Have you ever lacked confidence?

How about been bullied or made fun of because of your weight or the way you look?

Real Talk. Have you ever HATED your body?

Me too.

My whole life I grew up extremely active in sports ranging from soccer, softball, swimming, cheerleading, you name it. With so many physical activities on my agenda, you’d think I’d have had a pretty awesome physique right? Not exactly.

I can’t say I was ever obese or technically “over weight”, but what I can say is that I was not happy with my own body growing up (just like every other teenage girl). I never had a “flat stomach”, always put the weight on there the easiest and never understood what to do about it. Eventually I decided that was my body type and there was really nothing I could do about it (wrong).

When I got to college I decided to try out for the Wichita State Cheer Squad. I was nervous about not making it due to the lack of a “flat stomach” so, I basically stopped eating. This lasted for an entire summer before tryouts in the fall….and ya know what? It worked. I lost weight and I made the cheer squad.

But the problem was I couldn’t continue to eat this way forever. Eventually I was going to have to get myself back on a regular diet (whatever I thought that consisted of at the time). I tried to eat “healthy” by incorporating things like yogurts, granola, fruit etc. I stayed away from fast food entirely..except for the too often trips to Orange Leaf with my roommates (frozen yogurt is healthy right?). Also, I can’t forget about the typical college phase where my friends and I thought we were being cool and smart by saving our calories for alcohol (seriously, what was I thinking?).

It only took about a semester for me to gain all that weight back and more. I destroyed my metabolism by going from not eating at all, to binge eating, back to not eating at all, and consuming too much alcohol. When I eventually started realizing I was headed down the wrong path, instead of cleaning up my diet I decided to start running. I started with running 1 mile multiple times per week and eventually increased that to every day. From there I increased to a couple miles at a time. I hated every second of it not only because I just simply hate running but especially because I was making zero progress.

It was the spring of 2011 when everything changed. When I did not remake the cheer squad as a returning veteran. I knew a large piece of it likely had to do with my weight gain, and that’s when I decided it was time for a change. I asked my boyfriend at the time (now husband) to teach me everything I needed to learn about proper nutrition and weight lifting (he was a competitive bodybuilder at the time).

It only took a couple months for my entire body composition to change. I honestly couldn’t believe how easy it all was…”if only I had started sooner“, I thought…

Over the next few months I followed Kyle around like a puppy dog learning more and more everyday about the weights and macros. It was 2012 when I decided I wanted to do something huge for myself – and that was to compete in my first bikini competition. That experience alone taught me more about my self discipline than I ever could have dreamed of (but that’s a whole other story I’ll elaborate on later). That’s also when I decided to get my training certification, so that I could pass on the knowledge and help others learn and accomplish what I had. At the end of the day, it wasn’t “just my body type” after all, and I couldn’t have been happier to learn that I had the power to do whatever I set my mind to.

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