Wendy’s BodyBlog

From my photo shoot. My diet has not been as clean as it should be till a few days ago. I find it difficult to stay focused for 12 weeks to diet. So, it’s a good thing that I don’t have that much weight to lose. It’s definitely crunch time and am feeling it! I’m in my "game on!" mode! I am doing 6 days of cardio, and cleaning up my diet. Yesterday I went grocery shopping, and my cart was full of green veggies, lean protein, and oatmeal! I am also cutting down on carbs on the days I don’t lift. I am really excited about the shoot!

Last weekend, John and I went backcountry skiing with a bunch of other people. It was a 7 mile, 3000 foot ascent up to the cabin, where we stayed for two nights. It was NOT easy. It was my first time backcountry skiing. My rental boots were a size too small (I lost my two big toenails when I got home), and hiking with a bag that was at least 1/3 of my body weight was NOT easy. The ski down wasn’t much easier, either, even with a lighter load, thanks to carrying less water and food. Some girls snow shoed in, but  they still beat me back to civilization even though I started out earlier and was on skis! I just learned how to ski last year, and am NOT used to skiing on trails with trees all around! I literally snowplowed most of the way down (that’a great quad workout, BTW) and fell probably about 7 times!

I had no idea how difficult it would be, and it’s definitely not for me. I had to give my bf kudos, though, as well as the others at the hut who enjoy it. He LIKES that sh*t and is good at it! Just thinking about it now wears me out! 

I saw Lindsay Cope in the gym today. That girl is huge. She won the Nevada State Figure Championships last year, which is an NPC show. I thought about doing that show this year, but when I saw who won, I realized that I might be out of my league, at least for this year. Starting in December until probably March or April, I would really like to do a bulk to gain some size, particularly in my back, shoulders, and arms. From now until December, I am technically "in season" because of a photo shoot and shows.

I am about 7.5 weeks out from my photo shoot. My weight is about the same minus a couple pounds. I haven’t been as on point with diet as I should be, but now it really is time to buckle down. So I set a small goal for myself, to lose one pound this week. I also have to start shopping for it, which should be fun!
In the gym, I’ve really been trying to push myself more than I ever have. I am experimenting with my pain threshold, at least that is how I look at it, LOL!  I wonder how much faster I can run or how much weight I can really tolerate, and testing to see if it’s truly muscle failure versus mind failure. There is quite a connection there. Today, for example, I did some basic bicep curls with dumbbells. My left arm is so much weaker than my right, and at one point, I thought I had reached muscle failure with my left arm, but instead of thinking I was done, like I usually do, I told myself, no, damnit! And I pulled that sucker up with sheer determination! I have been using visualization, and it seems to help. That and really focusing on my breathing when getting through the last one or two reps. I find pushing myself in cardio is a lot more intense, probably because I am using so more muscles. So, we’ll see what comes of my experimentation. Now, I just need to apply visualization and breathing techniques to the kitchen!

I go away from this site for a while, come back, and then remember why I stay away in the first place: This site is getting trashier by the day. Enough said.

My boyfriend told me a story about a Marine officer who would order quite overweight newly enlisted Marines (am assuming men) to stand in front of the mirror and "play with it." It being the dude’s gut. And playing with it in front of the officer while watching himself in the mirror. Makes for a funny story, and it’s definitely one way to get people to finally accept the state of their bodies. I am feeling the same today. As in, just a moment ago, I was feeling the fleshy part of my inner thigh and was rather quite disgusted. I am not sure this is the healthiest relationship I could have with my body, but I’ll tell you something–my distaste for what I see in the mirror and what I also feel about my body are fueling my desire to change. That and being unhappy with the fact that I’ve been with Cathy for about a year now and don’t have much to show for it.  I am also beginning to think to continue to improve on our bodies, we must have an adversarial and ambivalent relationship with our bodies. Yes, I am blessed to have a healthy body, and I love my body for what it allows me to do, but damn it, I want more. And even when I have more, I will still want more.

I am down three pounds this week. Ok, well since Wednesday, I have lost three pounds. That would be three of the five pounds that I seem to go up and down, which is probably why it came off so quickly. I am still eating clean, per Cathy. My goal this week is to continue eating clean and in addition to log my macros. I didn’t do that this last week–baby steps.

I also enjoyed my cheats this weekend. Today I had a vegetarian calzone, which really wasn’t that bad–plenty of veggies, whole wheat tortilla, and a sprinkle of cheese. So I suppose the "cheat" was the chocolate-coffee milkshake (I think they add coffee beans in the blender!) AND a go-go bar, which was DIVINE! Coconut, nuts, chocolate… YUM! I love baked goods, and this place I went to does not use ingredients with trans fat.

I’ve also decided on my shows for this year. As many of you know, I will be moving down to Vegas in May or June. Vegas is actually a great spot for those interested in fitness. Plus, there are so many more photographers and coaches to choose from. The two shows I am doing are both in Vegas. The first is the NPC USA Championships, bikini division (since this division is new this year, anyone can compete in the bikini division at any of the shows) in July and Fitness America in November–I am not sure what I will compete in with that–bikini and/or figure, depending on how I look.  I would like to travel to do more shows, but being realistic, I am not sure I will find a job right after graduation, a job that does not involved taking little kids away from their abusive parents. There are plenty of those types of jobs open for social workers, but I really do not want to go that route. In fact, I refuse to go that route. Ideally, I would like to work in corrections–Yep, I *love* the criminals with mental illness–or in a clinical internship. Those two together would be perfect!

But I digress. I am not really the bikini type — I’m short, have short hair, and am not as well–um–endowed in one area as some other girls. Plus, I love pumping iron! But it should be fun nonetheless! And it seems like it will be a lot less of a pageant than other federations’ bikini or model divisions. Competitors walk to the center of the stage, do front and back turns, then walk off. That’s it! No prancing around!  I can handle that for my first show!

I am on day 5 of my 30-day clean eating challenge (with two cheats per week). And yes, I am already planning my cheats–an extra serving of my yummy yam protein pancakes WITH syrup–I usually go without. And pasta with one sausage and chocolate for dessert. Not too crazy, but enough to satisfy my cravings. Apparently I really do need to have to report to someone who will hold me accountable and give me a good talking to if I fail.

All of my numbers are going up at the gym. I managed to do 130 lb wide lat pulldowns, Bulgarian squats holding 35 lb dumbbells, incline chest flyes holding 20 ln dumbbells. And today I did 2×20 of 70 lb wide lat pulldowns with 20 sec of recovery AND 2 x 20 of 60 lb bench press with 20 sec rest. The shortened rest period was tough, but I made it! I remember when I could only do 70 lb pulldowns and 60 lb bench press for only 8 or so reps.

I am also on the hunt for suits again. I know that I want to go with a custom made suit. I *really* like Sylvia Tremblay and Passion Fruit Designs, but they are so expensive compared to other designers like Vandella Costumes (found a GORGEOUS suit on there for $350) and Lidia Conti.  I am also looking into Flaunt Swimwear. This girl only has a MySpace account, which I don’t have, so if I want a suit, I will have to set up an account just to contact her.  Decisions, decisions. And I have no idea what colors, cuts, etc would look best on me. Hope everyone is doing well!

I talked to my coach this past weekend about my frustrations with my diet, so she challenged me to eat clean for 30 days. WITH HOWEVER, two cheats per week–one each on Saturday and Sunday. I am on day 3, and only once yesterday when I was at the store and hungry did I want to buy a bar of chocolate, LOL! I got a salad instead. I also am supposed to email her every week about my progress with eating clean. I am also cutting out all nibbles–just sticking to 5-6 meals per day–no handful of peanuts here or there or one or two or ten chips between meals. NO MAS!

I took progress pics the other day, and I am not even going to bother posting them on here. It is the same old. I go down by 5 pounds, I go up by 5 pounds. This has been me over the last year. Well, this year it WILL stop! I am so tired of selling myself short, of being less than what I know I am.

I am gearing up for school to start next week. I am trying to adopt a kick-a** mentality instead of approaching it with dread and anxiety. Only four more months of busting my butt–totally do-able! Hope everyone is having a great start to the week!

Actually not a whole hell of a lot, LOL! Though I have been absent from this site for some time, I have been reading many of your blogs, even if I don’t always respond.
I finished up my semester just fine, and am currently staying in Vegas with my bf for the past 2.5 weeks. I have another half week before I have to return to Reno, and then another week after that before I return to reality–meaning school, internship, that damn thesis. I didn’t get approval from the human subjects board, by the way. I have to resubmit a new application, which is a little more than frustrating considering that I met with that office to go over my application word for word BEFORE I handed it in. Ain’t bureaucracy grand?

During my stay in Vegas, i had a chance to meet up with Trixter and Miss GJ. We had lunch and talked shop (fitness, of course). Meeting with GJ reminded me how nice it would be to have a girl friend who is close to me to talk shop with and plan for contests together.
Fitness is on track. I have scheduled a photo shoot for early April, so am dieting — I only had about a month and a half to enjoy the offseason (and I did, very heartily, I might add!).  I am actually 12 weeks out from the photo shoot tomorrow. I also scheduled a time to talk to my coach about preparing for the photo shoot, as I want these shots to be part of my modeling portfolio.  I am not sure what types of shots to add.

More than the usual fitness, school, work, internship, vacation bit, I have been thinking a lot about the status of my spirit and my mind-body-spirit connection.  I think part of this reflection is due to the fact that I am turning 30 in March, and I am taking stock of where I have been, where I thought I would be, and where I would like to go. I have noticed that I stop myself from achieving those things that I most want–those dreams that keep me going day after day. For me, those dreams are being a professional writer and fitness model, and becoming some sort of advocate for the chronically mentally ill–that last dream is still in the making. At the top of my list is writing. While I really wanted to write, I chose social work as a safety net. Plus, I figured that I would have something to write about in an educated manner, and social issues are very close to my heart.

And so to take stock of what is stopping me from achieving my dreams, I did sentence completions, a technique I learned in school this past semester. One of my sentence completions was "If I were to achieve my dreams, then…" and then finished the sentence as many times as I could without censoring myself. I highly recommend this technique to anyone who wants to uncover deeper fears or reasons that may be stopping you. Anyway, so I had of completions from that one particular sentence stem, and there were themes. One of those was loss–loss of friends, loss of comfort, loss of life as I know it, and the other theme had to do with fear of being a one-hot wonder, so to speak. Now, I didn’t say that these fears and beliefs are rational–mine certainly aren’t–but that these fears and beliefs do stop us from achieving what we want.

I suppose I have gotten to the point where I am tired of not living my best life, especially since I have blessed with the ability and means to do so. I think my fitness journey over the last year exemplifies this–I started, would fall off the wagon, get frustrated, start again, fall off the wagon, get frustrated, start again, etc. It’s an awful cycle that needs to break this year. And this is the year for it–as of late April, I will be done with school, done with my internship, and hopefully have passed the licensing exam. There will be no more room for excuses come post April.
My life seems to be one of a cycle of frustration and renewal, and I have become so tired of this cycle. When I get to feeling this way, spirituality becomes very important to me. I am not a religious person, but I am a spiritual one. My faith has aided me in getting through the darkest parts of my life. Believing that god–god him- or her- or itself and god acting through others–accepts me as I am brings me comfort.  Believing that  helps me to accept myself as I am, that I am worthy of all the gifts that have been bestowed upon me. Though I do not necessarily believe in New year’s resolutions, this year, because I will be three decades old and can no longer tolerate my pitiful excuses, will be a spiritual journey. I want to be ever more mindful of the mind-body-spirit connection, and I want to nurture and heal those parts of me that thrive on fear…

As many of you know, I have been re-evaluating this whole new fitness lifestyle for some time and deciding what I want to get out of it. I have changed my mind so many times, have started and stopped. And of course to complicate all of this is that I didn’t have the opportunity to get on stage, with my first show being canceled, and the second show coming at a bad time for me.

What has been a certainty all along is that I do want to be a part of this fitness lifestyle. And I was fit before I started lifting–I was an avid runner who ran anything from a 5K to 50 miles and while I wasn’t an elite runner or anything, I could usually place in the top 10% of women.

But that wasn’t enough. I was becoming burnt out, and my knees and hips couldn’t handle all of the pounding. So then the question was what I wanted out of training and my physique. Do I want to be a fitness gal and do all sorts of crazy tricks? A figure gal? A fitness model type?And how much of my life did I want to devote to this?
Today I read articles that were posted on a private site for people who received services from Cathy Savage (I’m not using her services now, but I saved all the articles on my computer!), and one article that I came across gave a rationale for why her programs are set up the way they are–why we don’t use too many machines to lift; we don’t do a ton of cardio; we don’t take supplements except for protein powder; we do a lot of functional exercises. But what really popped out to me was a point about eating something small and "unclean" so long as it fits into our macros (does NOT include cheat meal), and so long as we are eating clean 80-85% of the time.

And I recall reading that and Cathy herself telling me that, but for some reason over the past few months I lost sight of not just the little cheats we could splurge on but also that we don’t have to do crazy amounts of cardio. I tried to eat super clean and did cardio 5-6 days a week for one hour at a time in addition to weights. I did not allow myself cheats–hell, I tried to "challenge" myself to eat clean for weeks on end without having some ultimate goal like a show or photo shoot.

And so what happened? I totally crashed, was completely burnt out and am still recovering from that–just like the article said would happen if we deprive ourselves and work so dang hard in the gym day in and day out! And I think at some point, I decided that if I had to deprive myself and work so dang hard to have the physique I wanted, then it wasn’t worth it. So, that has been me over the past several months–swinging wildly from one end of deprivation and psychotic discipline to the other end of excess and binging.

I actually think a lot of the psychotic discipline actually came from this site. Julofthenile, who has been MIA for some time, wrote a blog recently and talked about being on here daily not being healthy and the need to put fitness in place with all the other things in our lives, and I have come to see how right she is.
There were the challenges of eating clean as long as humanly possible. There are people on here who do two sessions of cardio daily. I am not criticizing anyone in any way. If anything, I was the one who got sucked up into it and believing that these are the things that I have to do to get to where I want to be. And where did that leave me? Completely burnt out and unmotivated. (And yes, John… you were RIGHT, as much as I hate to admit it!)
Out of this came two things: The first is that I decided that when I can afford a trainer again, I am going back to Cathy Savage, despite our differences on running. And I will pay for more intensive services, so that on a weekly basis, she can keep me in check in terms of swinging one way or the other. What it really boils down to is that I like her approach, which is balanced. AND THAT, despite her focus on balance–ironic that I have to write that; you would think the fitness industry would focus more on balance–many women she trains are national champions.

The other thing that came out of this whole mess are my goals for my challenge with GJ. I am going to focus on moderation–maintaining moderation without going too much one way or the other. I am going to track my calories every day until January 1. I will rotate my calories between 1400, 1500, and 1600 calories (may change these after the first week or two if I am hungry or full all of the time). I will stay within my macros of 40/40/20 or 50 protein/30 carb/20 fat as much as possible. I will allow myself small cheats like a piece of chocolate so long as they fit into my macros.  I will also myself one full cheat meal once per week. I will do cardio no more than five times per week, four sessions being optimal, with 45 minutes being the longest amount of cardio at any one time. And I will lift of course. That is my challenge not just till I see GJ around New Year’s but for everyday, for as long as possible, at least until I am about 12 weeks out from a show or photo shoot, in which case I will have to change things up a bit…
I think I will lose some weight as a result seeing as how I’ve GAINED weight as a result of my latest binge… But now my focus is to stop my wild swings so that I STOP binging.

Ok, so I didn’t QUITE take off a week from the gym. I came across what I thought looked like a fun CrossFit workout, and decided to do it–because it looked like fun, LOL! So on Friday I did four rounds (supposed to be for time, but I didn’t time myself, just busted my a**) 400 meter run, 50 air squats. My legs were sore yesterday.

Then yesterday, I did this:

For time:
50 Box jump, 24 inch box
50 Jumping pull-ups
50 DB swings,
Walking Lunge, 50 steps
50 Knees to elbows (hanging leg raises with …knees to elbows!)
50 Push press,  30 Lb BB
50 Back extensions
50 Squat press, 24 lb plate
50 Burpees
50 mountain climbers

No, I did not time myself. And I did not do all 50 at once. I did the whole thing as a giant set (2×16), then the last set I did 17 reps to make it an even 50 reps total. And silly me, instead of just doing the jumping pullup, I decided to jump up to pullup position and do a sloooowww negative down. Well, I am so incredibly sore from that that I can barely bring my arms back to put on my jacket.

I read an interesting article on crossfit workouts on t-nation.com the other day. You can read it here if you would like. My own feelings on Crossfit is that some of the workouts are really great functional workouts, and you can get in both cardio and strength in at the same time, such as the one I did yesterday. My heart was a-pounding the whole time, but I also know from the soreness in my biceps, back, calves, hams, and pecs today that I got a good weight workout in too. I also like the sprints with some body weight lifting mixed in. Plus, these functional or sprint workouts can really mix up your training, which helped me to break through my mental plateau.
Other Crossfit workouts, however, don’t make much sense to me, such as the 7×1 of anything. I don’t see any need to ever do that kind of lifting unless you are a powerlifter, serious bodybuilder (not figure or fitness like myself) or want to qualify for the Olympics for that sport.  But, that is just my opinion.
I think I am ready to hit the gym again. I am still figuring out what I want to get out of the offseason. What I DO know is that I don’t want to diet, meaning squeaky clean then doing cardio for one hour 5-6 days per week. I just need a damn break from that. So, I am going to mix it up as much as I can. I’ve been copying other people’s weights routines from here. Jamie Eason posted one week of weight training and cardio, so I think I am going to try to do that this week. Shannan also posted her weights workout, so I might try that as well. I think I am also going to mix in some crazy functional/weights workous. Anything not to be bored! Anywho, back to working on the projects I have due tomorrow! Whoo-hoo!

Only a few more weeks…