Month: January 2017

We only have a couple of days of 2016 left and thankfully 2017 is finally on the horizon. With that being said I feel like now would be an appropriate time to reflect on my “fitness journey”, not just from the past year, but since I started this so-called “journey”. I hope this post allows me to share some of the mistakes I made along the way…so you guys don’t have to (just call me Mother Teresa). So, without further ado lets get cracking.

From a very young age, around 8-years-old, I started getting into fitness. My dad took my Thai Boxing with him and I continued to train for about 7 years until the age of 15. I was always naturally quite skinny, but due to my martial arts training, I developed strong legs for my size and a six pack. At the time I would eat whatever I want, never having to worry about my weight or how I looked. *ah the good old days*

At around the age of 14, I started getting really into Tumblr. On this website I found myself getting sucked into the world of “thinspo”. If you’re not familiar with “thinspo” it basically stands for thin inspiration. On the tag would be hundreds upon hundreds of tiny girls, some naturally thin and some who obviously had eating disorders. These girls were meant to be inspiring young, impressionable girls, one of them being myself. Once you found yourself on the “thinspo” tag it was pretty easy to eventually find yourself on the “proana” and “promia” tags where people would literally encourage and give other people advice on how to develop an eating disorder.

At this point, more than anything in the world I wanted a thigh gap, the problem was though due to my bone structure it was impossible for me. No matter how skinny my thighs were, my hips were too narrow. I was trying to achieve something which was completely impossible.

For a couple of years, I made half-hearted efforts to lose weight, not that I needed to. I switched between wanting to lose weight and wanted to gain weight and become more curvy. I started doing some ab workouts from Backonpointe which were a great introduction to at-home-workouts, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. I fixated on the golden number 50kg. But at 5’6″ and weighing about 54kg, this wasn’t really attainable for my body. I started swapping my lunch for a protein shake, thinking I was consuming fewer calories, but again I didn’t really know what I was doing.

When I hit the age of 16 I got a gym membership and started going quite regularly. I was mainly going on the cross trainer and doing ab workouts, again from Backonpointe. At the time my mum had been powerlifting for about 5/6 years, and I had always looked up to her. I asked her to introduce me to the dreaded squat rack. I can’t even explain how nervous I was to enter the male-dominated weights room. But I went in, and my mum showed me how to squat, my very first introduction into powerlifting.

I started to train with my mum’s personal trainer and coach, Carl, who was absolutely fantastic. Within a couple of weeks of squatting, we moved onto deadlifting and then benching. On my first go, I managed to deadlift 75kg, but on the contrary, I couldn’t even bench the 20kg bar. So we started with the 15kg until I could move onto the big-boy-bar.

I trained on-and-off about three times a week for maybe a year or so. Then when I was 17, I decided I wanted to enter my first competition as a sub-junior in the Yorkshire North East Federation. I had bought my membership, but then disaster happened, I got a blood clot in my right leg and was rushed to the hospital. Whilst there I didn’t really eat at all and lost about 8 pounds, as well as most of my strength. A couple of weeks after I got out of hospital I went on a girls holiday and remember feeling so horrible wearing a bikini. I still had a swollen leg, but felt like the rest of my body was so skinny and depleted of muscle.

This was when everything seemed to go downhill, mentally and physically. I was told I couldn’t go to university because I was in hospital during the exam period, and that I’d have to resit the year. In my mind, my world had come crashing down around me. I was going to be spending another year in Leeds, on my own, whilst all my friends were being whisked off to the exciting world of university. As well as this I was suffering from the symptoms of Lupus (which I later found out caused my blood clot). In a nutshell, Lupus is an auto-immune disease which in my case, left me incredibly tired and with awful joint ache, to the point I couldn’t walk at times.

Despite this, I decided that during my “gap year” I would focus a lot more on my diet and my training. I still felt self-conscious about my “fat leg” and decided I wanted to get super lean. I found a girl on Instagram who I asked to do me a diet plan as I didn’t feel that I had the knowledge myself. I downloaded Myfitnesspal to track my calorie intake and let’s just say it all went “tits up” from there.

Now before I share this, I want to say that for some people tracking their macros is great. It allows them to eat foods which would normally be classed as “bad”, but for me, it was quite the opposite.

Tracking my calories and macros became a method of control, a way I could control something in life when I felt like I wasn’t in control of anything else. It wasn’t so much about the way I looked anymore, although I was starting to revert back to the “thinspo” days, it was pretty much all about the numbers. It became a game to me, how little calories could I eat in a day, 1500, 1300, 1100? If I went over my calorie intake I would spend hours on the cross-trainer, in an attempt to “burn off” those unwanted calories. I remember one evening being starving and desperate for my dinner, but because I’d gone over my calories I actually went outside and ran (disclaimer: I flamin’ hate running and would avoid it like a hole in the head) just so I had enough calories for dinner. I would weigh myself 3/4 times a day, with the number on the “sad step” completely affecting my mood. Not to mention staring at my body for hours in the mirror going over my ever flaw.

Now, because I was undereating I was losing strength, and my training was really suffering, which just became something else to hate myself about. All I could think about was food, tracking calories, what food I could eat later, what foods I couldn’t eat. I felt a sense of achievement if I managed to get to bed hungry, this is pretty disturbing. Of course this “undereating” wasn’t sustainable, there would get to points where I was so hungry I would run downstairs and eat everything in sight, even if I didn’t want it. Then came the shame, the guilt, and all the horrible feelings that follow a binge. The night I stood over the toilet with my fingers down my throat was the moment I realised I needed to stop.

I vowed to make strength and powerlifting my main goals. I wanted to lift bigger weights and I knew that in order to do that, I had to fuel my body correctly. I believe that powerlifting saved me from a potentially, extremely dangerous path.

I started up @dionnelifts on Instagram and found a whole host of encouraging and empowering wonderful ladies, as well as guys! When I moved to university I really found my groove when it came to powerlifting, and in November 2015 I had my first powerlifting competition, where I was awarded best female on WILKS. During my powerlifting journey, I not only found great friends online, but also in real life…and I suppose the rest is history!

At the moment I am looking forward to every gym session, as well as looking forward to every pizza, burger, chocolate cake and bottle of wine. I have learned to find balance in my life, and I believe there is nothing more important. When I’m stressed out, or having a bad day, I still get urges to stop eating, or start counting calories again, but now I’m able to tell myself that I’m worth more than that.

Staying unnaturally lean, or thin is not sustainable or healthy. Eating 1200 calories a day is not healthy nor is eating 5000. Just believe me when I say, eat that last piece of cake, or live to regret it.

I hope this was somewhat interesting, or useful and if you have any questions about anything I’ve mentioned here please drop me a message via my email or on Instagram.

Thank you for reading this and give it a share if you found it interesting! Leave any suggestions in the comments below and make sure to follow my IG @dionnelifts for more food and exercise ideas.