Reset

I've been doing a little back and forth chatting with an AMAZING woman. She is a figure competitor in her 50s and her physique is stunning. She would be amazing to have that body at 20 and to think she is 50 and looking that good is a just crazy awesome. There is a lot of hard work and dedication into looking like that. And she just recently took home a first place trophy at a figure competition! MUCH deserved.

I feel like I have put in a lot of hard work and dedication too (obviously not as much as she has) but I still don't feel like I have the body to show for all my efforts. Something I'm doing is not helping, but hindering the progress I feel like I should be making. So I decided to go out on a limb and contact this woman, tell her a bit about myself and my "problem" and see if she could help me. Pinpoint what I was doing wrong with training and/or diet and give me a few suggestions.

She graciously agreed to help me out, despite having a family, full time career and crazy training schedule herself. I felt guilty about asking so much of her. I hope that some day, I can return the favor somehow.

Anyway, she wanted to take a look at what my training schedule was, the workouts I did and what I was eating. Lucky for me, I track all that stuff so I was able to fill her in. One thing she said really sticks out in my mind:

"Cardio is not your friend."

As you know, I am a staunch advocate for weight training OVER cardio as the way to get the body you desire. Unless you desire to be "skinny fat". That's a term for skinny people who look soft. If that's your desired outcome, do tons of cardio!

She looked at my workouts and told me I was doing too much cardio. Which was shocking because I really didn't think I did all that much. I had recently ramped it up in the final stages of a timeline to goal, as prescribed by my latest road to fat loss guru. But that was only 20 minutes after weight training plus a couple of HIIT sessions on off days. Typically, the only cardio I would do in the past would be 3 sessions, 20 minutes each, of high intensity interval training (HIIT) per week in addition to weight training. That's only an hour a week. HIIT has never proven to be a super effective way to burn fat off my body either. I like to do it for the cardiovascular benefit more than anything.

Also, she didn't think that I was eating enough calories. It always seemed strange to me that eating less calories and being in a deficit never produced fat loss. Sure, it did when I had lots of weight to lose, but the smaller I became, the more impossible it was to shed fat. I'm probably at a point where I need to just eat. And eat enough calories and do enough heavy weight training to gain as much muscle as I possibly can. That's the only way my shape will improve and look the way I want it to look.

Right now, I'm skinny fat (although my family tries desperately to convince me it's just skinny....I know the reality). Because either I would be solely training with weights (yet eat like a dieter, trying to lose fat) or I would go through periods where I thought I needed more cardio because the weight training on it's own wasn't working. So I would start running daily. But all those years I spent weight training and dieting at the same time, I wasn't adding much muscle and the muscle I might have added got wasted away when I decided to add cardio to the picture. Of course I wasn't improving! I've been spinning my wheels and driving myself insane trying this, that and the other thing because I feel like nothing works for me. All this time, I just needed to eat and GAIN.

For the past two weeks I've let a lot slide. I haven't been killing myself in the gym and I haven't been sticking to any sort of diet. My family seems to be a lot happier about it. But I am not. My stomach hates me. It tells me daily. But I'm just giving myself a break from it all. A break from the obsession. A break from the constant worrying if what I'm doing is right or wrong. I am trying to live like a "normal" person until I figure out what my next goal is and how I'm going to achieve it. With the help of one terrific lady. If you happen to read this, you know who you are. And you have NO IDEA how grateful I am to you for trying to help me out.

So, while I will not have my perfect bikini body YET AGAIN for summer, I will not give up. I'm done with fat loss, I'm done with my timeline, I'm just going to switch it all off. Reset.