Back to Monday. Oh sweet Monday. I went out of town this weekend, and I can definitely say that it was one of the best weekends I have had in a long time! Filled with fun and activity. I can also say that I am definitely more tired than I have been in a long time as well.

My blog will be filled with a lot of guest posts this week as I am packing and moving into my own apartment. It’s such an exciting time in my life. Unfortunately, all this excitement leaves me with no time to blog. So, I hope you enjoy these guests post until I am able to be back to blogging on a regular basis.

Today’s guest post is from Becca over at I Heart Eggs.Oh Becca. How I love her? I met Becca a long time ago and she has been a wonderful friend ever since. I think she the funniest and most hardworking gal I know. I hope you enjoy her guest post!

When Lisa put a call out on Twitter for people to guest blog for her I jokingly tweeted back that I’d be happy to type her up something about eating egg whites and going to be at 8pm. Later on that day, she actually messaged me asking if I was serious, and if I was if I had any ideas.

Since I’ve already guest posted for Lisa before telling her “my story”…. And I’ve guest posted for others telling “my story”… I had to actually THINK of something to guest post about. Honestly, I’m a little bit sick of telling the same “hey everyone, I’m Becca and I used to be fat and now I’m not” story anyway, so I put my mind to work and came up with a good idea.

Taking public transit and doing cardio everyday gives me a lot of idle time to think and it’s often where I start thinking of ideas to blog about. Somehow between that conversation with Lisa and getting off the bus this morning this post came to me. While it actually made me a bit afraid to THINK about this part of myself, I’ve always said I blog because it’s my therapy. So here you go.

Lisa and I met several years ago on a fitness message board. We were both working with the same trainer trying to achieve similar results so we followed along in eachother’s journals, which turned into emails of encouragement and texts of support. While not trying to compete, Lisa has already gone over her reasons for why she took her fitness to the “extreme” so I won’t get into that, but what were my reasons? That’s a really good question.

I was in a program geared towards people who didn’t want to compete, but wanted to LOOK like they competed. For some reason I couldn’t bring myself to commit to competing. Why? I don’t know… fear maybe?

It certainly wasn’t lack of dedication to the program. Oh? My weight loss stalled? Let’s cut out this food group. Stalled again? Time to go to 7 days a week of cardio. For an hour a day.

No biggie right? I was “hardcore”. I wanted this.

That spring Lisa and I met up in New York City with another friend from the fitness forum, Marlo. I was deep into my training at that point and scared to death of being away from my bubble for 5 days. Packing my “healthy” food and being sure we got to the gym every.single.day was an obsession for me. On our first night there we went to a fantastic Chinese restaurant. While everyone else enjoyed a variety of foods I ordered a salad, internally freaked out when there was noodles on it and wished I was like everyone else. Carefree and enjoying the delicious food put in front of me.

Going on that trip was the beginning of the end for me. I truly believed that following this program to a “T” would “cure” me of my food issues. Having the freedom to choose my foods to fit into my macros was going to be GREAT right? …. Well yeah, until the list of approved foods was ten items long. If I could stick to this program, be strict and really buckle down I’d be better, I’d never want to binge again, I’d never restrict my foods.

I’d be lean, mean, fit and magically love myself.

Only I wasn’t. I was miserable. Thoughts of food became unbearable. All I wanted to do was cheat and binge, but that led to the vicious cycle knowing that if I DID that, I’d then restrict, over exercise and try and “fix” the mistakes I had made. I was no longer working towards competing because I WANTED to. I was doing what I was told to do, convincing myself it was for the right reasons…. but it wasn’t.

So like Lisa, I quit the program. I went at it on my own. I mean, I’ve done every diet out there, read the books, done the research. How hard could it be to cure all these self imposed diet rules and regulations I put on myself?

I tried it all, bootcamps, taking up running, no diet, full on diet. Nothing worked. I was a mess inside (and out). After 8 months of this trainwreck called my life I started emailing with my current trainer Joe. We emailed for a week. I stepped back and really thought about it. Was I going to put myself back into the situation I had just “freed” myself from?

I was. January 7^th, 2010 I started prepping… For real… for my first figure competition.

I told myself (and ANYONE who would listen) that this time it would be different. Joe doesn’t restrict foods, I wasn’t going to put myself in a bubble, I was going to be sane and smart about dieting this time around.

And somehow I stayed true to that.

Deciding this would be my fresh start, I was going to get it together, put the past behind me. It was time to stop playing the “I used to be fat and now I’m messed up card”. I had started and stopped so many things because I couldn’t COMMIT. This time I did it. Not only did I have to prove to myself that yes I could follow something I started to the end, but I felt like I had to prove to everyone that I could, and I could be SANE and healthy about it.

And something clicked. I don’t know how or why, but it clicked.  I don’t fear food anymore. I haven’t binged in well over a year. I went through, and enjoyed, three preps back to back last year. I transitioned into my offseason without rebounding. I gained a mere ten pounds and felt amazing… physically, but most importantly mentally.

Since Lisa and I ended our relationship with the trainer, we have both found our way by taking very different paths. We both found a happy place and now enjoy our workouts and food. She is relaxed and listening to her body.

What about me?  I found my happy place by finally following through on a long held dream of competing. Once I finally realized that competing wasn’t going to fix my issues, I worked on myself while training to compete. I learned to separate my self-worth from my body and it’s changed my life in so many ways.

Sure, I still choose to eat egg whites, I still choose to go to bed at 8 or 9 pm most nights so I can get up at 5am to get my cardio over with but the key word all of that is I CHOOSE to do this. I don’t do it because I have to or I’m told to. I do it because I love how I feel, I love my lifestyle and myself. It’s a crazy feeling that even ten pounds heavier than I was on stage I loved myself. Yes I was soft, yes I was heavier, but that didn’t mean I was less of a person, that people would like me less. It meant I was working towards my goal of growing physically before competing again.

The ability to  commit to competing followed through in other aspects of my life. I committed to, and ran, two races with my sister in law. I started my blog and rediscovered my long lost love for writing. I found myself drawn to my family because I no longer feared them finding out about my eating issues. I no longer feared being single and alone making a self imposed “break from boys” was a welcome change instead of a sad and fearful time. Finally I had a life that I wasn’t afraid of, I was ready to jump head first into anything and everything that came my way.

So there you have it. I turned a joke about an egg white and 8pm bedtime blog post into a post about why I now choose to live the life I do. A life where I love myself, my health and my drive to keep competing and achieving my goals.

Thank you so much Becca! If you like Becca (and cmon, why wouldn’t you) make sure to visit her at I Heart Eggs or on her twitter page.

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