The Aftermath, Pt. 1

So here you go.  It's been about 2 and a half months almost exactly since my competition and I'm just sharing these now.  Part of my procrastination has been my constant vacillating as to what exactly I was going to say about all of this.  How do I sum this up?  What exactly did I do anyway?
Another reason it's taken this long to write about it, is that I flat out needed a break from it all.  Whether I got so wrapped up in it, or it wrapped me up in itself, or that I wasn't eating enough carbs after a certain point for my brain to be able to make distinctions anymore, I'm not entirely sure.  It was probably all of those things.  The amount that this project took over my life, my brain, my body, my emotions was far beyond what I had expected and I needed to distance myself from it all to see it for what it was again.

So what was it?

This began as a sculpture, a sculpture of myself to create an ideal form from the genetics I was given.  Then I was going to put my sculpture on display at the San Jose Body Building Fitness Figure Competition.  I did these things.  I became Fitness Barbie.

The reality of how I achieved this ideal, how I was able to mold and sculpt my body from the inside, with my diet, and out, with the weight lifting and cardio, bordered on a level of inhuman.  It was a constant mind over matter battle, with the matter constantly gaining the upper hand.  I was living on white fish and egg whites for the last 3 days.  That's it.  Seriously, that was all I ate.  I ate every hour on the hour or I had a melt down.  The last evening and day of the competition, I had to dehydrate, which meant I wasn't allowed more than a sip of water every hour with a treat of an ice cube as needed.  I had to saran wrap my skin around my muscles to get the desired last minute effect.  I cheated and had a sip of coffee in the morning.  I was in constant distress.  My body was eating itself as I went down to having 9% body fat.  Believe me, I could feel it happening.

There is nothing natural or healthy in looking like this.  The fact that society somehow believes this to be some sort of ideal, something to hold on a pedestal and stare in a sick wonderment at is - ah, but wait.  By putting it on a pedestal, we almost acknowledge that it's out of reach for most people.  It's an extreme, an outlier, something at the far end of the spectrum that almost becomes a caricature of itself.

Then we get to the actual exhibition, the San Jose Competition.  As most of you know, I was docked points for not being "tan enough" and kept out of the trophy running despite having the "best butt and legs in the entire competition," according to the judges.  I didn't use their tanning product, I got a regular old spray tan.  Their tanning product makes average white girls look mahogany brown so that the crazy intense lights on the stage bleach that skin tone out to be an odd orange tan color.  My little spray tan, even though it looks totally normal in the photos, made me look pastey on stage.  You can see the difference of what I was up against (in so many ways) by the body parts visible next to me in the photos below.  Here's what I see:  Somehow, I still look human.

So, after all of this, what next?  Like I said, I spent the last few months trying to figure that out while my body tried to figure out how to process regular food and hormones again.  I will write about that in part 2 coming up shortly.