My family has always been healthy, I won't say FIT, but healthy. We usually ate well as kids and were always active. For as long as I can remember my mom was into fitness, that perpetual journey for the "perfect body", (which I now know doesn't exist). As kids and even into my teenage years we did lots of sports like recreational kayaking, horseback riding and dirt biking as well as many other things.

When I met my husband in 2009 all my activities stopped. I didn't race motocross anymore, I quit being active. I developed his style of eating (fast food and homemade fatty box style cooking). I gained 30 lbs within 8 months and was a hefty 160 lbs. I felt sluggish and slow and never thought anything of it, I had no reason to change. When we became engaged in late 2010 I knew, as every bride does, I needed to look my best on my big day. We started P90X together and that lasted 45 days or so and my husband quit. Without my workout partner so did I.
It was several months again before I went to the rec center by our house and got a gym membership. My goal was to run, I didn't know much about getting leaner, cardio was my goal, just run. I did. I ran every 2-3 times a week and over the period of several months I decided to start introducing the P90X weight routines into my schedule 2-3 times a week. It went well. I lost 17 lbs in just over 1 year. During this time I had reduced my diet to a mere 1200 calories/day and no wonder I didn't see the results I wanted to and plateaued; my body had gone into starvation mode. I was also binge eating on a regular basis, thinking that it wouldn't hurt and I could always "run it off" the next day (which I never did).

After my wedding I decided I worked hard and looked good so I was going to take a couple weeks off, well those couple weeks turned into 6 months! I gained weight again and was sitting around 145 lbs on a regular basis (I never looked horrible but I was overweight, likely around 30% body fat). Lucky for me I reconnected with an old friend from college and we started doing P90X at the gym together. We motivated each other but the friendship tapered off again and I lost all motivation, I still tried to get to the gym and I was still running 1-3 times per week just to get out of the house. I never fully quit that time. I was still eating a horribly planned crash diet and didn't know better, so my results plateaued again.

When my husband and I moved I decided that this was it! Go to the gym NOW! It's three blocks away!! So I got my membership and started going, doing everything in my power to get my husband to come with me. A few months later we decided to get a Personal Trainer for him and split the sessions between us just so my husband could remain accountable. Our personal trainer was great for our relationship, we got lots of advice and he was good for my husband. I found I wasn't getting results, I was still eating a 1200 calories/day diet and doing HIIT Circuit Training with our PT 3x/week, and I would do cardio 2 other days. I lost only 1.5 % body fat and a pound or two in 9 months! I was told to eat purely chicken and cucumber and I would see results. At this point I had had enough, the training wasn't working with all the cardio and I was hungry, weak and tired! My birthday was coming up and my girlfriend and I were going to Vegas and were going to run the Tough Mudder while we were there; we needed to be strong and look gooooood!

This is when I decided I was going to lose the weight on my own, we fired our PT! (Roughly March 2014). I followed a very basic plan I found on the bodybuilding.com website, which I discovered from a Google search for "Beginner Women's Training Program". I ate cleaner and increased my calories a little (1400 calories/day). In 2 months I had dropped 2% boy fat from 28 to 26%, no weight lost. I was OK with that. We went on our trip and we kicked Tough Mudder butt! The same training continued when we got back and I was even more motivated to gain strength after realizing I needed it for my next mud run in June.

More research......How to gain muscle, moves to gain muscle, how to increase strength, building lean muscle for women,diet plans for women, clean eating plan for gaining lean muscle, supplements for women; all these Google searches kept popping up with one thing in common; Bodybuilding.com. I quickly discovered they had an app. Downloaded it and started spending more time on it than I did on Facebook. The community was great and supportive, people never said anything bad about your photos or your status updates, everything was encouraging and motivating. Having people I have never met as "friends" was great, I was sharing a journey to better myself with people that were just like me. I wasn't looking at the cover of Muscle Fitness Hers anymore day dreaming of one day looking like the cover model. I was looking at bodies just like mine! I love how it told me the progress I made since the last time I performed an exercise, how much weigh I lifted in my workout, how much weight total I had lifted. I felt inspired by my own progress as it showed up on the app. It became a challenge to lift more than I did last time. For the first time in a long time I wanted to go to the gym!

My addiction grew and I always knew I needed to learn more, I needed to prove to myself that I didn't need a Personal Trainer to do it for me, I needed to prove him wrong. (Now we are still friends on really good terms and he still does my physio stretching for me). Bodybuilding.com became my go to for learning more about fitness and healthy eating and supplements. In the mean time my friend had introduced my to Dana Linn Bailey's website and she definitely became an inspiration for me which has also grown significantly since the fall of 2014.

I lost my job in September 2014 and had a lot of time on my hands, my marriage wasn't the greatest and I needed to distract myself and the gym became my second home, my happy place, my escape. I found myself there every day except Sunday, usually for at least 2 hours. I had developed my own routine and lifting schedule from that small basic training program I found back in March; I had added more exercises and was lifting heavier but still stuck to the basic 3 set and 10-12 reps. I was seeing results and had started tracking my food intake on MyFitness Pal to try and keep my food in a 25c35p35f format, SO HARD! I had also increased my calories to 1500-1800cals/day. I started my own business in November within my field as a locum Animal Heath Technologist and felt great! I had developed my own routine again, my new career goals helped motivate me as well! I found DLB's Delt Homicide workout by accident and instantly became addicted to it! It taught me more about drop-sets and how many sets I should do for an exercise, and introduced me to supersets! Throughout the entire process leading up to January I had my ups and downs, I felt if I updated my body fat % or my weight when it had increased I was losing and it was a failure to me, so I wouldn't update them, I would leave them as my motivation.

Then at the beginning of January I got an email from Bodybuilding.com about the $200,000 Transformation Challenge. This is definitely my chance to prove myself to myself. I worked hard, I knew I had it in me, I was driven, determined and no one was going to get me down! My phone wallpaper was DLB, since she inspires me to get bigger and not be afraid to be yourself and be a goof, to know that everyone starts somewhere and look where they can go. I found a few eating plans on Google that were aimed at 12 Weeks out from competition and I meshed them together to create something I knew I could stick to. I used my own training program which I had been using but I researched a lot on my own online and from the library (old school is still school) to find out how I could dial up the intensity; that grew into learning about how to set up a workout to target muscle groups, proper form, how to create sets for hypertrophy, drop-sets, rest-pause sets (painful!), cardio and how to isolate muscles and use multi-joint exercises to slowly increase weight, etc. It went on and on. I added HIIT to my cardio regime as well which made a big difference. I was astonished at my results only 3.5 weeks in! As I took more progress pictures and watched my weight increases in the gym I was surprising myself! People who had their doubts were starting to comment on my progress. People at my gym started noticing my progress and I made lots of new and amazing friends! Near the end I was more shocked by my progress than I ever thought I would be. I had transformed beyond my own expectations! I kept looking in the mirror and touching my new muscles like " What are these?? I've never seen them, THEY'RE AMAZING!!!"

I did the $200,000 Transformation Challenge on my own, I needed to prove to myself I could do it that way, that I had it in me to finally get the job I set out to do in 2009 finished. You shouldn't have to pay for information to be a healthier person, I've shared my story, my nutrition plan, my routine, articles from here, encouraged people to get the app and get off facebook, everything with anyone who wants to know over these past 12 weeks and it feels great! I've become an inspiration to myself (I am now my phone wallpaper :) ), and to my friends and family and even strangers on Bodyspace who are just starting and have private messaged me to share their stories and to let me know that I am inspiring them to be better. I have been so touched by others and by my experience over the last twelve weeks and knowing that I have become a happier, healthier, person and am helping others to do that is amazing. I truly hope everyone has an experience like mine at some point in their life as it is truly freeing, humbling and makes you feel so much more human!

I DID IT!

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