After competing in October in my first bikini competition, I am now officially hooked. It was a very cool experience – I definitely learned a lot about my body and so much about the science of fitness, losing weight, and gaining muscle. It’s funny the things that surprise you at your first show, the main random things for me were:

• How hard it is to not only stand there for 10 minutes flexing all your muscles, but to smile authentically for that long!
• How the nerves totally go away, it feels very natural to be up there (or maybe you’re just so starved and water deprived that you’re in a daze)
• How no one looks like the bikini girls I follow on Instagram (except maybe one)
• How nice all the girls are – they’re all in the same boat and it was very cool to talk about how hungry we were and how many cookies, pies, pancakes, burgers we were going to eat after the show.

In the end, I was super proud of myself. Did I look exactly how I thought I would look? No. (I totally thought in 16 weeks I would look exactly like all the Instagram girls I follow – who have been lifting for 5 + years). Did I legitimately put in as much effort as I could have? Yes. That is really my measure of success – could I have done any more than I did in the frame of mind that I was in. And looking back, I know that even though I did have that extra spoonful of peanut butter pretty often, I needed it at the time. It was my first show and mentally that’s where I was at and I’m good with it. In the end I lost 30 lbs and 24 inches which is actually astounding to me. What’s nice is this prep I don’t have nearly as much to lose and I have a much better grasp on what is actually happening now.

Post – competition (lessons learned)

Immediately after my competition I ate a box of chocolate chip cookies and we went to Denny’s to eat their epic chocolate peanut butter pancakes. They were delicious and what I had been waiting for for at least 10 weeks.

And then… the next day was thanksgiving, so I proceeded to have 2 separate thanksgiving dinners and copious amounts of delicious pie.

After three days of fat food, I basically got back on the wagon and start counting macros. I was planning to reverse diet this way by slowly increasing my macros every week until I got to a maintenance level.

Lesson 1 – don’t go straight from bro-science to IIFYM

Because I was on a clean eating (bro science) plan, switching immediately to counting macros with no restrictions on what foods to eat was probaabaly not wise to do right away. I’ve learned that in order to successfully reverse diet (especially from an extremely clean diet) you need to progressively add back in foods your body has been deprived of so as not to shock the system.

Either way, I still managed to keep my weight at a reasonable level and am at a good place to start my next prep (100 times better than I was at the start of my first prep).

Needless to say, when I started my first prep, I really had minimal knowledge about what I was about to partake in. I was given a diet and workout plan and I just followed it without knowing much of the theory behind the process.

Lesson 2 – do your research

Throughout my prep, I did a lot of research to learn more about mainly the diet side (and the body composition side) of the equation. Some key things I’ve learned that now help me make perfect sense of the diet my coach has given me:

• You need to be in a caloric deficit of 500 every day to lose 1 lb per week, 1000 calories deficit to lose 2 lbs per week
• Every gram of protein = 4 calories, every gram of carbs = 4 calories, every gram of fat = 9 calories
• Carbs are not just bread and pasta! Fruit has carbs, sugar IS carbs! I know this may sound incredibly obvious to some, but it’s amazing how few people actually understand the most basic principles of nutrition
• Every vegetable will affect your digestion differently – experiment until you find the ones that don’t cause bloating, digestive issues
• The Glycemic Index – this explains why sweet potatoes are considered better than white potatoes, why whole wheat is better than white bread, and why unprocessed is preferable. In the simplest of terms, the higher GI foods cause your hormones to store fat – the enemy of all bikini competitors and body builders alike.
• The general desired BMI for bikini competitors is between 19.5 – 20.5 (according to experts), so this is helpful in knowing how much weight you have to lose (and what your caloric intake should be at) to reach your goal weight.

In the end, for me, knowledge is power and I now feel much more prepared, in control, and excited to start the process for the second time.