The career 180

Over the past 12 months, former marketing executive Amy Fleischer changed careers, dropped 80 pounds and gained friends she now calls family.

It started while the Huntington, LI, resident was recovering from a hip operation in late 2015.

“I saw a Facebook ad for boot-camp classes at the local gym. But at the time I could barely walk,” she says. It had been a rough few years for Fleischer — deaths in her family left her struggling to work and compulsively overeating.

“I basically stalked the owner of the gym. Finally she said, ‘Just come in.’ I was taking prescriptionstrength anti-inflammatory [medicine], but I got through an amazing workout.”

She liked it so much she started attending classes six days a week and working at the front desk last winter. It was clear to the gym’s owner that Fleischer had a future in fitness.

“One day [the gym’s owner] said, ‘I’ve signed you up for certification training,’ ” says Fleischer, 54.

Since becoming a personal trainer, Fleischer helped open a second location of the gym, Northport Fit Body Boot Camp; pioneered a children’s fitness class; and built her client list.

“I now wake up at 4 a.m. and train people at 5 — I used to have such bad insomnia that I’d be up until 5,” she says. “The only thing keeping me up at night now is writing workouts for my clients, and thinking, ‘This is going to be so good.’ ”

Fleischer can’t believe how much her life has turned around since her first boot-camp class.

“I wake up every morning and put on spandex, and I’m like, ‘This is what [being] a superhero feels like,’ ” she says.