When Kristin Savage started CrossFit 13 years ago, she had one goal: to gain weight and get stronger.
Over the last decade, she has built a body strong enough to lift her bodyweight overhead, do muscle-ups, and even compete in local CrossFit competitions.
Unknowingly, she was also building a body strong enough to fight Lupus, an autoimmune disease that would alter the way she thought about nutrition and exercise.
Building a Stronger Body
In 2012, Savage lived in New Jersey, where she worked as a bartender. One day, one of her regular customers started talking to her about fitness and mentioned that he was building a CrossFit gym.
“I was like, ‘What’s CrossFit? I don’t know what that is. That’s interesting,’” she recalled.
Her customer invited her to try out a free CrossFit class at the grand opening of Ocean CrossFit. At first, she thought it sounded crazy. She only weighed 105 pounds and had no muscle, the opposite of what she expected a CrossFit athlete to look like.
But she went to the trail class anyway.
“I couldn’t even lift the 35-lb barbell over my head,” Savage said. “(But) I literally was addicted the second I walked in.”
For over a decade, Savage has been a member at several CrossFit gyms around the U.S., from New Jersey to New York and St. Louis to Las Vegas.
She can now lift more than her bodyweight overhead, do handstand push-ups, and muscle-ups. She also started competing in local CrossFit competitions with her friends.
In 2020, after losing her job due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Savage became the manager of CrossFit Gambit in St. Louis, Missouri. There, she earned her Level 1 Certificate and started coaching.
“That’s when I really got into wanting to help people,” Savage said. “I (coached) masters athletes … some people couldn’t even do any squats, and then by the end of the time I was working with them, they were able to sit down and not have any knee pain.”
Two years ago, Savage joined Rugged CrossFit 702 in Las Vegas, where she became a Level 2 trainer and continues to coach outside of her day job in marketing.
Fighting Lupus
For most of her childhood, Savage was in and out of the hospital with extreme joint pain.
Her mom was diagnosed with Lupus, an autoimmune disease where her body’s immune system attacks her own tissues and organs, but doctors would tell Savage that she didn’t have enough symptoms to be diagnosed, as well.
The only treatment she was given for the joint pain was to stay active, so her parents put her in dance. The joint pain didn’t go away.
By the end of 2023, a rash formed on Savage’s face, and she started to feel extreme fatigue. Then, while on a trip to Hawaii, she got really sunburnt, which was followed by worsened joint pain, white fingertips, a butterfly rash on her face, and even more fatigue.
These were all signs of Lupus.
Savage went to Urgent Care, where she received blood work. Her Lupus levels — as determined by tests such as complete blood count, C-reactive protein, and complement levels — were off the charts.
“(The doctor) recommended me to a rheumatologist right away,” she said.
Savage was officially diagnosed with Lupus in 2024 and was prescribed medication to bring down the flare. Once she started taking her medication, it made her symptoms better, but the side effects made her lose weight rapidly.
On Oct. 26, 2024, she weighed 116 pounds, with 51.6 pounds of muscle mass.
She wasn’t able to lift or run like she used to, and at every doctor’s appointment, the scale would drop 5 more pounds.
“I put in a lot of work to gain weight, and then I went from 115 pounds to 102 pounds,” Savage said.
Her doctor’s response: ”Well, don’t you want to lose weight? My clients love this because they lose weight on (the medication).”
That is the moment Savage knew she needed to take her health into her own hands.
Nutrition and Movement Is Medicine
“I pay my doctor to write a prescription, and I do everything else,” Savage said. “I made the commitment to myself that I was going to focus on my nutrition and focus a lot on the gym.”
Knowing nutrition is the base of the pyramid for the CrossFit methodology, Savage hired her affiliate’s in-house nutritionist to help her dial in her nutrition and pushed herself to consistently show up to the gym, despite her Lupus symptoms.
That meant some days she had to scale back the movements depending on her joint pain and exhaustion.
But she still showed up. It wasn’t about PR’ing every day. She just wanted to move her body consistently.
“I proved to myself that I could do this even at my worst, even if I had to scale down a lot of stuff,” Savage said. “That goes for anyone. If you’re not feeling well, you don’t have to go in and do everything prescribed. That is what CrossFit is all about. It’s about scaling to your fitness level at that moment.”
By Oct. 23, 2025, Savage was back to her healthy weight of 124 pounds, and her muscle mass had increased 7% over the last year. She has minimal flare-ups and is working hard to get her Lupus fully into remission.
“People ask what I have done differently, and I say, ‘my food,’” Savage said. “For people with Lupus, diet is everything.”
The more she focused on her diet, the more she was able to push herself in the gym to gain back the muscle she had lost.
“The End Goal Is So Much Bigger Than Taking a Day Off”
After fighting Lupus for just one year, Savage is already reversing her symptoms.
But it wasn’t easy.
She had to show up for herself every day. She had to focus on eating properly and enough. She had to get out of bed and move her body, even if her joints were screaming at her to stay still.
“The end goal is so much bigger than taking a day off. It’s going into remission faster, it’s being able to care for my children one day, it’s being able to get out of bed not in pain, it’s keeping kidney and heart disease away, it’s proving to my doctors that I don’t need that transplant medicine they wanted to put me on (and I declined),” Savage shared on Instagram. “It’s hard work. It takes everything to get it right, it’s not always perfect and it’s not for everyone – but if you put your head down and dial in, have the right people in your court – you can change a lot. I go into my drs and he says ‘what are you doing you’re so healthy’ and I just smile and think of all of the hard work that goes into this. I hope to show people that they can come out on top and fight these diseases!”