ARLINGTON — In this modern world, it can be hard enough to find time for families to sit down and eat dinner together, let alone making time for personal fitness.

“Everything is geared toward instant gratification,” said personal trainer Angie Gooding. “Eastern medicine is not that way.”

To that end, Gooding and fellow trainer Leanne Christie of Body & Mind Fitness Studio held a Health and Wellness Fair to help people learn more about personal fitness, good nutrition, massage therapy and other holistic health services in the area.

While such services are not conventionally provided by insurers, Gooding and Christie see them as an essential part of living a healthy lifestyle.

Barbara Kehoe, a holistic health consultant, was thrust into the world of functional nutrition with the birth of her daughter whose food allergies forced Kehoe to become creative. Kehoe has since learned useful ways to prepare food so that people can maximize the nutrients they absorb, serving baked nuts at Body & Mind

Fitness as a sample.

While it sounds like a process that would require a chemistry major, Kehoe assured that the process was much simpler.

“This is all traditional knowledge we somehow lost. Somehow people knew how to do these things without the science to prove it was happening,” she said.

Masseuse Sierra Edinger attended the fair as well, touting the benefits of massage therapy. Edinger has long been involved in the personal fitness world, teaching cycling at the Monroe YMCA. She also introduced Gooding and Christie when Gooding expressed an interest in training to be a body builder.

Gooding said she got into the world of fitness following a career as a high school English teacher after the birth of her child. After undergoing a natural childbirth, she said she learned to appreciate what the body was capable of.

The two women opened Body & Mind Fitness and went into personal training to help provide people the kind of training and accountability to help them actually accomplish their goals.

“We go beyond paying your gym membership,” Christie said, adding that about 90 percent of those people don’t see their desired results without someone to help guide their training and keep them honest.

She added that she has trained people who were exploring gastric bypass surgery to achieve weight loss. Instead, with the help of one-on-one personal training, those people lost 100 or more pounds, avoiding the expense and physical trauma of an invasive surgical procedure.

One obstacle for many prospective customers is the expense. Christie and Gooding said they would like to eventually see personal fitness as a service covered by insurance companies. While the prevailing wisdom in medicine is beginning to reveal that preventive behaviors — like exercising and eating well — can reduce a patient’s likelihood to require emergency treatment down the line, the services of herbalists and personal trainers don’t typically fall under medical benefits.

Christie and Gooding chalk that fact up to a personal trainer certification process without stringent standards.

On other hand, for people facing an expense such as a weight-loss surgery, the benefits and relative cost of training can make it a financially attractive option.

“For people, it can be a chore,” Gooding said. “But fitness is a huge thing.”