bit about the journey that brought me to where I am today. I hope it inspires you, and helps you to understand that anyone can achieve the health and confidence they want. I did it. And so can you.
