Old and New
New:
The puppies are getting so big!
Old:
Boomer had a great time downtown Indy last weekend.
New:
Mike bought me an I love you outfit from Express! This outfit costs more than my entire wardrobe. Poor quality of a picture but you get the idea.
Old:
Mike did a 4 miler race this weekend in 25:06. My old man’s still got it!
Anything new in your life?
Weights and Pups
Hey! I had my weigh in this morning. It has been the same in the past 4 weeks which amazes me. I was eating 1200 cals and now i’m eating 1600-1700 and LOTS of yummy carbs! I’m feeling better and patiently waiting for my body to like the food and start to shrink again.
Watching the scale increase no matter what I did was discouraging but I know it was my bodies way of telling me to SLOW DOWN. I am listening and running and lifting at speeds i’ve never dreamed of. Sure my pants size is increasing too but i’m okay with that right now. It’s mentally easier knowing i’m fueling my body right and not over exerting it. Here’s how my typical week looks:
Sunday – 35 min SS run
Monday – Chest/Triceps
Tuesday – Quads/ 25 mins HIIT
Wednesday – REST (for real)
Thursday – Back/Shoulders – 35 mins SS run
Friday – Hamstrings/Biceps
Saturday – 25 mins HIIT
Short and Sweet! Simple and effective.
………..
In other news….Here’s my puppy! We get it 4/21!
And my other “puppy”
Buns In the Oven
All the other bloggers are doing it. Just kidding! I’m to be old to be having babies but we are expecting…sort of.
There are 5 puppies in here and one will be ours!
We have second pick of the litter and we want another girl but we’re not that picky. I think Boomer will be a good big sister too. So what kind is it? It’s a Vizsla. We will be great owner’s because they need lots of playtime and my husband never runs out of energy.
So cute!
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In other news….3 more days before the Arnold!!! Also my “healing” is going well. I feel so much better not stressing or overthinking things. I think i’m headed in the right direction.
We have a name picked out but what are some of your favorite puppy names?
THE COUNTDOWN IS ON!
I haven’t seen Angela since 2011 at the last Arnold Expo. It’s been WAY too long!
Words Of Wisdom
What chapter are you one?
Chapter One
I walk down the street.
There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I fall in.
I’m lost. I’m helpless.
It isn’t my fault.
It takes me forever to find a way out.
Chapter 2
I walk down the same street.
There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don’t see it.
I fall in again.
I can’t believe I’m in the same place.
But it isn’t my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.
Chapter 3
I walk down the same street.
There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it there.
I still fall in. It’s a habit.
My eyes are open.
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.
Chapter 4
I walk down the same street.
There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.
Chapter 5
I walk down another street.
Being in your fitness journey, career, or personal relationships, this is very common. Yet, we can all learn to take a different street.
Which chapter are you on?
From: Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying
Great Blog Post!
Eventually I will start blogging more. Until then this is a great article and explains some of why I haven’t blogged lately. I could have written it.
Blog Post by Clare Ross – INBA Figure Superstar
It’s been 2 years since I last competed and let me tell you it has been a difficult time!
When I finished the 2010 competitions I learnt very quickly exactly what I had done to my body. I attempted staying at lower body fat through the year but the amount of cardio and dieting I had to do to get there was astounding! What previously had worked for me didn’t even touch the sides. I was dieting harder and doing 2 week out cardio just to try and stay at a reasonable body fat offseason. My body had adapted to a regime of ridiculous low calories and punishing workload. The sensible me made the decision that what I was doing was completely unstainable. I pulled the plug on ever getting back on stage and started to try and find a way back to health, I started to think about repairing my body.
When I sat back and wondered what had happened to my metabolism. I have to reflect on exactly how I got into this state. It would not be until I fully owned my role that I would be in a position never to repeat the same behaviour. I would love to blame someone else, the people who helped me with my diet or other competitors who made my behaviour seem normal but really I know I was accountable.
Here are the mistakes which led, through ignorance or burying my head in the sand, to me suffering some metabolic damage.
- I ate under the prescribed amount of calories a lot of the time. Yes, I was given guidelines about how much to eat but surely if x amount of calories are good wouldn’t eating under that be better? I was hungry. I was suffering but to be successful I felt I had to suffer. The more I suffered the more successful I would be!
- I didn’t include rest days or rest enough when I got the chance. Sleep was a luxury and really coffees would suffice when you needed to get through. I just couldn’t do enough to satisfy my need to get lean enough for comps. Why rest when you can run around getting it all done? I was exhausted but I was worried it wasn’t enough!
- I was told to do high intensity cardio x 3 times week. I did that and another 20mins on the Stairmaster straight after training on top as well as my morning fasted cardio! My body started to get repetitive strains injuries. I thought that was the way to get lean. I was in awe of my body’s ability to do so much on so little!
- I did a lot of competitions and maintained extremely low body fat through cardio and strict diet throughout the year. Competing in July and finishing the competition year in November for 2 years straight is a recipe for disaster. Let’s not mention the binge eating after the competitions for 2 days and then the inevitable slog to get the body fat back down for the next competition. I didn’t even give a thought about my body and what it was coping with.
- I wasn’t honest with myself let alone with anyone around me. I almost relished in feeling exhausted and I was getting very lean. I didn’t think it should be any other way. Feeling exhausted, not remembering how to get the kids to school, a continuous and inexplicable twitching eye and feeling completely wired whilst zooming from one thing to another. Was I worried about my health? Nope! I counted down the weeks.
I truly believed when I was deep in competition prep that working harder than everyone else would see me do well on stage. I thought I would stand on stage feeling more deserving because I had been so much hungrier, tireder than everyone else. That’s what every motivational book, quote or some guru at the gym would tell you. I gave no thought to what my body was coping with or my overall health. What mattered to me was to get up on stage after having worked so hard and not to look out of place!
In reality what I was doing was conditioning my body to cope with and anticipate ongoing famine and severe physical hardship. Faced with this, it did exactly what it is supposed to do – it adapted. It learned to do more and more with less and less. Having barely survived the last “famine”, it learned that it really ought to hold bigger stores of emergency “on-board” energy in case that nasty famine should soon return! I guess you could call this metabolic damage, but it would probably be more fairly described as metabolic adaption.
I am grateful I had enough sense to realise that doing even more and more with even less and less is not sustainable and was not the answer. What I needed to do was to allow my body to learn that the shocking treatment I subjected it to was in the past and will not be repeated. The right answer was to give my body what it needs when it needs it. I’m still smashing it in the gym, but I’m giving my body the rest and fuel/nutrients it needs and slowly, slowly increasing this over time. I hope (and expect) it to eventually fully re-adapt to this new environment.
When I think about the journey I have been and am still on, I have to think exactly how I got into this position. It isn’t until I take accountability for the role my decisions played that I will be in a position never to repeat the same behaviour. I would love to blame someone else, the people who helped me with my diet or other competitors who made my behaviour seem normal but I know it was all me.
Has it been difficult, training every day watching my body get bigger and bigger whilst eating clean? Has it been difficult looking in the mirror and seeing a body that doesn’t reflect the discipline and effort I have been putting in? You bet. And it’s also difficult watching everyone get leaner getting ready for competition season whilst my body appears stagnant (albeit with increasing calories). Would I wish this past 2 years away?
Not on your life!
As no life lessons come from smooth journeys, I would say finally my eyes are open and I am armed with new knowledge and respect for my body. I am in the process of repairing my body and putting my health first. Ruining my metabolism may be the best thing I ever did 
I Thought This Was Great!
The Terrible Tragedy of the Healthy Eater
I know you. We have a lot in common. You have been doing some reading and now you are pretty sure everything in the grocery store and your kitchen cupboards is going to kill you.
Before Your Healthy Eating Internet Education:
I eat pretty healthy. Check it out: whole grain crackers, veggie patties, prawns, broccoli. I am actually pretty into clean eating.
After Your Healthy Eating Internet Education:
Those crackers – gluten, baby. Gluten is toxic to your intestinal health, I read it on a forum. They should call those crackers Leaky Gut Crisps, that would be more accurate. That veggie burger in the freezer? GMO soy. Basically that’s a Monsanto patty. Did you know soybean oil is an insecticide? And those prawns are fish farmed in Vietnamese sewage pools. I didn’t know about the sewage fish farming when I bought them, though, really I didn’t!
The broccoli, though..that’s ok. I can eat that. Eating that doesn’t make me a terrible person, unless….oh, shit! That broccoli isn’t organic. That means it’s covered with endocrine disrupting pesticides that will make my son sprout breasts. As if adolescence isn’t awkward enough.
And who pre-cut this broccoli like that? I bet it was some poor Mexican person not making a living wage and being treated as a cog in an industrial broccoli cutting warehouse. So I’m basically supporting slavery if I eat this pre-cut broccoli. Oh my God, it’s in a plastic bag too. Which means I am personally responsible for the death of countless endangered seabirds right now.
I hate myself.
Well, shit.
All you want to do is eat a little healthier. Really. Maybe get some of that Activa probiotic yogurt or something. So you look around and start researching what “healthier” means.
That really skinny old scientist dude says anything from an animal will give you cancer. But a super-ripped 60 year old with a best-selling diet book says eat more butter with your crispy T-Bone and you’ll be just fine as long as you stay away from grains. Great abs beat out the PhD so you end up hanging out on a forum where everyone eats green apples and red meat and talks about how functional and badass parkour is.
You learn that basically, if you ignore civilization and Mark Knopfler music, the last 10,000 years of human development has been one big societal and nutritional cock-up and wheat is entirely to blame. What we all need to do is eat like cave-people.
You’re hardcore now, so you go way past way cave-person. You go all the way to The Inuit Diet™.
Some people say it’s a little fringe, but you are committed to live a healthy lifestyle. “Okay,” you say, “let’s do this shit,” as you fry your caribou steak and seal liver in rendered whale blubber. You lose some weight which is good, but it costs $147.99 a pound for frozen seal liver out of the back of an unmarked van at the Canadian border.
Even though The Inuit Diet™ is high in Vitamin D, you learn that every disease anywhere can be traced to a lack of Vitamin D (you read that on a blog post) so you start to supplement. 5000 IU of Vitamin D before sitting in the tanning booth for an hour does wonders for your hair luster.
Maxing out your credit line on seal liver forces you to continue your internet education in healthy eating. As you read more you begin to understand that grains are fine but before you eat them you must prepare them in the traditional way: by long soaking in the light of a new moon with a mix of mineral water and the strained lacto-fermented tears of a virgin.
You discover that if the women in your family haven’t been eating a lot of mussels for at least the last four generations, you are pretty much guaranteed a $6000 orthodontia bill for your snaggle-tooth kid. That’s if you are able to conceive at all, which you probably won’t, because you ate margarine at least twice when you were 17.
Healthy eating is getting pretty complicated and conflicted at this point but at least everyone agrees you should eat a lot of raw vegetables.
Soon you learn that even vegetables are trying to kill you. Many are completely out unless they are pre-fermented with live cultures in a specialized $79 imported pickling crock. Legumes and nightshades absolutely cause problems. Even fermentation can’t make those healthy.
Goodbye, tomatoes. Goodbye green beans. Goodbye all that makes summer food good. Hey, it’s hard but you have to eliminate these toxins and anti-nutrients. You probably have a sensitivity. Actually, you almost positively have a sensitivity. Restaurants and friends who want to grab lunch with you will just have to deal.
Kale: it’s what’s for dinner. And lunch. And breakfast.
The only thing you are sure of is kale, until you learn that even when you buy organic, local kale from the store (organic, local kale is the only food you can eat now) it is probably GMO cross-contaminated. Besides, it usually comes rolled in corn starch and fried to make it crunchier. Market research, dahling…sorry, people like crunchy cornstarch breaded Kale-Crispers™ more than actual bunny food.
And by now you’ve learned that the only thing worse than wheat is corn. Everyone can agree on that, too. Corn is making all of America fat. The whole harvest is turned into ethanol, high fructose corn syrup, chicken feed and corn starch and the only people who benefit from all those corn subsidies are evil companies like Cargill.
Also, people around the world are starving because the U.S. grows too much corn. It doesn’t actually make that much sense when you say it like that, but you read it on a blog. And anyway, everyone does agree that corn is Satan’s grain. Unless wheat is.
The only thing to do, really, when you think about it, is to grow all your own food. That’s the only way to get kale that isn’t cornstarch dipped. You’ve read a lot and it is obvious that you can’t trust anything, and you can’t trust anyone and everything is going to kill you and the only possible solution is to have complete and total control over your foodchain from seed to sandwich.
Not that you actually eat sandwiches.
You have a little panic attack at the idea of a sandwich on commercial bread: GMO wheat, HFCS and chemical additive dough conditioners. Some people see Jesus in their toast but you know the only faces in that mix of frankenfood grains and commercial preservatives are Insulin Sensitivity Man and his sidekick, Hormonal Disruption Boy.
It’s okay, though. You don’t need a deli sandwich or a po’boy. You have a saute of Russian Kale and Tuscan Kale and Scotch Kale (because you love international foods). It’s delicious. No, really. You cooked the kale in a half-pound of butter that had more raw culture than a black-tie soiree at Le Bernardin.
You round out your meal with a little piece of rabbit that you raised up and butchered out in the backyard. It’s dusted with all-natural pink Hawaiian high-mineral sea salt that you cashed-in your kid’s college fund to buy and topped with homemade lacto-fermented herb mayonnaise made with coconut oil and lemons from a tropical produce CSA share that helps disadvantaged youth earn money by gleaning urban citrus. The lemons were a bit over-ripe when they arrived to you, but since they were transported by mountain bike from LA to Seattle in order to keep them carbon neutral you can hardly complain.
The rabbit is ok. Maybe a bit bland. Right now you will eat meat, but only meat that you personally raise because you saw that PETA thing about industrial beef production and you can’t support that. Besides, those cows eat corn. Which is obscene because cows are supposed to eat grass. Ironically, everyone knows that a lawn is a complete waste in a neighborhood – that’s where urban gardens should go. In other words, the only good grass is grass that cows are eating. You wonder if your HOA will let you graze a cow in the common area.
In the meantime, you are looking for a farmer who raises beef in a way you can support and you have so far visited 14 ranches in the tri-state area. You have burned 476 gallons of gas driving your 17-mpg SUV around to interview farmers but, sadly, have yet to find a ranch where the cattle feed exclusively on organic homegrown kale.
Until you do, you allow yourself a small piece of rabbit once a month. You need to stretch your supply of ethical meat after that terrible incident with the mother rabbit who nursed her kibble and ate her kits. After that, deep down, you aren’t really sure you have the stomach for a lot more backyard meat-rabbit raising.
So you eat a lot of homegrown kale for awhile. Your seasoning is mostly self-satisfaction and your drink is mostly fear of all the other food lurking everywhere that is trying to kill you.
Eventually your doctor tells you that the incredible pain you’ve been experiencing is kidney stones caused by the high oxalic acid in the kale. You are instructed to cut out all dark leafy greens from your diet, including kale, beet greens, spinach, and swiss chard and eat a ton of low-fat dairy.
Your doctor recommends that new healthy yogurt with the probiotics. She thinks it’s called Activa.
Protein Powder HELP needed!
Busy busy…
I went and watched the KY Muscle show yesterday. It was a LONG show as I remember. At least I was clothed, stark white, and in flat shoes this time around. I didn’t get “the bug” to compete so i’m thinking those days are over. I just want to live without freaking stomach problems.
WHICH, leads me to my question. I’ve been witout fake or added sugars since Oct 1st. Not even 1 bite of Halloween candy. I also went without eggs for 2 days. This was tough. Eggs and protein powder were 2 staples of mine. The 2 days without eggs I had ZERO gas both days. It was amazing. So now i’m looking at totally leaving eggs and whey at the door.
I know there are powders out there they don’t have sweetener and are made with rice, plants or hemp but I don’t want to get something disgusting. Does anyone have any suggestions?
Change
I love my pumpkin noatmeal but I need that change this week.
Death By Workout
Detox Day 18 and 19
Detox Day 18
Another day in working paradise. That was said sarcastically. I am feeling great today! I will feel exceptionally fantastic after I get my venti Americano. Hot or cold? Life it tough!
Meals:
Cocoa Noatmeal (pumpkin, coconut milk, coconut flour, egg whites) plus cocoa powder
Crockpot apples and 1 Smoke flavored string cheese stick
Leftover stuffed spaghetti squash
Chicken meat loaf, salad and roasted baby carrots
Chocolate Mug Cake
I love eating like this! Protein powder who? I think when I do have something sweet I’m going to go in shock.
Mike and I have a Florida vacation coming up over Thanksgiving and I’m really looking forward to it.
I’m getting a much need cut and color this weekend. I just started coloring my hair this year. Now I wish I never had.
==============================
Pumpkin cake(accidentally put the baking soda and coconut flour in my coffee the first time around)
Spaghetti squash, roasted carrots and chicken + green apple and cheese stick (hangry!)
Stuffed spaghetti squash
Chicken meatloaf, sautéed kale in macadamia nut oil
Coconut fudge (coconut oil and cocoa powder mix)
YIPPEE SKIPPEE!!!
The Weigh I Am 
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