8 days left until the 2010 NPC National Fitness Championships! 5 days until we will fly out and I am counting down the minutes! I am a little sad to say that this time I will venture out without my son, Sean. My husband and I are so grateful to know he will be spending a whole week with our dear friends Kelly and Mike and their beautiful girls, Malia and Kayla. Malia and Sean are such close friends! They will have a blast camping and playing together and Sean is looking so much forward to it! We will miss having him with us to share every moment of our journey while there, but we will be happy to know he will be having a great time.
I flew back from Chicago after competing in the NPC Jr. Nationals on June 19th, Father’s Day, 12 days ago. On that Sunday, I enjoyed a some Italian gelato and yummy pizza, but on Monday I got straight back on my diet. Our plan? Get back into the same diet and cardio as I was on three weeks out from Jr. Nationals for 3 to 4 days and, after that, re-evaluate my physique and adjust both diet and cardio accordinely.
Well, as expected, by Thursday last week, my body had shedded the little spill over from the off diet food and more! So we took measures with both nutrition and training in order to keep me full, maintain balance and not become too lean! As it turns out I have not been doing cardio at all! Shawn tripled my fat intake for a couple of days and I continued to wake up leaner. Incredible proof that what he always says, “fat in does not equal fat on,” is true. Since I continued to drop weight, we added simple sugars early in the morning in the form of blueberries. The fructose in the berries gets processed in the liver, which turns off cortisol (the catabolic hormone that is responsible for breaking down muscle tissue).
Cutting cardio has left me with so much time available during the day that I am not used to that I have no dirty laundry to wash. I was able to wash even those left over blankets from the winter months today instead of doing my HIIT! I am all packed, twice I have to say. I decided to unpack a couple of things a repack them a little neater, like my suits for example. I found these cute cases shopping (yes, I am also shopping a little!) to store my two piece and my routine outfit! Silly, I know, but it is such a great feeling to me and so unusual not to have to work so hard. I guess all that hard work is paying off and I am now enjoying some of the profits of it. I better enjoy it now while it lasts!
The intensity at witch I practice my routine has not changed though – I actually increased it. I am certain that one of the reasons why I don’t need to do cardio is that I have intensified my routine practice so much that it is like running high intensity circuit training, causing me to burn fat as if I were doing HIIT on the treadmill. I have been running my routine pretty much every day since I got back. 3 full-outs on average just about every day. Today I actually took a day off from routine runs to rest my legs. My quadriceps were feeling a little exausted. I had the pleasure of lifting some dumbbells as I trained shoulders and chest. It felt good to see my upper body is staying full as my legs are continuing to get smaller!
After resistance training I worked on posing for 15 to 20 minutes and, with Shawn’s help, I made some minor changes to my front pose. It is a little easier to practice right after a show when I have fresh images of myself in mind. The best practice is ultimately that which we achieve while on stage competing; this is one of the reasons why I compete!
I have made couple of fun changes to my routine music and FedEx envelope and I look forward to surprising everyone again! I am finding out a lot of my fitness friends will be coming to NJ, some to compete, some to just watch and to offer support. I am looking forward to meeting them all again and to strengthen our friendships some more. To me competing is also about building these types of relationships with women who, like me, are passionate about fitness, bodybuilding in general, and a healthy and fit lifestyle.