I failed spectacularly

First, it's been ages since my last post. I've been pretty busy with things in my personal life. Unfortunately a lot of things that don't include the gym or eating healthy food. I've gained a lot of weight over the past year. I feel like a perfect storm of circumstances hit and I just kind of surrendered to it. There were times when I would attempt to get back on track, I failed. 

There's a few things that led to where I find myself today. 

1. My keto diet during show prep last year primed my body for quick regain. And I wasn't careful to avoid it. After my show I took a break from the gym and basically binged on whatever foods I wanted. Zero regard for nutrition. That slippery slope is hard to come back from. 

2. I went through a divorce. Although it was amicable, it wasn't easy and it's still something I am working through emotionally. I am an emotional eater so when I felt stressed or guilty or anything I would fill myself with sweets and processed junk for a temporary good feeling. 

3. I worked two jobs. Ok I'm still working two jobs. But tax season was busy for me this year. I used it as an excuse to skip the gym and grab fast food meals between jobs. As an accountant I sit most the day anyway, adding additional work hours, more food, less activity.. It's really a recipe for disaster. 

So, I failed. I failed to keep off the weight I fought so hard to lose. But I'm ready to get back on it. I'm tired of feeling sluggish and icky. When I do workout I fatigue quickly. I know I've lost a good bit of strength. So I've made a couple decisions and set some goals. I'm going to blog real time weightloss. I'll start on June 1 with a current photo. I'll record what I eat and what workouts I do and every week I'll update my photo. 

I'll be taking weights and measurements as well. I may or may not post those right away. I probably will, it's more motivation for me to stay on track and have changes week to week. 

My goals right now:

1. Resume consistent workouts to build muscle and lose fat 

2. Get down to a comfortable maintenance weight and maintain for 6+ months 

3. Compete in another figure show 

First step is getting back on track and down to a healthy weight again. I'm ready to do this. 

Back to Reality

I just got back to KC from Puerto Rico. I already miss the weather! 

But returning to the cold weather wasn't the only shock to my system. The truth is, I wasn't as comfortable in my skin as I would have liked to be down there. I've been lax, and I've allowed stress to get the best of me. But it's a new year and I'm determined to take back control. 

I'm not really a fan of New Years resolutions. Unfortunately it seems they aren't something a lot of people stick with. So I haven't set resolutions. Instead, I have goals for 2016. 

My main goal: Take better care of myself.  This means physically, but also mentally. It means I can, and should, be a little selfish. I do need that time at the gym. I do need to make sure my needs are also met. (I do need to recognize what my needs are). 

It's really a pretty broad goal. I also really intend to blog more. To document my journey back to fitness, to have an outlet for getting things off my chest. Start experimenting with healthy recipes, putting together new workouts. Really doing the one thing I know I enjoy. 

Here's hoping at the end of 2016, I feel like a different and better person than I did at the end of 2015! 

I'm still alive.

Hey everyone, I've been a little quiet on social media lately. I've been busy at work and with the kids and going through some personal stuff. I've been missing the gym and my diet hasn't been great and I've gained some weight because of it. It's been tough to get my motivation back, but I'm taking steps toward getting back on track. Most importantly I'm trying not to beat myself up about my set back. No one is perfect. I'm disappointed in where I am physically, but I have conquered a lot worse. I'm getting my diet back in line and I'm going to resume studying for my CPT. I feel good in the gym and I'm passionate about fitness, I want to get back, I feel like I've lost myself a little. I plan on doing a lot more updates here. 

Diet Break

Post show my trainer recommended I take a week off from the gym. This was really hard for me at first, and then honestly due to some personal things, my daughters birthday party, an upcoming out of the country trip ( Which I am currently at 33,000 feet typing this up), as well as a family vacation right after I get back in the states, I ended up spending a lot less time in the gym then I typically would.

I wasn’t completely sedentary, but I was a lot less active than I usually am.  During this time, I slowly added carbs back into my diet. (If you’ve been following we did a ketogenic diet at the end of my prep you can read my post on that here) 

Once I brought my carb level back up, I kind of took a diet break. I stopped eating at a deficit. Heck, a few days (or so) I probably ate over maintenance. I did gain some weight back, which I wanted to not do, but it’ll come back off. And it wasn’t a lot of weight; the key is to keep everything in moderation. I don't really deny myself any craving that I have, but I do keep portions reasonable and I do still log what I eat. (except when I didn't have internet in India and I lost my steak on myfitnesspal.com ) 

I did this because I have been dieting for pretty much the last 4 years.  Your body adapts to your eating habits, and my metabolism has adapted to my constantly eating at a deficit. Especially toward the end of my prep I noticed my body wasn’t responding as we would like to the changes we made.  I really thought that I could benefit from a break. Basically I am eating at maintenance right now, feeding my body, hoping that it will realize that it can boost up my metabolism a bit. 

I do have plans to compete at least once more this year. I’m hoping that despite this “break” being only a month or so long, it will help my body respond better when I begin cutting for my next show. 

My plan for the next week and a half (until training, with my trainer, resumes) is 

1. Get back into the gym.  After some time off, I'll be starting back a bit easy so I don't hurt myself or get very sore.

2. Continue eating my current calorie intake and logging my food. Taking in balance meals and whole foods.

3. More thoroughly document my next journey to the stage. 

Ketogenic diet

I wanted to share my experience with a Ketogenic diet. About 7 weeks out from my show with my body not responding to the macros I was on at the time, my trainer decided to try a ketogenic diet with me (Keto).  Ketogenic diet is a high fat low carb diet.  Protein is also kept pretty low.  I went from having protein be 40-50% of my diet to about 20% and fats going from 20-30% to 65-80%.  Carbs dropped to 0-5%. 

Obviously this was a MAJOR change to my diet. I’m generally pretty capable of switching things up and keeping my diet interesting while keeping it within certain macros. But honestly, the first couple days I had NO idea how to put together a decent meal on this type of macro split.  I literally ate ground beef with ranch dressing on it.  My coworkers would wait for me to heat up my lunch just to see what kind of random stuff I was eating that day. (Before they left to go enjoy taco bell or burger king or Gates BBQ)

After a few days of trolling the internet for Keto recipes (thank you internet), I was able to actually put together something more resembling a meal. I happen to enjoy braunschweiger (liver sausage) and found that it was a perfect food for this diet.  Also I could eat lots of cheese, pepperoni, salami, make mini no bake cheesecakes. It seemed awesome.. for the first week.  To be honest eating mostly fat gets pretty icky after a while. Though I managed to find some low carb “bread” and muffins, mainly used to deliver butter to my mouth, they weren’t very flavorful and eating butter isn’t as great as it sounds.

We followed ketogenic diet for 2 weeks. Then we reintroduced carbs into my diet. It was kind of like a really big carb cycle, 2 weeks low, 2 weeks high.  We finished my prep with 3 weeks low carb. By the final 3 weeks I had become pretty proficient at making high fat meals but I was getting really tired of eating them.

At the end of the process I don’t even feel that this diet was all that effective.  The first 2 weeks we saw decent change, after that it leveled out and stayed that way for the duration. 

Following my prep, my trainer attended a seminar where ketogenic diet was discussed. It’s shown that the long term health risks of this type of diet far outweigh any short term benefit.  The thing with this type of diet is, it was first developed for short term use in morbidly obese patients in order to get them down to a weight that offered less risk for gastric surgery.

My personal opinion after being on the diet is, it cannot possibly be healthy. Eating mostly fat it’s really hard NOT to eat a bunch of high sodium processed foods.  To keep the protein and carb in take down you can’t eat a lot of whole, close to nature foods.  I love cheese as much as the next person.. but I don’t believe that should be a major part of a healthy diet.

Of course there are people who would disagree with my assessment that a balanced diet is better than a ketogenic diet. There will always be differing opinions. I feel like carbs always get such a bad rap. As I study to get my personal training certificate and eventually a nutrition certification, I look forward to learning more about how the body responds to certain macro splits and different theories on nutrition. Fitness and healthy lifestyles are always changing, there are new developments all the time and you have to constantly change and push yourself to continue to be successful.  As I near the beginning of my next prep, I am anxious to see how this goes the second time around. I plan on documenting more thoroughly how my body responds to the process and how you can get lean on a balanced diet that includes carbs.

my first figure competition part 3

Show day

Show day started for me at about 5am.  Having done one coat of tanner before bed (Jan Tana  base) I had to do 1 more coat (Jan Tana competition color).  My hair/Make up lady was coming at 6 am so we needed the tanner to be on and dry enough for me to be clothed and seated.

We applied tanner, when Lindsay showed up to do my hair and makeup, Julie went down to have breakfast. Hair and makeup took a little over an hour to do!  I guess it takes a while to make me pretty J  We were supposed to report to the show by 7:45 but we were told by the show promoter at check in that figure competitors could come later because we wouldn’t go on until after women’s physique and all bodybuilding (and boy he wasn’t kidding). 

After hair/makeup I ate breakfast which was

1 sweet potato pancake See recipe here

1 “schmear” of natural peanut butter (it was about a tablespoon)

1 small apple

5 hardboiled egg whites.

I scarfed this down (carefully to avoid messing up my lipstick, as carefully as you can scarf food!  We packed up everything and headed to the show.  We arrived late.. after 8 for sure. My husband, dad and trainer were there waiting for us.  If you haven’t read my preceding posts, I suppose I should say the show was in a different city so I had just a small group of people there with me.

This is when we began the hardest part, the waiting.  The show was scheduled to start at 9. It didn’t.  In this post I posted a packing list. I mention food.. Lots of food. More food than you think.  Seriously. BRING IT! And tell your supporters to bring some snacks too. Most these shows don’t have any food at all and if anything, they only have some supplement companies/stores selling protein bars or something small. My Dad, husband and trainer at breakfast around 7.. they didn’t eat again until dinner time.  My friend Julie shared a pump up pop tart with me but that wasn’t really a lot of food.

So basically for the next 5 hours I waited… Touched up my tan, tried not to pee on myself. Peeing while in a posing suit it quite an adventure. I suppose I could delve into that experience real quick and give my two cents.  So some of you have heard the punch the bottom out of a Dixie cup in order to direct the stream and spare your tan. Well, I did pee, once..it was much more difficult that you would imagine and although I managed to spare my tan, I think the Dixie cups are more trouble than they are worth.  See, once you put your suit on, you don’t take it off until your done. So you kind of just pull it to the side to pee.  So imagine trying to  pull your suit to the side and hold a Dixie cup in place.. mind you the Dixie cup won’t hold the suit… anyway. In the future, I’ll be using both hands to pull the suit out of the way and forget the whole Dixie cup business.

Finally around 1 pm it was time for figure.  I think I must have been pumping up back stage for 20 minutes at least. They did an intermission that gave me a bit longer time. I didn’t really know what else to do.. at this point I’m just really ready to go on stage.  I should say for those who don’t know me, I’m an introvert. So don’t think you have to be this bubbly, outgoing, extrovert personality to do this sport. Now you do have to fake it a little on stage. Appear confident and comfortable, which I am still working on.  And it would be a total lie if I said I wasn’t terrified a little bit when I walked out on stage. Really most of it was because I knew my conditioning wasn’t what I wanted. I decided to do the show anyway for the experience, but being less than comfortable with the package I brought was really a challenge.

Regardless, here I was, lined up with a group of girls wearing teeny bikini’s and 5” heels.. and I was about to walk out and be judged.  Figure does a series of quarter turns.. so you’re thinking, you go out, turn, turn, turn, turn and you’re done.  Well it’s not quite that simple.  We had the smallest class, 6 girls. I’m not sure exactly how long we were out there but it feels like an eternity. You turn, the judges move people around, you turn some more.  Your cheeks are shaking.. honestly most of you shakes. I’m proud to say mine was due to nerves as I had been practicing posing a lot. (However my stage shots show I had pulled my shoulders forward so I was a bit disappointed that my posing wasn’t on)

I entered 2 classes, novice and open. You do the same process in each. Then you do a T-walk (I was competing NANBF).  I was so so nervous during my Twalk.  It’s just you out there, ALL ALONE. I’m not sure if I looked nervous but I shook like a leaf the whole time.

At the end of the day I walked away without any hardware. I walked away with experience that I will take with me in future shows. Yes, there will be future shows. Next prep begins in about 3 weeks.  I’m excited to do this all over again and hope to bring a leaner package next show.  

Show Day Sweet Potato Pancake

For breakfast the day of my show I had a sweet potato pancake with a tablespoon of peanut butter, a small apple  and 5 hard boiled egg whites.

The recipe for my sweet potato pancake is below

Ingredients:
56 g (2 oz) Baked, mashed sweet potato
46 g (3 Tablespoons) egg whites
15g (1/2 Tablespoon) coconut flour
1/4 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

Procedure:
Mix all the above ingredients in a blender, mixer or by hand until a batter forms.
Pour on to a heated skillet.

I made 1 large pancake, you could make a couple smaller ones.

Macros for entire recipe
Calories: 97
Fat: 0.6 g
Carbs: 14.2 g
Fiber: 4.1 g
Sugar: 3.9 g
Protein: 6.1