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Up until I started living a healthy lifestyle, I was as sedentary and unhealthy as a human can be. So when I began my fitness journey about four years ago, I knew close to nothing about either exercising, or having a clean diet: all I knew for sure, was that I was sick of being uncomfortable in my own skin, tired of dreaming I had the body of all these gorgeous Instagram Fitness models without doing anything to actually try to get there myself, and I was definitely over feeling inferior every time I’d see a girl with a great body passing by me.
I wanted a change and with the little knowledge I possessed at the time, decided to take a step in the right direction: I enrolled in a gym and would exercise five to seven days a week. I’d sometimes wake up at 5 in the morning when I knew my schedule wouldn’t allow me to train throughout the day. I was determined and disciplined!
The two-floored gym I would train at was divided into a cardio section (upper level) and a strength training section (lower level). Needless to say, I felt extremely uneasy exercising at the lower level because firstly, I didn’t know how to use the machines and didn’t want to look dumb in front of all these super fit people and secondly, I would have rather died then workout in the centre of the gym, where everybody looks at you and can see that you are absolutely clueless about what you are doing. No; I was the girl that hid under large grey sweater pants and T-shirts, in the corner of the cardio section, on the last row of machines, where not only nobody cared about you, but you could actually see all the girls that looked like goddesses strength training downstairs, which would motivate me like nobody’s business.
My goal was to lose weight and since I didn’t know which exercises to execute, I would complete an hour of cardio on the stationary bike, and 30 minutes of abs, again, in the corner of the group workout room, when there were no one inside.
A couple months later, I moved from Hamilton to Montreal, where I decided not to take a gym membership: there was a stationary bike at our apartment and I could do my abs from home, save some money and spare myself the discomfort of exercising in front of other people. “Yes!“, I thought. But I quickly realized that I wasn’t pushing myself hard enough and although I had lost a little bit of weight, I wasn’t getting the results I expected. That’s when I stumbled on a French fitness girl on Instagram who had launched her home workout programs that promised to get you your dream body in 24 weeks. She kept posting before and after pictures of girls who had completed both her programs and the results were truly stunning. The Sonia Tlev Top Body Challenge program cost about $60 so I decided to go for it because I really needed guidance and didn’t want to enroll in a gym. My determination and hopes were at the highest level possible. The mental picture of me walking at the beach with an hour-glass figure, flat stomach, rock hard abs, bubble butt, wearing the sexiest swimsuit ever was so vivid in my mind! I was just a couple months away from my dream body and I was so ready to sweat.
Ah, how naive I was.
Five weeks into the program, I got a knee injury. I had never had any major injuries in my life (knock on wood! 🙂 ) so I really thought it was no big deal and the pain would go away in the next ensuing days, with a little rest. I was wrong. Three months passed and the pain grew stronger than ever; I knew I had to pay a visit to the Doctor’s and that’s how I found I had a torn meniscus that needed to be removed.
“F************************************CK“, I thought, cried, screamed inside of me. “How can the world be so unfair! I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do, I’m working out like a beast to reach my goals and that’s what I get in return?! You’re supposed to get what you give in life and I’ve given hard work, sweat, discipline and dedication and that’s what I get in return?! THAT’s my karma???? Thank you, Universe, THANK YOU VERY MUCH!” I was furious! Enraged!
But I wasn’t executing the squat movements correctly, which led to the injury.
You’re supposed to heal from a meniscus surgery in three weeks. In 21 days, the surgeon said, you’ll be able to exercise again, as hard as you used to prior to your injury. You can’t even imagine how happy I was to hear that, except it took me a year to fully recover from the surgery. Not three weeks. I was discouraged and on top of that, grew so scared of injuring myself again, that I no longer wanted to perform squats.
Simultaneously, my knowledge about nutrition kept expanding. I figured out that some of my food choices that I thought were healthy actually weren’t and I realized how clean my diet had to be if I wanted to reach the goals I had set. So progressively, my eating habits changed and became very clean, which helped me lose more weight.
When I felt ready to exercise again, I started over the Sonia Tlev Top Body Challenge. I completed both of them and although the results on my abs and stomach were very encouraging, I wasn’t too happy about the lower body results. However, I am extremely grateful for her programs because they enabled me to kickstart my fitness journey, they taught me which exercises to perform and how to organize a workout session. Then I thought I’d try the Kayla Itsines BBG program, which is also divided into two workout plans: one for beginners and one for advanced people. I went straight to the second program, as I didn’t consider myself a novice, I didn’t think her first workout plan would have been efficient for me. Her circuits were so challenging, I loved it! But again, I really wanted to gain muscle mass on my glutes (butt) and it still wasn’t helping; my abs, however, became much more defined thanks to the BBG 2 program, which I thought was amazing. Now at that point, it was about four months ago, I thought “I’m done with these programs, they are not helping me reach my goals. I must be doing something wrong.” I wondered why my stomach wasn’t flatter (mind you, my stomach is flat, but I have bodybuilding goals in mind so I wanted rock hard abs) and really couldn’t understand why wasn’t my butt more prominent. So I read articles, spent hours researching online, and found that if you want to develop your glutes, you have to allot specific workout sessions that exclusively target these muscles and that your glutes are only going to grow significantly if you lift very heavy weight, which is impossible to do when you train from home. I also realized how much information went into sculpting a body. It’s a very precise science that I definitely don’t master would be too time-consuming to try to learn by myself. It was time to move to the next level, accept that I wouldn’t be able to make by myself, put my ego aside and ask for a pro’s help. That’s when I decided to get back to the gym and this time, take a personal trainer that would guide me every step of the way, according to the specific goals I would give him: get my dream body by my 30th birthday in December. 🙂
Thankfully, my mindset about exercising and sculpting my dream body has evolved over the past couple years. In the beginning, I am not even going to lie, I wanted to look beautiful, but I also and most importantly wanted people to think I looked fantastic. I longed to flaunt every little visible change from the weight loss, to the more defined abs; it was kind of like my revanche on life and on all these years where I felt uncomfortable in my own skin, although I still wasn’t 100% confident, I was on my way to meeting my goals and that was enough reason for me to feel better about myself and want to show off.
I think everything in life happens for a reason and I firmly believe that my knee injury was the Universe’s way of telling me: “Girl, you need to have a seat and eat a slice of humble pie or I’m gonna have you sit down“. I wasn’t mentally ready to have my dream body. My intentions were ego-driven.
Today I’m in a much different place in my life. I have come to realize that this obsession about beauty and this hunt of perfection makes women incredibly narcissist, individualist, self-centered, and envious. Like the whole world revolves around them. So much negative energy is wasted comparing oneself to another female and in doing so, sadly, always thinking the other woman looks or is better. All this energy could be used for the greater good of humanity.
There are so many things in life I want to accomplish and none of them are related to my physical appearance. My only goal is to serve my community and help, encourage, motivate, heal, inspire people to reach their highest potential and become the best version of themselves. For me, exercising and having a trainer help me reach my fitness goals is a way to be at peace with who I am, knowing that I do everything in my power to be my best self, which involves taking my body to the highest level it can possibly reach. I don’t want to be my average self, I want to be at my very best in all departments of my life: personal, professional and interpersonal. I don’t ever want to compare myself to anyone ever again. And I most definitely don’t ever want to feel inferior to anyone. (I don’t ever want to feel superior either!) I don’t even want to think about those superficial things! And the only way to get to that place is to do what you have to do to feel 100% great about yourself. That takes sweat, hard work, sacrifices and tears, sometimes, but it’s worth it. None of it is motivated by the desire to show off, none of it is driven by the hope to be validated by other people, and none of it is motivated by the longing to resemble the standards of beauty portrayed in the media. I’m doing it all for myself. For my own well-being and for my own peace of mind. It’s all love. 🙂
I’ll share with you before and after pics in another article: I’ll show you what I looked like four years ago when I started my healthy lifestyle journey, and what I’ll look like in December, four months after exercising with a trainer.
