SORRY BAD ENGLISH.
Good morning! Monday and new challanges, new progress pictures and new oppoturnities.
Images like this, maybe create alot of thoughts..opinions.. maybe even less respect.
As I said before and I say again and again, to make it clear. I’m not the best role model. I am myself. I’m over my body anxiety. I am over the times that I stare at the mirror, searching for every flaws. I’m over it. Otherwise I would not be able to keep up with the sport I do now. Compete in bikini fitness.
It requires enormous self-discipline and to keep your head high, both before and after the competition. What the judges is judging, is not everything. It’s not about what the judges think or anyone else thinks about your body that you should care about, it is how you see yourself, how you feel. And when you no longer care so much and don’t spend all your time thinking about it, that’s when your body image is changes, hopefully forever.
When you accept yourself, your body. You simply forget the anxiety. There are so many other things in life, so why throw away so much time to worry about how your body looks like. When you understand that… everything becomes so much easier. When you are in this world when you hate your body, it can be hard to understand that there actually is normal people without body anxiety. There is. And… As with everything, you need to stop listening to the anxiety. Working it away * (read more down) It does not mean you need to be happy, to love and enjoy your body and think that it’s perfect.. It means that you need to learn to accept it and move on. When I reached that…. it was a freedom I never wanted to let go.
When someone (friend) started talking about her body and how disgusting it was, I got soooo angry and just wanted to yell at her and tell them so much how stupid those thoughts are and when I was finally free from them I did not want to hear or feel or have to do with anything with bodyhate anymore. “Why can’t everyone just put down that shit” xD… I just wanted to enjoy the food we ate or the workout we trained. Because that when we ate/trained, that was usually when someone started to complain about their body. Ofc… Alot of people don’t actually mean anything serious about it, but I took it seriously…after several years of my struggle against the body.
So to compete in bikini fitness is not the wisest thing. Because usually it’s alot about the body weight, body fat and staring in the mirror trying to find the perfect posing angles. But as I said, I have overcame the anxiety. I do’nt take it so seriously anymore. I do not see the bikini fitness as a body- or beautycompetition. I see and feel and experience it like this: hard (both lovely and painful) workouts in the gym, sweatparties, healthy foods & mealprepping, meet other people with same interests, get new friends, to have fulltime job.. and to have fun, throughout the journey there.
To weigh me or stand in lingeries don’t give me any emotions anymore. Neither fear, joy, other energy, its probably because after so many years of experience in both the model country and the eating disorder..so much energy you put on the need to be perfect. Now fuck I let it be like it is. OK if it’s not good enough, I can not be bothered anymore. I’m fine as I am. I try my best and that’s enough. There will be days I can have performance anxiety more or less and not feel good enough compared to others. But compared with myself, I’m still a hero. I should not even compare myself, why should I, but I sometimes do, thankgod not everyday. But still It comes days I feel like a worse person than others !?!?!? That is something I really need to work on.
So….To compete in this is of course for the sake of love for the sport and a lifestyle that I enjoy, but as I said, it still requires much. To go over the limit and challenge yourself, practice a lot of posing and trying to get better all the time, to follow a strict food- and workout schedule and often you need to go on a hard diet before the competition. I just need to honestly say that right now, (and the competitions before) I focused only on experience, the joy, the journey there … not on the winning or to be the best. I did not train on the posing so much and I cheated often on both food and training schedule. I’m a pretty casual person who does not take everything so seriously. Sometimes there will be periods that holy shit my motivation to win all shit home is going on, and I want to challenge myself and go 100% straight into the goal. But so also the bad days when I can not be bothered, and with my experience, I have to always choose the health first, whether it is good or bad for the competition. I still want me to feel good. Both in my body and soul. So it is a mix of what I do now, trying to keep calm and to now have so much stress or performance requirements, thats when you start loving what you do and not put so much thinking about what you need to do or why you do it and how you do it, if you do it good enough etc…
May people can think or say what they want, that I am a weak person or whatever but I know how hard I work on this and I always do my best but I also know that there are times I choose to rest my head and body extra. It is probably the difference between winners and “losers” in competitions. But for me, a competition is not just a competition. It is about how I feel, I want to feel strong, cheerful and happy. I want to stand there and remember the journey as a good memory.
But I also have the enormous competitive person in me, but I think I’ll take later, when I really am ready to go all in, but first: life, me, the freedom, the sport as a love. And building muscle is ofc a change of the body, but it’s not something I need and must have, it’s more like a reward or something that would be a happy thing to have,something fun to look forward to, because when you put on more weights (the love feeling) thats when you gain muscles, so It is like beeing promoted at your job or something lol 😀 ! If I compete or not, I am still as good as I am anyway! You too! Also, the feeling and love to put more the weights in the gym on offseason is twice or hundred times more wonderful feeling than to put less and lighter weights on the diet haha…
Some people tell me that “of course when you have a body like that with no fat, you don’t have anxiety” But wtf, all the pictured I put on instagram is not how I look from day to night. Do I put pictures of me when I have my bad days? Nah not so often. So honestly, I actually have worse days. On days when I feel too thin or even when I can feel “anorexic” (as I talked about before) and days when I feel swollen, tired, extra waterweight, almost “big”. We all have those days. Eating Disorder or not.
It’s alot because of my hormons, my lack of thyroid (I take medicine and sometimes I forgot and some days I need to take more or less). And the stress level, the food I eat, I usually keep the same healthy foodplan (from my coach right now) with the same food mostly, but I love to have these cheating days as people call it, I could say that I do not see it as cheating, more like a time to enjoy, but on the other hand, it is a cheat, on my schedule, of course. And maybe the healthy way would be to only eat one serving of chocolate cake or a bowl of icecream or so, go out for dinner, etc., I do that too of course sometimes! But I also like, eating all in, like many others, eating everything I love and be full, in a foodcoma, for several hours afterwards. Without anxiety over what I ate. I think it is okay to eat what you want! I have eaten without foodplans thousand times before, with variety and sweets every day, but I still I love to have days where you eat extra, like unnormal amounts. Maybe it has something to do with the training, becoming hungrier than usual. Don’t know, anyway, we are all different, and if you feel good doing it, it is probably okay, as long as you are healthy and don’t extend it to an ED. Anyways, the day after I am often watery and filled with carbohydrate weight, actually sometimes physical pain in the body, but all of us who have experienced it and know that it will be gone..:P , maybe a few minutes anxiety (not over the food being eaten, but maybe how you feel or how you look, as I said sometimes I can have still theese small anxieties, but still so small), or laugh about it, or bothersome stomach pain but you get other things to worry about, so time pass on. Maybe it is healthy or not, a life with some anxiety about anything (jobb, school, performance, money, social times, time, anything) is probably something you/I have to live with, but at the same time something to work on.
* Not by training or food, you should not try to fade away the anxiety with that. You should work on it by the brain, probably listening to it and go through why you feel like this, what happened, calm down and say “goodbye”, or just say no, you are not welcome, and think about other things, haha;) anxiety comes and goes, but to be without the body anxiety around the clock, is a damn free world. But remember that being healthy, well, free from an ED does not mean that you never will have an anxiety in life, but it sure will be a damn less. Everyone has less or more anxiety. But when it starts to affect your life, thats when something is wrong. Thank you and goodbye!