It may have been Marci’s rough start as a sickly child plagued with asthma that attracted her to the clients with chronic conditions who were not seeking beach bodies but backpedaling from type II diabetes and other chronic conditions that threaten, not only their quality of life, but their very lives.

 

“I came with instructions when left with the babysitters and family,” she recalls of her plight. “Marci can’t run too much. Here is her pump if she starts to wheeze and so on. I spent days in an oxygen tent as a child. The first trimester of my second-grade report card is blank. I know how it feels to have a chronic condition rob you of days, weeks, and years.”

 

Marci’s empathy makes her popular and effective among those with whom she has trained and coached emphasizing the link between human health and lifestyle habits. 

She still cringes at the memory of sitting in 

the smoking section of the Emergency Room struggling to breathe as her mother, 

a chain cigarette smoker for decades, puffed away. Today, Marci is the primary caregiver for her mother who has been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and mid-stage dementia. 

 

Despite having asthma, Marci was an active kid and teenager playing basketball, skateboarding, roller skating and eventually becoming an avid spinner. “My MYX bike and weights take up a lot of valuable square footage in my bedroom,” she jokes. 

 

Marci recently ran the Percy Sutton Harlem 5K and is scheduled to run NYC’s Midnight Run on New Year’s Eve. She finds that running helps strengthen her lungs. 

 

In 2024, she plans to focus on the politics of food, launching a blog called Close GRAS, the Generally Recognized As Safe loophole through which the FDA conceded its power to regulate the safety of additives used in the food supply to the entities its charged to regulate. The food companies have since flooded our food supply with more than 10,000 additives via the GRAS loophole-99 percent of the additives have not been studied.

 

“I have a problem with this,” Marci says. “We have to turn off the faucet of toxins that flow into our food and then our bodies making us sick and killing us. Until then, many doctors, nutritionists, fitness trainers, lifestyle coaches, and their health professionals will struggle to help their clients reach optimal health and maintain it.”

 

Marci is aware that 60 percent of Americans daily calories come from ultra-processed foods that are comprised of thousands of these unstudied additives heavily marketed to kids and residents of marginalized communities. She’s appalled and moved to take a different type of action and approach to help reverse the poor health outcomes in this country.

 

“Becoming a food safety activist was not on my bingo card,” she laughs. “I have worked with hundreds of clients one-on-one and in groups. I can now help save millions from sickness and premature death by closing the GRAS loophole. It’s battling Goliaths, I know. It might take years. I am crazy enough to believe it will happen. I just hope to live to see it.”