“It’s currently midnight and I am about to go on this five-miler. I was about to go to bed and I said ‘Tristin, you know what? You’ve been slacking: Christmas Eve, Christmas, mom’s good cooking, these parties, drinking, you’ve gotta get back on track,” said Tristin Trivers on a recent TikTok, bringing in over 113 thousand views.

One user, Chantelle, comments, “This literally gave me motivation to go for a run right now — let’s goo.” Another, Stephanie, comments  “Immediately just set my alarm for 5:30 a.m. to get back in the gym. Thank youu!”

For Trivers, a Florida Atlantic University junior and business student, getting into health and wellness didn’t only allow him to become the best version of himself, but also to create a platform focused on uplifting others. 

Trivers, who has garnered close to 150 thousand followers on TikTok and a little over 58 thousand followers on Instagram, shares motivational videos on both apps. He has been able to post “Day in the Life,” inspirational running and cooking videos. 

In a March TikTok with over 642 thousand views, Trivers takes a Saturday night ten-mile run. He shares, “Never ran ten miles before, I was discouraged… thought it would be too hard, didn’t know if I was going to finish. But guess what? When I do finish, and I will finish, I’ll prove to myself that I could do anything.” 

Growing up in southern New Jersey, Trivers moved to Florida for college, originally landing in Orlando. He quickly realized the area didn’t fit him, expressing that because he grew up near water, Boca Raton was a better fit for him than Orlando.

Shortly after moving to Florida, Trivers began his social media journey on TikTok, recreating popular dances and trends. 

“I started posting trendy videos that people would do to TikTok songs [and] lip sync. I realized that that type of content didn’t get me anywhere and that it didn’t get anybody else anywhere,”’ he said. “I wiped that whole account. I had maybe eight thousand followers, and I started posting stuff that I was passionate about that could also help people — that could bring value to people.”

It wasn’t until later in his journey that he began to do his motivational runs. He believes that his father and his other mentors played a big role in developing this part of his content. 

“My dad was a big part of my motivational life and so I started bringing my phone with me on, my runs and I would talk to the camera and I’d just give advice based off of what I heard my father say and based off of what I learned through the mentors I have,” he said.  

Nathaniel Ayeni, a junior in architecture at FAU, met Trivers on shuttles during their freshman year of college, living in the same off-campus hotel due to a lack of dorms on campus. Ayeni remembers when Trivers first began his social media content, sharing that he was serious about his platform from the start.

“I can’t think of a moment where he just had that realization that he was going to make something big out of it, but I think from the beginning he knew that there was something possible with what he was doing, and he just kept at it,” Ayeni said. 

Eventually, Trivers began to experiment with health and wellness content within his platform, subjects he was passionate about well before his rise on social media. Although this was a topic of interest to him for a while, it wasn’t until he met his mentor, Jeff Herzog, CEO of marketing agency “Avenue Z”  that he began to take his health seriously. 

“… Jeff, [who’s] almost 60 years old, and has a six-pack,” he said. I asked him, ‘What do you do to obtain this type of physique?’ and he told me two things: he said, ‘I haven’t missed a day of working out in 30 years and I haven’t had a slice of pizza in 20 years,’ and that’s all you had to tell me because with that, it told me that it’s all about discipline.”

Trivers believes that as a college student, maintaining a balance between the various aspects of his life, from school to work to health, is one of the most important aspects of getting to where he wants. 

“I try to wake up really early and I am also a resident assistant on campus, but I am still trying to be a full-time student and doing content creation and also trying to work on an app — so it’s definitely a lot, but my motivation behind it all is that if I don’t do these things, then I’m not going to end up where I want to end up, and I really want to be that successful entrepreneur guy when I’m in my late twenties,” he said.

Isabella Catania, a psychology junior at FAU, met Trivers during their freshman year of college. She shares that his perseverance towards greatness has been extremely inspiring for her. 

“I have probably never met anyone as disciplined as him at our age, in terms of school, personal life, and self-care. It is definitely super admirable to see someone with that drive in them to want to be successful and just become the best version of themselves,” she said. 

Maintaining discipline to keep pushing isn’t always easy, not even for Trivers. He believes that it isn’t always about staying motivated, that most of the time, it’s about staying consistent in your goals and actions.

“As soon as that time comes and you wake up and you’re tired and you want to stay in bed, that’s when discipline comes in, and you just have to tell yourself: ‘I need to do this and I am going to do this,’” he said. “… And if you do it long enough it becomes a routine,” he said.

Trivers played baseball for Egg Harbor Township High School growing up, which he said helped him stay consistent in his health and wellness goals

Optimeal, one of Trivers’ latest ventures, has allowed him to further pursue his passion for health and wellness. The app focuses on allowing users to plan their meals according to friends and other health influencers. Using Artificial Intelligence, the app hopes to allow users to create personalized shopping lists for optimum wellness. 

Trivers began the project alongside Bobby Baxter and Brandon Bell, friends of his from high school. The project began as an app where people could connect to play pickleball, but it didn’t garner as much success as they had hoped for. This led Baxter and Bell to introduce Optimeal, which quickly captured Trivers’ attention.

“They came back with an AI app for health and fitness, and I said that’s perfect because I am passionate about that and that matches what I film and so we could make this thing work — and so we are still in the process of building it right now,” he said.

The responses Trivers has gotten from his many ventures has inspired him to keep going, revealing how he was able to make an impact on people’s lives in ways he could have never imagined before. 

“I never really thought that some kid from a town in New Jersey would be able to make an impact on so many people. But when you pull out that phone, it’s very powerful that you could reach so many people and in being in that bettering yourself and influence and health/wellness/fitness… [being] in that niche, [I] get to see the physical changes that people have made, and it just makes me happy and makes me want to keep going,” he said. 

Gabriela Quintero is the Student Life Editor for the University Press. For more information on this or other stories, contact Quintero at gquintero2022@fau.edu