APART from everything else, holidays mean a lot of eating. A month after Christmas' and New Year's well-laden tables with all kinds of food temptations, most people are trying to get rid of the holiday weight by working out more at the gym.

Your best partner in the battle against the extra kilograms is the fitness instructor. Maya Peeva fits the bill. She has been professionally helping people to keep their body toned for more than a year, but her sport career started long ago.

"I've been doing sports forever," she said. "The first time I entered the gym was when I was six."

Her CV doesn't end with fitness. On the contrary, at 30 years of age Peeva is credited with experience in eurhythmics and 12 years of work as an aerobics trainer.

Maya also won first prize at the National Championship of Fitness and Body Building. This victory is even greater than it seems considering it was her first fitness competition ever.

"I had been working out to keep my body in shape for a long time, but never participated in any competitions," she said. "During the past year, my colleague Valentin Petkov, who came first in the Body Fitness category, succeeded in convincing me to try."

Although Maya claims that it all started as a joke and without any expectations, she put in some serious effort to achieve the title. To work out to prepare for a fitness contest is very different from working out just for general health.

That's why Maya had to change not only the method and intensity of her training, but also her food regime. And she even confesses: "For three months I was starving."

Prejudices exist even in the gym. Despite national recognition of her professionalism and skills, some muscular macho men still take her to be only a tiny, tender woman and ask: "Is there an instructor in the gym?". Several visits to the gym later, though, they understand who the real trainer is.

The most common mistakes at the gym depend on gender - men usually choose bigger weights than are suitable for them, and women want to have the perfect body after only two weeks working out at the gym.

As Maya says: "The instructor is not a magician after all. Fitness training can make your body well-proportioned and look good, but it won't happen all at once, it takes some time."

According to Maya, Bulgarians don't have a very good culture of fitness: "In spite of the fact that for the past several years the gyms have been full, there are people who have very bad body fitness. I train many people who have spinal problems and have seen a 14-year-old school girl who cannot do a couple of elementary exercises".

Problems are not missing in the fitness field either. Financial insufficiency is the reason why the Bulgarian Federation doesn't support its contestants the way it should. That's why most of them prepare for the contests only as well as their means allow, often not reaching the optimum of their potential.

Nevertheless, Maya is an optimist. She thinks that despite all the difficulties in Bulgaria young people can achieve their goals and build a decent future here.

She is not interested in politics, but considers it a topic everyone should know a little bit about, as far as he/she is a citizen of this country.

As you can imagine, sports take up most of Maya's time - when she's not working at the gym as a trainer, she's there as a client.

Still, in her spare time she goes out with her friends or reads about the latest discoveries in microbiology - a field she's very fond of.

At the moment, fitness is number one on her everyday agenda, but who knows, maybe some day she'll also have a degree in microbiology to add to her CV.