The athlete, model, entrepreneur, mother, mentor, and founder of Tresh The Body and XRSEXI, Treshanna Eloise Creighton, has spent more than two decades learning that transformation isn’t about becoming someone else. It’s about having the courage to become more fully yourself.
There is a particular kind of pressure placed on women who refuse to remain easily defined.
Choose the career. Choose the family. Choose strength or femininity. Be ambitious, but not too ambitious. Reinvent yourself—but preferably while remaining recognizable enough that everyone else stays comfortable.
Treshanna Eloise Creighton has stopped negotiating with those expectations.
Over more than two decades, she has moved through competitive fitness, bodybuilding, modeling, entrepreneurship, motherhood, mentorship, wellness, and community leadership. She earned first place with the OCB Fitness Competition Federation in 2015 and competed with the IFPA Bodybuilding Federation the following year. In 2024, New Day Associates named her International Model of the Year. Her community work has included Congressional Recognition, serving as a West Haverstraw Ambassador, leading community fitness programming, and coaching young women in modeling and presentation.
But a résumé isn’t really the story.
Treshanna’s Transformation is.
“For a long time, I looked at my life in chapters,” Creighton says. “Fitness was one chapter. Modeling was another. Motherhood was another.”
Eventually, the boundaries between those identities began to disappear.
“Then I realized the common denominator was always transformation.”
Whether she is training a client, teaching a young model to command a runway, building a business, mentoring someone struggling with confidence, or showing her son what discipline looks like, Creighton sees the work as part of the same purpose: helping people recognize something within themselves they may have stopped seeing.
That philosophy now sits at the center of Tresh The Body, her personalized fitness and wellness company, and XRSEXI, the group fitness and wellness-events concept she created to make movement more social, feminine, expressive, and celebratory.
Yet perhaps the most interesting transformation has been her own.
“I stopped feeling as though I had to choose one title to make people comfortable,” she says. “I can be strong and feminine. I can be a mother and ambitious. I can be a businesswoman and still be creative.”
And then, with the clarity of someone who has spent enough time being categorized:
“They are all me.”
The Freedom to Chance
Reinvention sounds glamorous when viewed retrospectively.
Living through it is different.
Creighton has learned that becoming someone new sometimes means disappointing people who became attached to who you were.
“Reinvention requires courage because every new version of you will confuse somebody who became comfortable with the old one,” she says.
For Creighton, evolution has meant learning unfamiliar industries, taking risks, building businesses, changing direction, rebuilding and accepting the uncomfortable position of becoming a beginner again.
It has also required something less visible: relinquishing the need to make every evolution immediately understandable.
“I had to stop asking, ‘Will people understand this?’ and start asking, ‘Does this still represent who I am becoming?'”
There have been moments when people wanted the fitness version of her. Others recognized the model, mother or entrepreneur. But Creighton says she no longer feels obligated to flatten those identities into something easier to consume.
“I refuse to shrink my evolution into something convenient for other people to understand.”
Growth, she has discovered, isn’t always photogenic.
“Sometimes growth is beautiful. Sometimes it is uncomfortable. Sometimes it looks like standing in a room where nobody understands your vision yet and trusting yourself anyway.”
Her conclusion is simple.
“I don’t believe a woman owes the world one permanent version of herself.”
When Strength Stops Meaning Punishment
Creighton’s relationship with strength began with the body.
Competitive bodybuilding taught her discipline, preparation and the ability to push beyond perceived limitations. Earlier in her career, strength could be measured: how much she could lift, how lean she could become, how disciplined she could remain and how far she could push.
More than twenty years later, the metrics have changed.
“Now I understand that strength isn’t just pushing harder,” she says. “Sometimes strength is knowing when your body needs you to listen.”
Movement matters. So do recovery, posture, nutrition, stress and sleep. And so does something fitness culture has historically been less adept at measuring: how someone actually feels inside the body being trained.
“A beautiful body that is exhausted, injured, and unhappy isn’t my definition of wellness.”
Creighton hasn’t abandoned intensity. She still believes in hard work. She still loves lifting heavy. She wants women to experience their bodies as powerful.
What has changed is the relationship.
“The goal is not punishment. It is partnership.”
Then comes the line that perhaps best summarizes her evolved fitness philosophy:
“Your body is not something you conquer. It is something you learn.”
The Woman Before the Workout
That distinction is foundational to Tresh The Body.
Before Creighton gives a client a workout, she wants to understand the person expected to complete it.
“What does her life look like? What has she tried before? What does she hate doing? What does she enjoy? How does she eat? How does she sleep? How does she move? What makes her quit? What makes her feel confident?”
A program can be technically perfect and still fail if it doesn’t belong in the reality of the person receiving it.
Creighton understands the consequence.
“If it doesn’t fit her body, mindset, and lifestyle, eventually that plan becomes another thing she feels like she failed.”
Her coaching therefore extends beyond sets and repetitions. The body may be the visible component of transformation, but she believes the process often begins somewhere else entirely.
“The biggest misconception about transformation is that people think it starts with the body. Most of the time, it starts with belief and behavior.”
The client who says she can never remain consistent might not simply need another workout plan.
“She needs evidence that she can trust herself again.”
That changes the role of coaching.
“I’m not just training bodies. I’m helping women rebuild relationships with themselves.”
Strong. Feminine. Unapologetic.
If Tresh The Body reflects Creighton’s increasingly holistic understanding of transformation, XRSEXI reflects her refusal to accept the cultural binaries surrounding women’s fitness.
Why, she wondered, did serious fitness so often have to present itself as hard, aggressive and punishing?
“Why can’t a woman lift heavy, sweat, dance, feel sexy, wear pink, laugh with her girlfriends, and still be an athlete?”
More pointedly:
“Why do we have to give up femininity to prove that we’re strong?”
XRSEXI became her answer.
The concept combines fitness with community, music, movement, sensuality and celebration through experiences that can include Pilates, yoga, Yogalates, dance fitness, outdoor classes, themed gatherings and other wellness programming.
But underneath the programming sits a larger cultural proposition.
Creighton wants to challenge a version of women’s wellness centered around reduction.
“Smaller waist. Smaller body. Smaller presence.”
She offers a different vocabulary: stronger. Healthier. More confident. More expressive. More alive.
“You don’t have to disappear to become your best self.”
No Expiration Date on Becoming
In 2024, Creighton was named International Model of the Year through New Day Associates.
Had it happened earlier in her life, she thinks she might have interpreted the award as evidence that she had finally “arrived.”
Instead, its timing changed its meaning.
“I see it as proof that there is no expiration date on becoming.”
By then, Creighton had already been an athlete, coach, mother, entrepreneur, mentor and business owner.
Then another door opened.
“You don’t have to accomplish everything at 21 years old for your story to matter,” she says. “Some dreams mature with you.”
The recognition provided validation, but its deeper significance was confirmation.
“I wasn’t finished.”
It is a message she believes other women need to hear.
Women are frequently handed invisible deadlines about when they should succeed, settle down, change their bodies, stop wearing something, abandon a dream or accept that a certain opportunity has passed.
Creighton has rejected the schedule.
“My timeline belongs to me. I am not late.”
Nor is she interested in attempting to recover a younger version of herself.
“I’m interested in discovering what this version of me can do.”
Movement as Dignity
Creighton’s work now spans generations.
As lead instructor for Dance Fitness by the Pond, she brings movement into her community. She has taught senior citizens through community wellness programming and serves as Head Modeling Coach and Program Director for the Queen of Rockland County/West Haverstraw program, where she helps younger women develop posture, runway technique, poise, stage presence and confidence.
Working across those generations has complicated her understanding of what confidence actually means.
“The desire to feel seen never disappears.”
For one young woman, confidence might mean walking into a room and knowing she belongs there.
For an older woman, it could mean getting out of a chair, moving without fear or dancing again.
“The circumstances are different. The emotion underneath them is often the same.”
People want to feel capable, included and beautiful, she says. They want evidence that their presence still matters.
Creighton has watched seniors transform when music begins playing and age temporarily disappears from the equation. She has watched young women physically change their posture after realizing they deserve to occupy space.
“Movement can give people pieces of themselves back,” she says.
“That’s bigger than fitness. That’s dignity.”
The Life She was Building — and Raising
Creighton’s 19-year-old son has witnessed much of her evolution.
“Motherhood gave my ambition responsibility.”
Before becoming a parent, achievement could remain personal—what she wanted to accomplish, create or experience.
Motherhood introduced an audience of one.
“Children listen to what we say, but they study what we do.”
Her son has watched her build businesses, train clients, compete, model, serve her community, struggle, recover and continue creating.
That visibility created accountability.
If Creighton wanted to teach discipline, resilience, health, ambition and character, she understood that those values had to exist beyond language.
But motherhood also reflected qualities back to her that she hadn’t always recognized in herself: patience, sacrifice, determination, protection and the ability to continue when exhausted.
“One of my greatest accomplishments will never fit onto a résumé,” she says.
“It is knowing that while I was building a life, I was also raising one.”
Understanding the Middle
Public success creates an illusion of linearity.
Awards, businesses, clients, titles and recognition make a life appear as though one achievement naturally produced the next.
Creighton knows better.
“There have been chapters of my life where the woman people saw publicly and the woman fighting privately were living two completely different realities.”
She doesn’t detail every circumstance, but she describes seasons when relationships, routines, titles and securities she thought were permanent changed.
Once, she associated strength with never falling apart.
“Now I know strength can also look like rebuilding.”
Perhaps more importantly, she had to dismantle another assumption: that losing something automatically meant she had failed.
“Sometimes life removes the structure you were standing on so you can discover that you were the foundation all along.”
Those periods changed the way she encounters other people experiencing upheaval.
When someone tells Creighton she is rebuilding her life, Creighton says she doesn’t view that woman from the comfort of the finish line.
“I understand the middle.”
“And the middle is where a lot of real transformation happens.”
“Oh… There She is”
Creighton’s next chapter is expanding.
She continues developing Tresh The Body and XRSEXI alongside virtual coaching, community wellness programming and the Hourglass Abs Blueprint, a developing fitness and wellness guide focused on core strength, body awareness, nutrition, consistency and sustainable habits.
But she is thinking beyond individual products.
“I’m building an ecosystem around women becoming powerful in every dimension of themselves.”
Fitness is one doorway. Beauty is another. So are confidence, entrepreneurship, community, mentorship and wellness.
And while appearance has been part of a career spanning bodybuilding, fitness and modeling, Creighton is emphatic that appearance isn’t enough to constitute a legacy.
“I don’t want my legacy to be, ‘Treshanna looked good.’ That’s too small.”
She wants women entering gyms without intimidation and rooms without shrinking. She wants women starting businesses without waiting for permission and caring for their bodies from a place of love rather than hatred. She wants women she mentors to eventually mentor someone else.
Legacy, in that formulation, isn’t remembrance.
It is continuation.
“People carrying something forward because my work helped awaken it in them.”
Ask Creighton what she hopes a woman thinks after finishing one of her sessions or walking out of an XRSEXI experience and the answer is strikingly quiet compared with everything that came before it.
“Oh… there she is.”
Not *I need to become somebody else.*
Not *I’ll finally love myself when I lose ten pounds.*
Creighton wants her to recognize the woman who might have disappeared beneath motherhood, work, relationships, stress, responsibility or insecurity.
“I want her leaving taller. Lighter. Stronger. A little sexier. A little louder. And a lot more certain of herself.”
Because after decades spent transforming her own understanding of strength, Creighton has arrived at a definition that has very little to do with becoming someone new.
“The most powerful transformation isn’t when a woman walks out looking completely different.”
“It’s when she walks out remembering that she was powerful before she ever walked in.”
What's Your Reaction?
