I guess this would be a good time to tell you a little bit about myself and how I got interested in the industry in the first place. I have been involved in sports from the time I can remember. I am extremely competitive and I love the sense of accomplishment after a job well done.  Once I graduated from high school and started working on my undergrad at Boise State, I realized that something was missing.  I was lacking motivation and felt as though I was in a constant rut at the gym.  I had been getting really interested in lifting weights and I have always been really active, but I felt as though my efforts weren’t matching the progress that I WASN’T making.

I became friends with a wonderful woman named Dawn in 2010 and I soon learned that she was a figure competitor.  I also learned that her ex-husband owned a local gym and trained athletes before competitions.  This was a whole new world to me and I was fascinated from the get-go.  I ended up making an appointment with her ex-husband and he took my initial measurements, wrote me a workout plan in order to help me meet my goals, and most importantly, he got me started on a diet plan.  I soon realized that for the past few years I had been SEVERELY under-eating to an almost scary degree.  I was only eating between 1350-1750 calories on this new meal plan and it felt like more food I had ever eaten in my entire life. I finally started fueling my body with the food that it needed in order to build muscle and let go of the fat stores it had created.  I was told that it might be a longer process than someone who had been overeating before I reached my goals, because my metabolism was completely shot and my body would be pretty stubborn in letting go of the fat that it had stored.  I by no means was overweight, but my body was literally holding on to everything it could, and I didn’t feel as though my insane efforts in the gym were paying off for the small amount of food I was eating.

I am so thankful that I made that initial appointment and started getting my diet and training on track.  I am sure that throughout my blogging journey I will add more bits and pieces of my past, but all I can say is that first appointment completely changed my life, and more importantly, my perspective on using food as fuel for my “machine”, rather than viewing it as “bad.”

Throughout the past few years I have experienced both success and failure, and I have built a great group of friends and mentors that support my lifestyle and help push me to be the very best I can be.  For me, it isn’t completely about HOW I LOOK, but more about my OVERALL HEALTH and how I FEEL.  A lot of people that you see with “perfect bodies” are far from perfect, and even farther from healthy.  I want to be able to be active even when I am 90, and taking care of my body right now is the only way that I will achieve that.  I have whole heartedly adopted this wonderful lifestyle and I hope that by letting you in on my thoughts, feelings, fears, ideas, and goals, I will lead by example on just how rewarding this lifestyle can really be. I am in love with it and I don’t plan on that stopping anytime soon 🙂

xoxo Mac