Awaken The Athlete Intro 2

Transformation Comeback  

A pro Athletes Journey: management of an ED (Eating Disorder)

In continuation to yesterdays blog post, after my first encounter with anorexia I journeyed through fitness for my recovery. I had seen a Fitness Pageant on ESPN and decided I wanted to do that routine round! I was ok with the physique round with look of the fitness competitor although never planned on achieving the pro level fever.  I wasn't so excited about the beauty portion, lacking confidence there, and was never a 'make up frew frew' girl.

What I wanted was to perform, dust off my gymnastics and dance which I had to quit as a kid due to my health. I was ready to take this on and find my fit in my mid 20's!

At this point I was introduced to some asthma medications that allowed me the freedom of exercise without attacks. I had the asthma under control for the first time in my life. I felt like a caged animal, freed!
I trained, competed, tried it all, every diet, every category, every federation and learned so much!
Immediately I was recruited into fitness modeling, magazine appearances and photo shoots.

My goals changed and as I achieved, I wanted more! I won trophies and Pro cards throughout the ranks, federations and different categories but Fitness was always my main drive. The rest was for fun. Sometimes If I had an injury I would try another physique category so I could keep competing and learning yet competing in something less agile as fitness, such as Figure or Bodybuilding.

I had the normal stuff like sprained fingers, toes, wrists, shoulder and groin issues, blew my knees and had them both reconstructed, but in 2009 after a few years of nagging my doctor, he finally took me seriously and discovered I had osteoarthritis in my neck and lower back. It had crippled me for a year or so and I was not sure I would ever come back. I kept working on it with acupuncture, deep tissue massage, fascia massage and different types of chiropractic. Over a couple years I had eliminated the chronic pain. A few car accidents in between all this did not help. Of course the osteo will react if I do not care for it properly and work with it but you can still be almost normal and do what you like athletically if you work with the body rather than force or fight it…….a lesson I learned from always being the force and fight type.

I went on to coach athletes, judge and host a few competitions myself.

Personal training was also born after my initial recovery and grew fast from 1993 onward, while working with medical practitioners and their patients, injuries, health issues, athletes and everyone in between. This was what I was meant to do, it came easy and naturally. I loved it and enjoy the outcome of positive results with everyone I am blessed to work with. Empowering others and watching them achieve things they did not think they could and may have never tried, that is the best part of my job. This knowledge also gave me the power over my better health.

Anorexia can come in different forms, eating disorders in general have many faces. Anorexia for me has been starvation, weight loss to extreme and then trying to put it back on after recovery, while training your system how to eat, digest and process food again. This can be painful for me with the other issues involved and I lose fast and easy with a very high metabolism, so gaining has been especially difficult this second time around. This time the starvation was over a period of 3 years up an down but mostly down. Again a death was the trigger. I had a short bought after my first dog had passed in 2003 but it was 3 months and I clued in fast and recovered fast. This time, there was a lot of factors involved which lasted during these 3 years.  It left me unable to find enough of a break in time from the stress to grasp anything but a few better days, before being blasted again with extreme stress. This gradually broke my system down to undernourishment.

Up until 2012 I would keep an avg weight of 125lb fit and lean to 135lb 18-20% body fat. I was 129lbs lean in the beginning of 2012 and came into my best comp season ever even with the beginnings of this 3 year drama, a fully blown knee and having to leave town several times for my safety.

I had found myself this past summer at 105lb, my dog Diva had cancer for over a year, needing progressively more and more hands on care until she passed on April 1st 2015.  I struggled through 2015 trying to gain, trying to eat again, now that the stresses were over and gone from around me. But mentally and emotionally I was still trapped and had a few heartaches along the way which worsened things.

So here I am. Over the past few months, with a lot of '2 lbs up, 4 more down' type of days…….I managed to get myself back up to 117lbs on avg. I tried to do some easy training though the summer of 2015 but no matter what I tried or how mild I worked out, I would drop 2 lbs the next day. I had to back off a little bit longer until I could hold my weight. 

I need to train to get the eating on track but holding weight at the same time, that’s the trick now.
This is a little bit new to me since my experiences in the past had never run this long.
First the trick was to get food down, convince my body to keep it and hope for no pain. This was my summer and most of my fall for 2015.  This is still prevalent.

I am now at the cusp to move forward and decided to share since its like starting over in a sense, something we are all familiar with.  Maybe some of you are in a same starting or restart point so why not join me?

Tomorrow I am going to talk about 'the plan'.  How I will be using my fitness goals to inspire my action, improve my health issues, heal my mental / emotional state, reversing some of the effects and damages, my plan of attack and what works for me. 

The end results and my present body atm is very common to being unfit in general with: loose skin, muscle loss, poor body composition and shape, saggy triceps and glutes, loose thighs, but I will get into this and the other things tomorrow. 

Awaken The Athlete Intro

Welcome to my newest blog series, I'm inspired to write it and hoping it inspires you in some way.

There's 2 main reasons I wanted to share this.  One is that being a trainer I get to see first hand all the various fitness blockages people go through with things in life or whatever it may be.  I know that many of you can relate, even if your story details differ.  The overall idea of finding strength is a common thread among us.  The other reason is to show you that you may be short changing yourself and capable of more than you give yourself credit for.  In pushing my clients and myself I have seen many people think those who achieve certain goals have some special magic or genetics when in fact most people who think those goals are unreachable CAN also achieve these or similar goals .  I love it when a client says, 'I did not think I could do that, wow'.  That is why I do what I do!

My history is one of a girl who always wanted to do active things but usually could not or had to quit because of some health issues. 

My environment was not healthy, lots of extreme borderline behaviors around me plus stresses that are damaging to all areas of health especially in a child.  That became a lifelong exposure as it was family related.

Age 3 I started with chronic pneumonias but since Chronic Bronchial Asthma and 'allergy related asthmas' were still highly unknown, I went misdiagnosed until age 6.   My teeth rotted from the medications, and I spent months out of school either at home or in the hospital for most of my childhood even after I was diagnosed.

From age 6 to about 23 the drugs were all either band aids or experimental.  The theophylline destroyed my stomach, and I was regularly on prednisone.  I used my rescue inhaler Ventolin on avg 26 times per day.  This drug makes your heart work twice as hard as normal.  The prednisone is a catabolic steroid which destroys bone density and can be dangerous taken long term.  Your immune system lets the drug do the job and lowers itself until you get off it and immunity slowly restores.

I wanted to dance and join in on sports day and be able to race friends running down the block, but I paid dearly if I tried, losing breath to dangerous levels.

In my mid teens I had horrible weight gains from the prednisone and constant stomach discomforts from the theophylline.  This lead me into the world of vegetarianism, eating disorders and dieting.

The vegetarianism was an excellent area to learn and experience.  I never stopped since.

The dieting started with Dr. Scarsdale vegetarian diet or ideas from weight watchers but I had no idea what I was doing.  Of course this trial and error is what taught me over my lifetime but as a teen exposed to the trend of anorexia paired with my idea of feeling fat with no success in my first few attempts dieting, it was easy to lean toward starvation type dieting.  I never got into the purging trend.  I had enough trouble keeping food down with the stomach issues from the asthma drugs so purging came on its own!  It may have helped if someone told me the drug caused weight gain, water retention and so forth.

At 17 my father died, anorexia, starvation took over.  I had no appetite, nausea at the thought of food, so I didn't eat.  I think over the first few months after his death, a friend was taking me for a small order of fries each day to get something down.  My dad was my only ally in this lifetime and he was gone.

9 months later I had gone from 140lbs to 97lbs and puking blood.

By this point my stomach would never be the same and years later I would finally be diagnosed with IBS.

I lost the weight alright but was not happy with the left over, my body looked no better skinny!  My recovery began and over the next 2 years I not only learned the fit direction I learned what I was going to do for the rest of my life!  Eating regularly was the only way.  That in itself saved my life.

Check back tomorrow and daily over the next few weeks as I post more about where I am at with each days exercise and nutrition, sharing some great information, ideas and motivation! 

I will share with you how I was again triggered through loss and death, going from fittest ever to maybe the worse shape ever, and now recovering, this time from a longer run of starvation.  Working my way back and to a better version of my previous best! 

Watch me transform over the next 3 months, transform along with me!

Fats Aren't So Scary

Check out my latest article on Fats, a guest blog. 

http://www.holdfastiron.com/new-blog-1/2015/7/8/nrqc6hzin7sos47vbx4kzfd99swoif.

Track Cutter Workout Bodyweight Work

Workout Warriors, here is the last clip for the TCW series.  Once you master each clip individually you can put them all together for a killer workout and awesome results.
Now go kick some butt!!

Track Cutter Workout Jumps

The next exercises are jumps which burn fat, condition joints, connective tissue as well as muscle sculpting and muscle torque.
Use lower elevations for your box jumps until you get stronger and more confident then you can challenge yourself with higher jumps.
Ok Workout Warriors, have at it!

Track Cutter Workout Stair Sequence

The next clip in the Track Cutter Workout series to add onto the clips you have seen so far, is the stair sequence.  Most tracks have stadium stairs or some type of stairs available to you for this workout.

Here you utilize forward and backward running up and down stairs along with some double and single leg plyometrics work.  This gives you hamstring torque, and power, much more than sculpting, shaping and fat loss.  The benefits are many.  Ladies, the ham glute tie, which is where your butt cheek ends and thigh starts, is a trouble spot for most of us but these exercises help define this area giving you separation between the 2, lifting the cheeks and giving you great shape from lower back to thigh.  Butt implants are not needed when all you need to do is spend a bit of time working it out to get the same effect.  I found jump work to be what was most useful is giving my hamstrings and glutes muscle which give you shape and curve.

Take your time with this, and be surprised at what a great workout to the body, challenge to the lungs and your body awareness.  Have fun with this.
Don't be afraid to use those hand rails until your balance and backwards movements improve.
Time to try out the stair sequence Workout Warriors!  Have at it.

Track Cutter Workout Stretches

These are some stretches that you should do after your sets and exercises throughout this TCW series.
Pay attention to the form, the hips and alignment, hold each stretch for 30-60 seconds.  Feel the stretch but don't push to discomfort.
This will minimize soreness, bring blood to the muscles which carry oxygen and help removed the lactic acid build up from the 'burn'.
Take your time, this is part of the workout so don't neglect it.  Have at it Workout Warriors!