A Perfect Example of How Too LIttle Food Makes You Way Too Lippy

Disclaimer: This blog is all about competition prep. If you aren’t interested in this topic, for the love of Pete close it down and get on with your life.

Holy hell – 5 sleeps and it’s here!! Finally here!! Can hardly believe that it’s arrived and I’m so incredibly excited. Bullet point time!! Here’s what I am most excited about;

• Embarking on a holiday with my beautiful little family – we are staying on for a week in a unit on the beach at Coolangatta – enough said!! Woohoo!!
• Having my most favourite friends in the world (excluding one that can’t make it ..sob sob) there with me during the comp; Michelle, Candice, Racheal, Kieran…Ingrid, Renata, Ji and Stoj – couldn’t ask for a better support crew – I know I’m incredibly lucky, and I try never to forget it.
• Competing is pretty darn good fun. Especially at this point because I have absolutely nothing in the world to lose and anything to gain. I have never competed in anything international and never really thought I would so that’s exciting in itself.
• I would be lying through my hungry teeth if I didn’t say that the post-comp dinner is something to be well and truly excited about. I have studied restaurants, menus and distances for me to waddle back to our unit. It’s all under control and I have great expectations that it will taste excellent. When people say comments like, “Oh but your poor little tummy will be so sore after so long of being on a diet”, it reinforces to me that this person knows me not at all. I have a guts of caste iron. I can cope with pretty much anything. Once, on the way back from Brisbane, I thought it a good idea to cook one of the sachet rice things and eat half the rice on the way to the airport then tuck the rest into my hot little handbag. I ate the other half during the flight home and by the time we landed in Darwin, I had clearly given myself a touch of food-poisoning (very easy to do with cold rice I found out later). I was literally writhing in pain in the car and felt queasier than I had ever felt before (excluding early years alcohol indulgence episodes). It took the whole 3 hour car trip home to come right and, by the time we pulled into the driveway I was all ready to eat again. And eat I did! Rob was impressed. Being the opposite it would have put him off food for at least the rest of the day.

So that’s the nutshell of excitement I have going on. It actually keeps me awake at night and I got up at 5.30am the other morning and had a swim to calm myself down.

The other big thing I am seriously looking forward to is being off competition prep. As previously harped on about, I have been on this train since April. I am over it. Seriously over it. I want to eat with my family and indulge in scrumptious foods and forget about the content. I want to plan my training and smack out some new goals without any pressure at all to perform. I have written and scribbled and planned and strategized all of the things I want to achieve next and I’m rip snortin ready to get cracking!!

So let’s talk the last couple of weeks. As I said to a friend of mine the other day – hunger and fatigue have led me to the truth-tree and I must speak what hangs on my mind. But first off, a reflection of what’s happened to my body.

• I arrived home from Hobart quite happy with my condition but very perturbed about my inability to drop that last 1.2kg. I sat on 58.2 for so long that I even went and got a new scale battery in case the damn thing was playing up. It wasn’t.
   
  I felt that my food was lower that I wanted it, my training was high but very half-arsed due to lack of food. I was not a happy camper and did not think I could make another 3 weeks in that condition. I told Ingrid and we put our heads together and she came up with a plan that I had freedom to tweak.
   
  We added carbs. We changed training splits to something truly radical. I decided on HIITS every 2^nd day and not a minute more than 25m. No steady state. No cardio sneaking into other training. Nothing fasted. Just honest sessions fuelled by more food. Prior to leaving Hobart I had a disproportionately large dinner after the comp – plenty of cheese and some bread to boot! Heaven. We also added in another day of food-relaxation and some red meat and fruit along with rest time.
   
  I came home and upped those carbs. Relished in the new tastes and thrived on having something sweet. I worked really hard in my training with the extra food – it was infinitely easier than the laborious sessions I had been doing. On a specific night I had a generous re-feed. Very generous. No penance cardio!!! Just the scheduled sessions of 25m every second day.
   
  Wait for this. Wait for it. This morning I weighed in at 54.5kg. Only 3.7kg down in 2 weeks. Who does that? How does that happen? How do you increase food, decrease training and drop fat like a mad-woman!! I am simply amazed at myself. Amazed at the changes. Amazed at how shredded I feel. And my mirror and training sessions would indicate I haven’t dropped muscle size to any great degree. I am lifting weights that I lifted prior to the final 12 weeks.
   
  Massive, massive learning curve.
   
  Ok – so here’s the last thing. While on comp prep I have become quite sensitive to the various strategies and positions on the crux of female prep – dropping weight while maintaining health and muscle. I have just given you my very honest experience. I can say that I experienced the gut-wrenching pressure of the scale weight looming at me every week. The feeling of not achieving what I set out to and paying the consequences by competing in a category that I did not want to compete in. Twice. Sure it all worked out in the end, but my mind didn’t register the bigger picture, just the weight snapshot and it sucked. Truly sucked.
   
  Now I can say that fat-loss is almost too easy this week and I’m adding more grams of carbs in an effort to keep it on. It’s so much more fun on this end of the stick!!
   
  But while riding this wave, I have come to detest the self-righteousness of some opinions. I believe the condition of my body means my sensitiveness to certain things is heightened. I admit this is one of them, but it has played on my mind so much that I am going to blurt it out.. in my way… bullet points; 

• The way you start out thinking you’ll prep may not be the way you end up actually prepping. Grand ideas of eating text-book foods and never over-doing the exercise, not even considering a fasted-cardio session or multiple gym visits in a day – whatever!!! When you are committed to a goal and you’ve been single-focused for around 4.5 months, you’ll find yourself open to ideas that once you would have balked at. Get over yourself, do some research and decide whether it’s worthy of a try or not – but don’t reject it purely based on stubborn self-righteousness. And there’s only one thing worse than a prepper with that attitude and that’s a non-prepper who chimes in with their own self-righteous angle on what another is doing in a terribly judgemental way. Rack off.
• The list of ‘naughty foods’ just grows doesn’t it! Clean and dirty. Good and bad. Ok and naughty. For fucks sake people, if a bit of chewy and a fake sugar or 6 gets people through a lean day, button up and let them have it. If an opinion is wanted it will surely be asked for. But seriously…. Those of us who wouldn’t give up our Extra without a fight to the death, we don’t give a flying rats crap whether you think it’s going to undo the last 18 months of hard work (as if?!!!! Simply ridiculous!!) or not. We can research for ourselves and that looming stick of judgement just spurs me to chew louder. Or I might ask you just how clean your protein powder is. Or remark on your many pictures of supposedly “naughty” foods and how you constantly justify your choices.
• I never once pretended to be a poster-child for health and fitness. And I'm certainly glad I haven't plastered Facebook with my one-eyed views on food because I can tell you that I've changed. My view and opinions are based on my experiences and those of my trusted friends. I won't bore you with the details because I might change again in the future. That's what I call being human.
• Again – in my humble opinion, the judgement of food has gotten way, way out of control.

 I am lucky to have a coach who listens to me. We don’t always agree. But she listens and she cares and she is very willing to make changes based on my responses. I love that about her. She doesn’t judge me. She saw me chewing my Extra like a heifer in Hobart and not once did she call me up on it. Not once. Why? Because I’m me. I’m Kirsten. I don’t comp prep like you. I don’t want to. I have different thresholds and my body reacts differently to yours. I don’t care for your opinions at this stage because I’ve already invested 18 months with someone who knows their shizzle. I am also intelligent and can research my own facts and, based on what I find, I either make change or I don’t. And that’s just how I like it.

 Wow. I think I need a regular input of “naughty" food to help me calm the heck down!”