wow. Thanks you guys!
I must say, it certainly has been quite challenging balancing aesthetics with performance. I suppose this is not a bad maintenance look year round. I am usually within 10lb of competition weight from either end. I'll put on ten pounds for the platform and drop 10lb for the mat. Some minor manipulations to cardio and diet and I can be ready for shoots, video, etc...After my meets, I am literally back down to maintenance weight in 3 days tops..I do not touch diruetics or water pills or do a water drop of any kind. Just good ol food and the magic you can do with the most minuscule of changes. I have even made some remarkable changes to my physique by trying new unconventional dieting approaches that have been working like a charm for me. I've seen more changes in my physique in the past 6 months than I have in 10 years. Maybe I'm just getting old.
My legs are far ahead my upper body in terms of development and balancing out my physique is something that might not happen in the near future considering the nature of my training and my priorities.
I am trying to wear a belt more often than I used to to aleviate the chances of my waist getting any wider. My back has a lot of thickness and could use a little more width for a better taper considering there really is not much I can do to make my waist any smaller besides maybe sacrafice some muscle mass all over, to shave it down a bit...which I am certainly not willing to do. So I will try and wear things that are flattering for my body type, like corsets and waist cinchers, tight skirts, exposed back and shoulders.
As abnoxious as many people might find my implants, they fit my body perfectly. Notice I do not have a 6" gap between them and having them over the muscle does not take away from my pec development, especially when the implant sits more naturally and gives me a lot of cleavage, which I have always had before bodybuilding. Afterall, I am 57" around the shoulders and a large implant was necessary to achieve the look I was going for. I had no desire to look like a toned barbie doll with perfect perky lil tittis. I wanted to look like a bohemoth muscle bound porn star of cartoonish proportions. haha.
I have not trained biceps in almost a year. I cannot clean Olympic Style with big arms and so I have had to lay off the arm training completely and settle for my sad 17.5" bieceps. They get worked in all heavy pulling motions though. I have not been updating my training journal often because quite honestly I've been in limbo and have had some problems with my training that I will not get into in this thread.
Its a process. I guess that's more the point I intended to make in this thread. The slower the process the more likely you are to achieve the results you seek without having to deal with a lifestime of unecessary consequences. When I was a little girl, my friends in school would always make fun of me. I remember it like it was yesterday...they would mumble under their breath and make fun of the size of my legs...yes...I was born an 11lb baby with probably 5lbs in my legs and 6lb in brains. At least now with the tits we have a healthier balance. See! I was developing that master scheme in utero! lol
Even my father hated my legs..he would drag me out of bed at the early age of 9 and throw me out in the cold to run 3 miles up a hill in a sweat suit thinking that would shave some of the size off them...but to his utter dismay, they kept getting bigger and bigger and evertime I got on the scale I panicked because I was hung up on numbers and did not know any better back then. I was a child having to go to school with carrots and palmito when my friends had sandwiches, juices and candy. It was to the point that one of my classmates mothers in 1st grade would pack double sandwiches for her daughter so that she could share them with me. And everyday I looked forward to seeing Nancy and going through her lunchbox to find my share of food.
The point is...I have never felt good about my physique, much like many bodybuilders really...I know the roots of my issues with food and they go back decades. And now 20 years later, bodybuilding rituals are a regular part of my lifestyle. I have been dieting since I was 6 and was under constant pressure to look a certain way by my family and my peers. That was the direct result of my eating disorder in my early teens, and the struggles I have had with my self image.
It wasn't until I learned to love who I was and learned how to use my assets to my benefit to maximize my potential as a genetically blessed athlete, that I tapped into a world of infinite possibilites and realized that other people's opinions did not define who I was. Just because the people in my life who mattered the most did not approve of my choices, did not mean they would love me any less. All I had to do was believe in myself and be proud of my accomlishments. I've shed sweat, blood and tears to make it to where I am today.
It is also probably the anorexic model thread that GM posted a few days ago that got me thinking about how far many of us women have come, each of us fighting her own battles, in her own way, for the very same cause.
And that is true preseverance.
Tammyp said sh ewould like to walk down the street with me just to see people's reactions to me...Believe me when I tell you I have never felt like I have ever stood out in a crowd. Not once have I ever been approached in the gym by anyone who wanted to ask me a single question about my training. I've grown oblivious to stares and I do not think anyone is ballsy enough to say somthing insulting, loud enough to where I could hear it. So frankly, that has made me very introverted and besides my training partners on both my teams, I have nothing even remotely resembling a social life. But...I am not consumed with lonliness like I used to be. Being with me is not so bad. I like me. Plus I have BI and my mother who are very supportive of me, and of course all you people who always make me feel good about myself, which is something I do not feel too often. I wish more of us lived in the same cities...God knows I have not had a female training partner in years. I literally had to put an ad out to find a female willing to train/spar with me.
So yes, we are different. We accpet it as a result of choices we've made. And the more comfortable we are with our choices, the happier we are with the women our circumstances mold us into.
Thank you for being my brothers and sisters.
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