Over the last few months, I talked about a plan being in place and left out the details waiting for an opportunity to sit and type it all out. I will break the background into different sections, I think there are important issues to discuss and toss out there in case anyone else might benefit.

Here’s the catch up…

I am currently down 23 lbs from early January. I’m not totally sure when it “officially” started. This week I packed up my first bag of clothes from my closet that are too big and put them in storage. I am playing a continual game of pulling and tugging, trying to get my remaining pants to stay up throughout the day. As a result, the official launch of flip flop and skirt season came early this year. There is a very clear cut plan in place with concrete goals and currently things are going very well.

Before moving forward, it’s imperative to look back and reflect on the journey until now, no matter how unpleasant. So here we go!

The Rapid Deterioration As An Athlete

Life has been tremendously difficult the past several years and focusing on myself has not been high on the priority list. While both Competitive Edge Athletic Performance Center and Movement Guides have been tremendously successful, priorities quickly changed and life was turned upside down. The priority of me as an athlete moved dramatically down the list and I simply was going through the motions with training and competing when possible. This phase also accelerated my rapid deterioration. Loss of focus, limited time and other demands slowly chipped away at my training, performance and health. In response, my weight climbed, my issues with my knee accelerated and there were no gains. The rewards from training disappeared and training became a manifestation of consequences from not training holistically.

Let’s Rewind

Back in 2008 when I went to World Strongwoman Championship in Poland, I was rebounding from my lightest in my adult history. It was also my weakest point as a strongwoman athlete. I lost a significant amount of strength and it took far too long to regain the damage that was done. Somewhere along the line I thought it would be a great idea to go see The Fat Doctor. Keep in mind, I wasn’t as thin as I was as a teen but I was doing great in strongman and my added size served me well. Through the years I have learned that body weight is irrelevant, I use clothing size to make decisions. At that time I wanted to be skinny which meant a drop in two sizes maximum. Maybe I wanted to be jacked. I’m not totally sure but whatever my thought process was, it screwed me up for a long time to come.

The Fat Doctor

The Fat Doctor was by far one of the biggest mistakes I have made in my strongwoman career. I had it in my mind that I just wanted to get thinner. See, even identifying it as thinner rather than leaner indicates why this whole thing went wrong.

The snake oil they were selling was a 1200 calorie a day diet and phentermine. I was also training four days a week at that time, one of which was event day. My strength disappeared and I dropped 25 lbs within a few months. This is also the time I learned how to manipulate my body weight because I couldn’t do the program and it was killing me. So I had to find a way to play the game and still be accountable for either maintaining or losing a couple pounds per month at minimum. I knew all the games to get me by the monthly weigh in and lecture for not being able to stick with the program.

Over the months, I was becoming crazy. My temper was very short and I was not the mother I always thought myself to be. The slightest things would trigger me and send me over the edge. The only way I could hold the crazy together was to alternate the phentermine days. I was able to convince my doctor that 1700 calories was the bare minimum my performance could tolerate and that was nothing short of disaster. The mood swings weren’t formally identified as a side effect of the phentermine and I felt like my concerns were minimized.

Late one afternoon, I went in for my monthly check in after work. As what was emerging as a pattern at this point, I got the lecture for the slowly climbing numbers on the scale. We discussed what my diet looked like which fit into the macros outlined within the program +500 calories to attempt to support my training. We reviewed different programs to help me track my diet and the doctor pulled up hers for the day. She was reviewing her meals and sharing them to give me some ideas. I quickly glanced at the screen and saw 900 calories. Like a fatty strength athlete, I was impressed and complimented her on an impressive meal. I was quickly corrected that this was her diet for the DAY.

That was the final straw and I knew I had made a serious mistake. My training was too important to me and this plan was not yielding any success or rewards. Actually, many negative consequences manifested, my crazy continued to escalate and I was in trouble. I stopped going to The Fat Doctor and within a very short period of time, my weight rebounded and added another thirty pounds basically overnight.
After many, many months of frustration with the entire situation, I continued to train and move forward as best as I could. Things continued to deteriorate and it was obvious something had to change. I started to educate myself and calculate what options were available to get my training back on track and continue my pursuit of strength.

Part 2 is posted. You can read the second installment here.