Article I: Embrace Your Inner Bombshell: Personal Empowerment Through Weight Training Series

Anyone who tells you that physical beauty does not create desire is kidding themselves. The fact is that sex sells and like most women I can relate to societal and self-induced pressures to attain physical perfection.

Unfortunately it’s thanks in part to those pressures that over 10 million women and men in America suffer from disordered eating patterns. My own weight yo-yoed up and down for years and I’ve endured the pain and frustration that goes along with the seemingly futile efforts to shed pounds and the delusion that doing so would make everything better.

As far back as I can remember I’ve been on one diet or another and it’s taken a long time to get over the mentality of “if I could only lose X more pounds, fill in the blank, would be perfect (everything from my love life to my career, to my relationship with my father). The reality is that for me, as it is with millions of others, weight was never the real issue and while it’s been the longest and most difficult road to personal healing I doubt that I’d have been able to achieve the genuine happiness and satisfaction with my body and mind without weight training, clean eating habits (forget the fad diets!

Clean eating is about a proper combination of protein, carbohydrates and fats), and the tireless efforts of a compassionate, inspiring and educated personal trainer. The personal empowerment that I’ve gained from weight training alone is something far better than any other feeling I’ve ever had. It’s given me the ability to not only make peace with my body but also truly love and honor it and the inner strength to accomplish my goals and change the negative messages hardwired into me –permanently.

They’re things that everyone deserves to have and I want to share with you the hard won secrets of how to achieve that empowerment yourself.

Don’t misunderstand me I don’t discount the good that therapy can do in changing disordered eating and its underlying issues. Therapy and counseling, sometimes even medication are necessary in changing an unhealthy mindset. Unfortunately they tend to leave a gap between healing the inner-self and attaining a beautiful, awe inspiring physical exterior.

For someone with disordered eating this means retaining the ability to exert control over your own body and what you put into it without employing health hazardous methods. The how-to of accomplishing that are simply things that most health professionals just don’t care to address because they deal with addressing the causes and not the symptoms.

But long after inner healing and serious health concerns are dealt with the desire for physical beauty still lingers.

It sounds ridiculous but moving to Southern California made extremely positive changes in my life because it set me face to face on a daily basis with our countries images of physical perfection. Here in Malibu where Pam Anderson is the resident beauty queen just about every woman here is not only Barbie Doll gorgeous but they seem to defy natural law and gravity.

I’ve seen these gorgeous women sweating it out in the gym and shopping sans-makeup in the grocery store and the God’s honest truth is that when all the three-point lighting and makeup artists are absent their bodies are every bit as beautiful as they look in print –even if they aren’t at their most glamorous. But if just being rail thin cut it in the Mecca of beauty Playboy, FHM and Maxim magazines would be filled with pre-pubescent looking models and the starved and waifish would be cleaning up at strip clubs.

The head turning look out here is the tried and true evolution of woman and that head turning look sets the standard for not only America’s ideal of beauty but the world’s. And while desirable hairstyles and clothes may change the physical body of that standard is constant, a tanned and tone body with sensuous curves, a lifted firm butt, and a taut flat stomach -essentially the look of the fitness model.

After a few months in Southern California I’d gotten pretty slack on my diet for no other reason that I was literally starving and by the time I was dragged out to the annual Pasadena Fit Expo muscle tone was something that was completely absent from my body. This was never more apparent to me than when I stepped foot into the coliseum and in spite of the fact I was pretty thin at the time I’d never felt more inferior in my life.

The women there were absolutely ethereal and not only did they have beautiful tans, perfect teeth, and long shiny hair (something that disordered eating compromises significantly) but their bodies were lean, clearly healthy and with varying degrees of stunning muscle tone. There was nothing emaciated or scrawny about these women.

They owned the floor with their beauty and confidence. Men stared in awe and clamored around them for attention. It occurred to me that no matter how much I starved myself or pounded the treadmill I would never look like them -so what was their secret? What were they eating, or not eating? I just had to know. I questioned at length a lot of the women there but only ended up with product pitches for various shakes, bars and supplements until I stopped at the Met Rx booth and met Taylor Ferrell.

To tell you that Taylor is my personal trainer is a little insulting since she’s far more to me than just that. Yes, she eventually became my trainer, but she’s also my inspiration, a big sister, a mentor and a God-sent. She epitomizes the “All-American Bombshell” and not only is her physique something to aspire to but so is her healthy outlook on life.

Taylor is the inspiration for Bombshell Buff and lucky for every woman that very thing, the gorgeous figure, beautiful, healthy body and positive mental attitude is something that every woman can aspire to if they’re willing to make the commitment required to achieve it. As the story goes Taylor happened to be about five moths pregnant at the time with her son Xander and agreed to train me in spite of the fact that I’d have to drive more than two hours roundtrip to train with her in Corona, California.

The fact that she was in far better shape than me on my best day and knew more about fitness and nutrition than anyone I’d ever met sealed the deal.

At my very first session she sat me down for a discussion on clean eating, supplements and a lengthy explanation on why creating the body I wanted would take time and why I needed to be kind to myself during the process. The desired look wouldn’t happen overnight and it wouldn’t be an easy road, especially considering my past history but she promised that it would happen.

She started me on an eating program that began to reduce the puffiness and bloating my body had been carrying around as well as creating lean muscle mass and lowering my overall percentage of body fat. Above all she stressed that under no circumstances could I deprive my body of food because the workouts and building process I was about to embark on would not give me the results I wanted if I refused to eat properly and that recovering my natural metabolism wouldn’t be possible if I insisted on not eating enough to get it running efficiently.

Those were the keywords for me at that first session. Recovering metabolism. I didn’t think mine had any hope since I’d been abusing it for years. I had long believed that I’d been cursed with a slow metabolism unlike anyone else and eating in the way Taylor asked me to was just going to cause me to gain weight.

It’s one of the biggest concerns I continually hear from other women. The belief that their metabolism cannot be fixed and that starting a healthy way of eating will not work for them, or that they will gain massive amounts of weight if they stray from the eating habits they have created for themselves. I can tell you from experience that it just isn’t so and that clean eating coupled with regular workouts (at least three times a week) will not only recover your metabolism but make it run far more efficiently than it has in years.

Diet is at least 75% of the battle in recovering metabolism and creating a beautiful body –that’s something I’ve learned the hard way. So I hope you’ll believe me when I tell you that sticking to clean foods will help you lean out, give you the energy necessary to get through your workouts and create cellulite free gorgeous muscletone. My own list of “clean foods” varies only slightly from Taylor’s version because my personal tastes run toward incorporating plant proteins into my daily diet.

Clean Foods

Complex Carbohydrates

There’s no mystery at all and eating clean is truly that simple. Eat a combination of these foods every two to three hours, five to six times a day. No more than 1/2 cup complex carbohydrates per sitting and go easy on the condiments. The key is to stick as close to the food chain as possible and learn to listen to your body.

I try to stay away from meal replacement bars and shakes although I do occasionally need to replace a meal with a shake or bar but I avoid sugar, corn syrup, and products that contain high fructose. If I absolutely need to have sugar I’ve got my once a week cheat day to fall back on. The cheats are necessary since they allow me not to feel deprived of anything and keep me on track the other 90% of the time.

I’ve been able to turn the extreme desire for control that comes along with disordered eating into something positive by using it as a tool to hold myself to health eating habits and choices. And it does me good to remember that this way of eating recovered my metabolism and after all of the insistence that my metabolism had freakishly mutated -it turns out it really hadn’t.

Of course it’s not just the switch to clean eating that will put a metabolism back into check. It has to be coupled with an effective exercise regiment that will increase your lean muscle mass and decrease body fat percentage. For this it helps to have a trainer that you can trust or at lest enrolling in a basic weightlifting or body sculpting course in order to learn proper lifting techniques. Once you’ve got those down you can vary your routine to isolate muscles and sculpt your body into your own ideal of what it should look like.

It’s really your call as to whether you prefer a softer or more striated look. All things are possible with weight training and they’re possible at any age –never let anyone convince you that’s it too late for you or the only options you have are unhealthy diets, pills, or surgical procedures because it simply isn’t so. Nothing is more empowering than seeing goals achieved month after month and working toward something healthy and beautiful.

During my struggle with disordered eating I became absolutely addicted to the validation of being thin. Fortunately the validation and sense of self-respect that comes with weight training far outweighs anything I once felt. All it takes is discipline and desire. No excuses, no vehement insistence that you’re too busy, don’t know how to cook, or have bad genetics. Bombshell status is all yours if you want it.

….future article: Choosing a Personal Trainer….

By Reneé Baisque
Fitness Model, National Physique Competitor, Personal Trainer, Fitness Seminar Speaker/Instructor, and professional chef.

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