Beyond now.................

Why now? Why anytime? Why not! I want to feel normal, I want to be treated normal, I want! Why do I want…………… its been said. I have always struggled with my weight and no matter how hard I work at it, I never seem to get it right. Why is it so hard to lose body fat? Do I have to continually live the life I have, day in and day out, struggling to maintain, let alone lose weight. This mountain that I climb seems to get steeper and steeper each year. I am a 42 year old woman, who is a sendentary office worker, actively goes to the gym 5 days a week, loves lifting heavy weights, manages some type of cardio 5 to 6 days a week. For any other “normal” person, this would be enough to create that defecit required for consistent body fat loss. But you are listening to a person who can put on just under10 kilograms in under 3 weeks, while walking around Europe all day, albeit the diet was not ideal, it was not that bad either. Maybe more carbohydrates than I should have. The breads, majestic breakfasts, long days walking, not eating again till early afternoon and the gelati’s. Whew, pretty bad, but hey you only get one go at the first time in Italy.
So now that my feet have landed back in reality and the knowledge that I had put on some serious weight in a short amount of time, it was the wakeup call to get back on the wagon for the ever quest to get that body I wanted way back in 2004 when I witnessed my first ever body building competition. I had already discovered weight lifting in the coveted “boys area” at the gym serveral years ago. Then got invited to a competition where a fellow gym junki was competing in Physique. Although I didn’t like the way she looked (I felt she was too thin compared to others), it was the rest of the competition that totally roped me in, hook, line and sinker. I watched a competitor call Telia Raciti and totally fell in love with muscle and Physique competitons. To top the day off, I witnessed a quest appearance by the magnificent Jo Rogers. It wasn’t her extreme muscular look that mostly appealed to me, but the way she did her routine on stage and her talk afterwards. I was bitten. Since then I have dieted, pushed myself hard with cardio and weights and obviously yoyoed up and down in body size. Then comes the anxiety and disappointment for not getting good fast results and obviously that coveted body image that I crave.

Now talking about the body image I crave, also comes with the need to be satisfied. But do you know what the hardest thing to accept, is watching people who you know do less exercise than you and eat not as cleanly as you, get more results than you and faster too. Your determination starts to disappear and now going to the gym becomes a chore. Your time starts to peeter off, till you are just going along obligatory and following a half ass eating plan, on goes the body fat you managed to lose over six months of consistent effort. You start to feel sorry for yourself, sabotage yourself then kick yourself in the butt. So after a week of asskicking and reflection, you drag your sorry ass back to the gym, you get started back on the right track and continue down it once again to try and obtain that body image you crave. So now you ask yourself, all those years, surely somewhere you should have got it right. You go and obtain more knowledge by completing Certificate Three and Four, and you would think with all that knowledge, surely you can get the whole body image quest right at this point! A case of Try and Try again until you succeed.

Accepting your challenges is bad enough, as you cope with the daily grind of bearing the unwanted body image, but to note that people tend to look past you or not take you into conversation due to your size. Surely not, you say, people are not like that, but alas, bear witness to people often walking past you to talk to the person who has a much neater body image. Females are not quite as bad as males, but working in a construction industry, you tend to notice this more. An example of what you feel can be best explained following: You know you have some serious surface veins on your legs , and normally it does not worry you as you usually forget about them. But walking around with shorts on or a shorter skirt, you start to notice people looking at your legs and you become extremely self conscious of it all. You then start to cover yourself up. This is what it is like with the body image issues. You are comfortable with yourself all the while you are pursuing your happy body image, until you come into public and you discover people around you don’t have the same issues as you, then you start to feel inadequate. Enough to the inadequacies, time to put a stop to these feelings. Time to get out of this rut. But what is the rut you in, you exercise consistently, you train till you fatique, you ensure you expend more energy than you take it………..so where are you going wrong. Emotions!

I can tell you that disappointment plays a big part in the weekly grind. You put in an extra effort that week, you exercise so hard, that you are literally tired and sore and the scales and measures show no to hardly any change at all. You tell yourself that persistence and perseverance will always pay off. So you keep at it the following week like a good little Trojan. You stick to an extra clean eating plan for 5 days of the week because it is easy at work. No distractions. But the weekend comes along and you have so many chores to run. You start the first morning off with a great powerwalk and breakfast, then out you go for your weekend routine of groceries, odd jobs and catch ups. Before you know it, its 4.00pm in the afternoon and the last time you ate was at 8.30am in the morning – what the? Where did the day go? You are now hungry, so you think about something to eat but dinner is soon, so you can’t have too much. You nibble a bit, maybe a piece of bread with peanut butter or crackers with something. Then after a long day of shopping, chores, cleaning and running around, you really don’t feel like cooking dinner. You live with 2 men (husband and son) who do not cook, so you make toasted sandwiches or homemade pizza. You couldn’t be bothered making something else for yourself so then you eat the pizza too. Now comes the guilty feeling that you didn’t put in the extra effort and vow not to do the same tomorrow. Tomorrow comes, you keep to family tradition and cook breakfast for everyone – usually a very good healthy breakfast, an omlette of sorts. So again the day starts out well and often you get to lunch eating what you had planned in the first place. Usually the morning is taken up chopping, dicing, cleaning and bagging vegetables, roasting and chopping meat and basically preparing food for the following week. Lunch then turns into something healthy at home for yourself and sandwiches for those who are at home. Mid afternoon always gets missed, usually doing way too many chores to think about it. Come Sunday night, you have either put on a roast for the boys or have something else prepared but you do not feel like eating yourself. You don’t. Later that night you get hungry, so you open fridge doors and cupboard doors…………………looking for that elusive tasty morsel that is good for you, has no fat and will help you achieve that body image you crave……Ha! In what dream?

Now you ask what are you doing?? What do you really want?? You want to be that Physique competitor that you admired and aspired way back then when you first was touched by the passion. You want not to be that failure that you think people think you are, you want to achieve that perfect body image for you. So now once again you have set yourself goals, announced those goals publicly and 3 months later, you really have not made such a dent in that doona layering that you have on that hard hot body of yours. You have set goals – Big Enormous Hairy Ass Goals that you want to compete next year. With the three months gone already, you realize you are not making the achievements you need to have done by now to actually make it next year. But this is okay, you still maintain that sometime, something has to happen, and when it does, it will be great. So you talk yourself about staying on track and each weekend you try to make it perfect. Try and try again till you succeed. You surround yourself with positive people who inspire you, acknowledge you and even admire you, all in the quest to boost your self confidence.

Now goals are set – Ulitmate Long Term Goal, to maintain a body image you will be happy and comfortable with. To live life comfortably and to be accepted by your peers as have a fit and healthy body, and not overlooked for the person with a neater body image. Intermediate Long Term Goal is to compete at least once in Physique. Medium Term Goal is to achieve one third body fat loss towards your end goal by Christmas. Short term goal is to have a very clean healthy full week of 7 days with one reward at the end of a good week.

I will compete in Physique and no one will deter me from my vision, not even myself.