12 Days Until Tahoe Show!

I'm super excited for my next show! I look better than ever and have improved SO much since my first show it's crazy. I know I haven't posted in a while, but here I am :) I'm so much more lean than I have ever been ans it's crazy! I wish I knew EXACTLY what it is that has gotten me here. You know what I mean? Like I've tried everything! So many things, so I don't know if it was a certain combination of things I did or one specific thing. For instance: for my first prep, as a fat burner I used raspberry keytones, for this prep I used Liposide by Evogen which is a caffeine based pill. I took fish oil pills three times a day for all three preps. I did fasted cardio for five weeks this prep, none on my first and second. I did way more cardio this time around in general. It would just be great to know what to give the credit to for my fat loss lol. Oh well! In April I was 14% body fat, now I'm 11% and ridiculously vascular. I'm happy, 2014 has been an awesome year for me!

I've been doing show preps since February 1st of this year. So crazy! I took a couple weeks off after taking 6th at the NorCal Championships in Sacramento in June. I just ate clean and worked out normally with random cheat meals and maintain my physique until 5-6 weeks out from the Tahoe Show. Now I'm a little less than 2 weeks out and I just look great. It's awesome, I feel awesome, and I really don't know what I'm going to do mentally if I don't place in this show. seriously. WTF. I'm so sick of "losing" next to girls who don't even look like they spend any time in the gym. They just get on a treadmill and run until they're ridiculously skinny, put on a bikini, and call it day. Okay that's mean, but I'm venting. I just feel like the judges love the higher body fat girls in the amateur shows, but the pros are freaking 10% or less body fat. It's hard to keep up. Somehow I have stayed positive and I'm going to do MY best and kill it on stage. I know in my first show my hips and but were so much bigger than they are. It's crazy! I'm going to post my measurement changes and differences from April 12th show, to June 7th, to now. I'll do that in the post tomorrow! Minus all the water, this is what I'll look like on stage. And I'm happy with how I look. SO happy! :D

I've also improved my posing a little. I've learned to manipulate the stances to make my butt look better with different angles. One thing that I learned at the posing seminar at the NorCal show is to NEVER turn your back to the judges when walking (unless they tell you of course). So walk in sideways to hide that jiggle, and walk off sideways. Sounds so silly! lol My butt looks amazing, but it still jiggles when I walk. One sad thing about losing so many inches and so much body fat in this short amount of time is STRETCH MARKS!!! Ugh. So annoying. I'm not a self conscious person in the slightest, but man I'm noticing them more and more. I've been using the Frank body scrub along with Palmer's Cocoa Butter lotion for stretch marks hoping the combination of the two would fast track them away. I know I have to be patient... but be gone stretch marks! Haha anyway I've posted some new photos in the progress tab, check them out!

For the next two weeks, I'm going to continue carb cycling with a high carb day on Friday and moderate on Saturday, Monday-Thursday are low carb days. I still do the "eat a different meat every meal" thing to keep my meals interesting. It usually goes: morning carbs: oatmeal + 1/2 scoop protein, 2 hours later: 2-3 eggs, then chicken and bell peppers, then shrimp and broccoli, then swai fish and asparagus, then workout and shake, then dinner which is ground turkey and egg whites. On low carb days I have a rice cake with peanut butter on it before the chicken meal and before the shrimp meal. Low carb day is 60 carbs or less. I'm not going to switch it up on peak week, just going to do the same thing with asparagus to get rid of that water weight, take dandelion root, hit the sauna, and rock it! So no water depleting, no real sodium depleting since I don't use salt that much anyway, just what's in food. Can't wait, I'm excited! On a side note: I have not had a Quest Bar in like three weeks... so weird.

Thanks so much for reading! You rock! Feel free tom comment below :)

Mel