Thursday, 6 Jul 2006
Kyra posted on June 28 in her Muscletank diary about the difficulty of dieting for what boils down to purely aesthetic reasons when one is already in great cardiovascular condition with plenty of lean mass.
You are only 5-20 lbs away from goal. You are strong. You run on the treadmill while others plod along at 3.0 mph. You fit into a retail size 8 or less.
But you can’t seem to dredge up the focus to eat clean and low enough for those last 4-12 weeks to be truly jiggle-free and magazine cover ready.
Why is that?
My sister and I call this “good enough and better than most” syndrome. Another word for it is complacency. We both suffer from it to a minor degree.
It’s hard to motivate yourself to go for those last few pounds just for the sake of aesthetics when you are fitter and trimmer than 99% of the people around you, and the world just keeps getting wider, slower, and more out of shape. When you think about it, all you have to do is maintain the status quo, and in less than five years the rest of the world will have gotten so fluffy that you WOULD be mistaken for a figure competitor just in contrast to Mr. and Mrs. Average Citizen of Western Civilization.
Both of us are driven by competition, primarily with males. Carolyn told me today that she was at her leanest when she was hanging out mostly with guys who universally sported six packs and spent 2 hours a day in the gym. I got to the point where I could do 80+ pushups in a row without stopping because I was outnumbered 10 to 1 in the Army by guys.
Sad to say, but other women are not nearly as motivating because the ones around me either aren’t in shape at all and do nothing to get that way, or *are* trying but never seem to make any progress (maybe because they are suffering from the same syndrome).
There are a handful of guys at work who workout and eat like I do–literally 5, haha–but none of the other three women do. And of those men, only two or three are as driven as I am. Everyone else in the company is content to take whatever genetics, a sedentary lifestyle, and lots of take out food gives them in terms of physiques–either big and broad with a belly, or skinny limbed with a belly. 
Given these circumstances, I sometimes feel that there’s no real REASON or competition around to get me going, you know? And no, I have zero interest in competitive sports of any kind, especially running any distances greater than 5k.
I guess that’s why contests like the EAS Body for Life and other transformation challenges are useful–to give people that extra goal or boost to essentially go beyond good health and into the realm of exercise and diet for the sake of aesthetics.
The only problem for people like us who have progressed beyond that initial challenge or two and have made this a lifestyle in truth is that we no longer dream about winning the big prize or quite believe that it can be done in the 12 week block of time allotted. We’ve all gotten good results in 12 weeks, but we didn’t look like the early BFL champs of old (not the watered down versions of recent years) after three months of following the program religiously, so we become skeptical and a little jaded. With more research and experience, we know it will take a lot more cardio, much more lean mass development and a lot less food for the woman of average genetics to look like a figure model than Bill Phillips would ever admit to, and one year or more after the initial beginner’s zeal, the single-minded mania needed to do that extra cardio and give up the much-loved, unauthorized treat completely for 12 weeks has left us.
That’s where my head has been this past year or so, especially when work has gotten busy.
But I think I’m tired of putzing around the upper teens in body fat and never quite reaching my goal. I am willing now to suck it up, do the cardio, keep on lifting, and go to bed a little hungry for a few months. I don’t care if other people tell me I should live a little and indulge. I don’t care that I’m going to be working 80 hours a week quite soon.
I’ve got my challenge packets from BFL and Instone in hand, and I’m sending in “before” photos this Saturday because these are the bare, unvarnished facts:
- Twelve weeks is NOT forever.
- I am not entitled to eat whatever I want after 7:30 pm just because I workout daily and am in better shape than nearly all of the women I see on the street
- All that yummy Chinese home cooking and Kashi Go Lean I want now will still be there when I reach goal and will be mine once more when I am bulking
- I have to prove I can tear it up in a 12 week challenge for under $40 a week so I can thumb my nose at all of the whiners whose only real problem is not wanting it badly enough and say, “I told you so!”.
- I only have to drop 11 pounds to be at 12% body fat and hit my goal. Eleven…measly…pounds. Not 25, not 50, not 100. Eleven. A pittance of poundage. Six to ten weeks–tops–of steady, consistent, focused effort.
It would be straight up silly to stop now just for the sake of a bowl of noodles or a brownie, don’t you think?
So who’s with me?
