"I was a child who understood at a very young age that she had to survive"

At 16, after her belongings were placed in trash bags outside the house, Yuval Tenenhouse found herself without a permanent address and without an adult she could call. On some nights, she slept at friends' houses who knew a little of her story, and on others, she simply waited outside the school until morning.

"There were nights when I had nowhere to sleep," she says in a conversation with mako. "I would sit outside the school and wait for the night to pass. Then morning would come, I would go into school and continue my day as usual."

Today, Tenenhouse, 31, from Tel Aviv, is a content creator and entrepreneur in the fitness field, who is behind Lasu, a fitness and nutrition app that offers training programs, personalized fitness videos, and nutrition menus. But her path there did not start with a love for sports, nor with a childhood dream of building a startup. She grew up in Jerusalem, in a family with three children and in a reality that included financial difficulties and an environment she defines as unsafe.

"From a very, very young age, it was clear that this was not a safe environment for me," she says. "There was no money for anything. We are three children, I am the eldest, and there was no money. I didn't even really grow up in my own home; I grew up mainly at my grandmother's. I knew that the caregiver in my life, my safe place, was my grandmother. She gave to me, bought for me, and took care of me. Everything I wanted, she did."

When she was 14, her grandmother died of cancer, and Tenenhouse lost the only person who gave her a sense of home. "I felt like I was literally left alone in the world. She was the home I could escape to every time I felt unsafe, every time I wasn't doing well, or when I needed help. A child needs someone to help them and take care of them. When she passed away, I was literally left alone in the world."

She tried to manage in her parents' home, but according to her, the attempts ended again and again in explosions. "I was a child who understood at a very young age that she had to survive. I do what is necessary to survive; I have no time for ego, emotion, or anything else." When she was 16, she was told she could no longer live at home. "They told me, 'You don't live here anymore, take your things.' They threw all my things into trash bags, and they were waiting for me outside the house. At 16, I went and looked for myself without a single adult figure to ask for help."

Tenenhouse started working at the zoo's buffet, in a shoe store, babysitting, and any other job she could find. "I went and worked so I wouldn't have to beg for money from anyone. When my grandmother died, I understood that I only had myself. There is no one to help me, no one to give to me, no one to support me."

In retrospect, she sees the independence forced upon her as a source of strength and daring to this day: "I truly know that no matter what, even if I lose my pants tomorrow, I can get up from it. It's a very deep sense of security. I have self-confidence that I will manage in any situation."

Only in the army did she realize how abnormal the reality she lived in was. In a conversation with a welfare officer, she was asked if she had a home and replied that she lived in a shed without a toilet, shower, sink, or air conditioner. "This whole story, I didn't even know it was a story. It was just my reality. Only there did it hit me that I was living an abnormal life, that the soldiers around me were not living the same life." She served as an observer and was recognized as a "lone soldier" without family support, but even with the assistance she received, she had to work every time she left the base to fund her living.

The years she had to manage alone also influenced the relationships she formed. "I always felt that people my age didn't understand me, so I got along with people who were older than me. I looked for people who could teach me and help me understand how to read a lease agreement or how to pay bills, because a 17 or 18-year-old girl doesn't know how to do that."

Although today she is identified with the world of fitness, for years Tenenhouse did not like to exercise at all. The change came at age 21-22, following a question thrown at her in front of other people. "Someone asked me if I had gained weight. I was so embarrassed and didn't know what to do with myself. I cried for two days and signed up for a gym. I didn't know what I was going to do there and I didn't know what my goal was. I was just so scared that they would ask me if I had gained weight that I said, 'I'm going to do something about it.'"

At the beginning of the path, she was ashamed to ask for help from the instructors and tried a different machine or exercise each time, until she began to understand how to train. The significant change for her was not just physical. "I built my self-confidence with the help of the gym. The confidence I gained there, I managed to take out into life. I saw that suddenly I could talk to people and I could bring myself," she says.

According to her, the training allowed her to rebuild trust in herself. "How many times do you promise yourself something and not keep it? You say you'll start on Sunday and you don't, that you'll sleep early or stop smoking, but you don't. You break that trust. When you say, 'I will get up at six in the morning and go to the gym,' and you do it, you prove to yourself that you can be relied upon. Your ability to rely on yourself is what builds confidence."

At that time, she lived in Be'er Sheva with who was then her partner and is today her husband. Out of boredom and loneliness, she began to film her workouts and upload them to Instagram, and gradually received messages from women who wanted to train but didn't know what to do in the gym. "A community was built around me without me noticing. There were customers before there was a startup. People told me, 'Tell me how to train, I don't know how to train.'"

From this need, Tenenhouse began in 2019 to develop an app that would put into the phone the information she herself was looking for at the beginning of her path. "I told myself that I know the gym will give women what it gave me. I just need to find a way to bring them and keep them there. I will let them be shy, and in the phone, I will put all the knowledge." The first version of the app came out in 2020, a few months before COVID. Tenenhouse invested her money in it and focused on gym programs, but then the gyms closed and she was forced to add home workouts.

According to her, before the launch, even the programmers she approached warned her that no one would pay to train using an app. Today, she offers programs from 12 trainers in fields including strength training, Pilates, yoga, and running, at a cost of 99 shekels per month. According to her, in the last year, about 20,000 users have used the app. "Everyone told me, 'You will lose all your money.' So I said, 'So I will lose all my money, what happened already? In my life, I've slept on a bench. What, am I going to lose money because I wanted to build an app?' I can take risks because I trust myself that I will get out of it."

Alongside the business, she continues to create content and tries to talk about failures, bad days, and weight gain. "I don't do it to look authentic. I open a camera and reflect everything. It was shitty, it was good, I succeeded, I didn't succeed, I messed around, I gained weight. Whatever there is, it is translated as much as possible." Even in an era where artificial intelligence can build a training program in seconds, she believes that the connection with the person behind the program will remain significant. "People will want a stamp of a real person they know and some kind of human connection. You can combine a lot of AI and still keep it human."

Despite the confidence and independence she built, there are things that haven't disappeared. When she sees people on the net returning to their parents' home and receiving food, laundry, or simply a feeling that someone is taking care of them, she feels, as she defines it, a small sting. According to her, she is not in contact with her parents and hasn't seen them for over a decade. "I say, 'Wow, how fun it must be to go to a house where they take care of you, where they do your laundry.' It stings, yes."

And yet, she refuses to see her starting point as a sentence. "It is very important to me to convey the point that your starting point is only a starting point, and it doesn't determine anything. It's harder than others, but you can do everything. I have a true belief that precisely people who come from a harder background can succeed more. People can do crazy things, they just need to find the strength within themselves."