Character Animation Messes Up Rotation in Unity?

I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out how to orient my model. I noticed the problem when I ran into trouble getting my character to rotate in the direction of movement. After significant trial and error with functions like LookAt() I realized it was because my character's z axis (forward vector) was not facing the same forward direction of the character. After rectifying this in Blender I imported into Unity and walah the z axis is in the same direction as the character. But when I play the game and the animation starts, the z axis points in the wrong direction again! Any idea why Unity is doing this? fyi I modeled the 3d object in blender.

ps Unfortunately the forum wont recognize the images I have uploaded so I am posting the links to what I described:

AFter starting the game (character doesnt face z axis) : https://imgur.com/a/jqc3Px4
Before starting the game (character faces z axis) : https://imgur.com/a/2XdvLfE