~Michele~’s BodyBlog

There are a lot of diets out there, but I think that this is one that we are all familiar with. "Tomorrow I will quick eating sweets", "tomorrow I will stop drinking beer", "tomorrow I will make sure I eat six small meals throughout the day". I think this is some way of justifying the bad choices that we make today. At least that is what I do, if I know that tomorrow I am starting my program, then what does one more day matter?

The problem is that the Tomorrow Diet doesn’t always mean that tomorrow is going to be a fresh new start. One small trigger and the whole process starts over again. What happens when you get to work tomorrow morning and someone had brought fresh bagels from your favorite bakery? You think to yourself, "tomorrow I will start my diet." It is a vicious cycle, allowing us to justify the fact that we know we aren’t doing what we know we can be doing, today.

I am very familiar with the Tomorrow Diet, because I have been on it plenty of times myself. To anyone who has a goal, to anyone who doesn’t yet have the body of their dreams, I challenge you to ditch the Tomorrow Diet and try out the Today Diet. Don’t wait any longer, it is only going to delay the feeling of accomplishment that is long overdue. Don’t start tomorrow, start right now. Start with your next meal. You have the power to make those decisions, so what are you going to choose?

If I won the lottery, the first thing I would do is hire a personal chef. Now, I don’t expect this to happen anytime soon, considering I don’t buy lottery tickets, but it’s fun to think about. The most time consuming part about getting ready for shows and shoots is cooking! It would be great to just hand someone my diet plan and not have to worry about it.

I think that contest prep, or just eating well in general, would be so much easier with a personal chef. When I come home after a long day, running from the gym to work to the gym again, all I want to do is relax. But wait, I have that cooler that I need to unpack. I don’t dare leave it until tomorrow because I remember how nasty those containers smelled last time I let them sit too long. And don’t forget about the meals that I need to get ready for tomorrow. After washing out my gladware, weighing out my chicken, and repacking all of those meals, NOW I can relax.

And for some reason, food always looks better when someone else cooks it. My chicken and broccoli never looks quite as tasty as the chicken and broccoli that someone else prepared. It’s the same food! Mine just doesn’t look as tasty.

As many of you may know, preparing for a contest takes a lot of sacrifice and commitment. I have found that for me to feel like I am on the right track, I have to just get in the zone, tune out any distractions, and do my thing. Day in and day out I live for my goals. Wake up, cardio, eat, lift, cardio, eat, work, eat, cardio, eat, pack meals, sleep, repeat.

One the positive side, I know that I am completely prepared by the time I step on stage. I can stand up there, feeling confident that I did everything in my control to present the best package that I can naturally achieve. There is no second guessing my preparation, I am ready and it shows.

But on the negative side, during prep I become so focused on my goals that I neglect many other important things in my life. I have been called out by my friends for blowing them off, my relationships suffer, and I turn into a little hermit. I don’t go out much because I have to make sure that I get in all of my workouts, or that I don’t miss a single meal. Even my best friend, who is also a figure competitor, was upset with how much I shut myself off from life outside of prep.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about this, trying to figure out if there was a way for me to prepare for a show without becoming so wrapped up in it that I blow off the people and events that I care about. I wouldn’t want to feel any less ready when the time comes to step out on stage, so I am still struggling with the meaning of balance. The people I love mean more to me than any trophy, yet I still have trouble doing anything that makes me feel like I am not going after my full potential in achieving a goal.

I have gotten asked this question enough times that I thought it would be helpful to write about it here. Let me start off by saying that when I started training, I had an incredibly flat backside. So it’s NOT genetics, trust me on this.

I went through a period when I first started training where I wanted to be able to lift the heaviest weights possible. I wanted to make the guys in the gym embarrassed to get on the leg press after me because they had to unload the plates for their own sets. I was doing low reps, heavy weights, and lots of compound movements. My leg workouts were usually squats, lunges, stiff-legged deadlifts, and some leg extentions to top it all off. My legs grew, but my glutes did not develop as much during this time as they did when I first started competing.

During competition prep, I found myself doing a lot more cardio than I ever had before. It was at this time when I discovered the StepMill, which is the number one factor that I can owe to the development of the booty. Now, lifting heavy is one thing, but climbing stairs for at least an hour, day in and day out, is quite the workout in more than just cardiovascular terms! If you have one of these in your gym, USE IT! It seems that this is the one machine that there is never people waiting for, so it is always open for you to utilize in your quest to sculpt those masterpiece glutes.

This does not mean neglect your leg workouts, though. It is important to keep those all important compound movements in your routine as well. Always use proper form to make sure that you are actually getting the benefits from the exercises that you are doing. And try some of my glute-y-licious moves:

• Walking lunges, carrying 25-45 pound dumbbells in each hand
• Stiff-legged deadlifts (make sure your form is PERFECT)
• Step-ups with a barbell across your shoulders
• One-legged leg press
• Traditional squats
• Ball squats (put a swiss ball between your lower back and a wall, hold heavy dumbbells)

I hope this helps answer those questions! I would love to hear what has helped other people as well!

So it may seem a little odd that a 21-year-old is writing about fitness as being the fountain of youth, seeing that I am still just a baby in the grand scheme of things. But today I want to share my latest inspiration, which is the awesome achievements of women who are nearly twice my age. I see women in their 40’s and 50’s who look smokin’ hot, and it is due to their ongoing passion and commitment in the gym. I only hope that I can look half as good as that when I grow up!

One specific example of this is a woman I recently met at my gym. I am new to this city, so being the social butterfly that I am, on my first day in my new gym, I asked the woman at the front desk if there were any other figure competitors that trained there. I am always excited to make new friends

So she introduced me to a woman named Lisa, who was getting ready for a show that was just a few short weeks away. Now, Lisa is in her 40’s, but you would never know that. She also has kids, but you wouldn’t know that either unless she told you. Lisa has killer shoulders, an back that I am so jealous of, and is just tight all over. She looks fantastic. She was making me feel self-conscious just standing next to her, and I give her all the credit in the world. The woman works her butt off in and out of the gym, and it shows.

I was not surprised when I get a call from her after the show, telling me that she won TWO pro cards in the WNBF, one for winning the Master’s division and one for winning the Open Overall! What an inspiration! Congratulations to Lisa and congratulations to all of the women who have discovered the fountain of youth in fitness. Thank you for being such an inspiration.

It seems that everyone has their own recipe for protein pancakes, but mine are the guaranteed fluffiest and most delicious. I have tried tons of different ways to make them, but after eating enough runny, dense, gummy "pancakes" (if you can even call them that), I finally figured out what was missing. The Magic Bullet.

They aren’t kidding in those cheesy informercials, the Magic Bullet is SWEET! I use it for everything from protein shakes to chopping almonds, but the protein pancakes that come out of this thing are the best by far. If you don’t have one, you could try my recipe in a regular blender but I imagine it would be a little messier and not quite as thrilling. Like I said, the thing is sweet.

Ingredients:

• Oats
• Egg whites
• Protein powder (I use AllMax IsoFlex in Vanilla)
• Xanthan gum
• Water
• Splenda
• Cinnamon

The amounts that you use of each are not too important, you can vary them based on your own dietary needs. Personally, I use 1/4 cup of oats, 1 cup of egg whites, and 1/3 scoop IsoFlex, but that is just for my own caloric requirements. The only thing that you need to pay attention to the amount of is the Xanthan gum. Only use a little tiny sprinkle! This is what creates the airiness in the batter, but it will get all thick if you use too much. Only add just a little drizzle of water, too much will make it runny.

Directions:

Put all of the ingredients except for the water in the Magic Bullet cup and blend a little bit. It should look like real pancake batter once it is blended. Not a watery sludge with pieces of oats in the bottom (I am sure you have had this happen with other recipes). Spray Pam in a pan, cook one side until it starts to bubble. Spray the top with Pam before you flip to make sure it doesn’t stick on the other side.

These are awesome with a little Fabio Butter Spray and sugar-free maple syrup. If you want to eat them at night and you don’t eat carbs in the evenings, leave out the oats and they are still delicious!

I am not usually a big spender. I rarely go shopping for clothes, shoes, purses, etc. It’s just not my thing. But I have to say, I went shopping last week and bought something that I can already tell is going to get a whole lotta use. Introducing… my new elliptical!

Okay, so it wasn’t cheap. But there is no price you can put on actually ENJOYING my cardio sessions! I also bought a NetFlix subscription, so now I get to rock out in my own basement, watching episodes of Entourage on DVD and actually looking forward to cardio. I didn’t think that was possible.

First of all, let me apoligize for making generalizations in this post, I just have been seeing a lot of terrible form lately and I’ve got something to say about it. Not all guys use bad form, not all girls use perfect form, but allow me to generalize to get my point across…

Lift like a girl. What in the world does that mean? It means, check your ego at the door, bud. Are you trying to curl 60 pound dumbbells because you are strong, or because you want to LOOK like you are that strong? For example, if you can swing a dumbbell up to your shoulder that doesn’t mean you can CURL that same dumbbell and actually get the benefit of the exercise from it. Isn’t that why we train? To grow and develop our muscles?

When I am lifting, I don’t care what the number says on the weights that I use. My goal is to reach failure at the number of reps that I am aiming for. I don’t care if I impress anyone with my strength, so I don’t care if I look strong or not while I am lifting. But then again, I am a girl. I want to look good outside of the gym, it doesn’t matter so much to me what others may think in the gym.

Moral of this? No ego. My advice to the guys with bad form? Get rid of the ego, lift like a girl. Use a weight that is lighter, but use perfect form. You will benefit so much more this way! You will make gains faster! Hot fitness chicks will notice you on the beach and grab your big biceps and say "WOW, which way to the gun show!"

 Okay, now the last part I cannot guarantee, but you see where I am going with this.

Want to know how to impress a company that is looking to sponsor you? Stuff yourself with italian food and chocolate cake in front of them… while they are paying the bill…

Trust me, it works!

This is one of the many reasons why I am so happy to be with AllMax. After a long day of working the booth at a HUGE expo in Anaheim, we headed to Bucca di Beppo for a nice dinner. Now I had just competed about a week and a half prior to this event, so I was still in my "let’s see how much I can eat in one sitting" phase. In terms of calories consumed, I think I beat all of the AllMax guys that night, because when that cake came around you better believe I was eating some of it. Or a lot of it…

Another great thing about that event was that it was the first time I had tried RapidCuts Hardcore. This was prior to it’s release in stores, so I didn’t really know what to expect except that Sales Guy Mike told me it was pretty intense. Okay so he wasn’t kidding, you want to see me dance around a booth for 8 hours? Just give me some RapidCuts and the party has begun!

So thank you to AllMax for putting up with my post-contest-italian-food-binge-eating behaviors, I am happy to be a part of the team!!

My name is Michele, and I am a Gemini. I am a figure competitor, fitness model, and an AllMax sponsored athlete. YES, I would call myself an athlete. If you don’t agree with me, let’s arm wrestle over it. I am joining the blog world because I want to make a place where I can share my little theories and ideas that relate to fitness. I hope to get others to think about things in a new way, and maybe learn a thing or two. I like to learn things too, so I hope to get plenty of feedback and comments.