My biggest fear came true at the Mr. Olympia 2013 Body building Expo

Hey there!

So a quick check in today – One- I had NO idea in the blog world that challenges happen so frequently, or maybe it is just my bloglovin’ feed, and/or everyone wants to set great October goals. I am not doing 31 days like the link ups ( What is a link up anyways?! Lost. As usual) , I am only doing 30. Yes I know there is 31 one in October. The last day is a free day, to celebrate and plan my November goals!

I intend fully for Wednesday’s to be “Weigh in Wednesdays” for my challenge- but I CAN NOT FIND A SCALE. Anywhere. I have asked the hotels, the gym, nothing. How there is not a scale in site is beyond me. So it is only day two, but a starting point would be nice. So instead of a picture of my scale and report I am going to recap Mr. Olympia Expo today. We had a super fun but busy day last weekend. We did a timeshare presentation, hit up Mr. Olympia, and went to a Vegas show!

I am starting with the expo because well – We were inspired by the expo. I can not believe we almost did not go, but my Aunt pushed us saying it would be full of samples and cool things. Understatement if there ever was one. Not only did we learn a lot, we only hit up PART of the expo and this was the result : samples

Yeah. This is no joke. Mine is the crazy messy left side, Hubby’s is the right side- the organized separated out samples. This totally is a perfect picture of how we live our lives. I am crazy disorganized, spread my stuff all out so I can see it. He – organized, neat, everything put away. I am learning from him- I still love to see everything.

So we get BULU boxes, a health sample box every month. We get KONA cases for a while, natural healthy samples for running/ exercising. We thought we were learning, we thought we didn’t need any supplements/fuel, we do not body build, we are terrible at strength training as well. We do not use any supplements outside of honey stingers- if we use anything.

So naturally we went to an expo full of supplements, products, body builders, fitness models, and heavy lifters.

Fun fact? I am really strong.

I have been since I was little. Farm girl thing maybe? I always won tractor pedal pulls at the local fair, ticking off the biggest guys in my class. (yes we were –12 and younger! ) I used to arm wrestle boys too, and win. It really ticked my cousin off as well. He ALWAYS wanted to arm wrestle me – now a days I am pretty sure he would win but I am going to hold onto that memory of little champion me. In rowing the only workouts I was excited for was 2x a week strength training! I could do the isolated leg press (one leg) –over 7+ times at 405 pounds. I always prided myself in being strong, and telling people how much I could leg press always made me happy. Can I do it now? No. Do I want to be that strong again? Thinking about it.

I will add another piece of honesty in here. I felt MEGA out of place at first at the expo. Thankfully my husband looked in shape enough for me to feel not weird going. When we got there I felt obese. I mean – I am overweight, but I felt MORE so as they would hand supplements to my husband and not me. I have never run into this before. I had never felt what I have seen other plus size bloggers talk about. I have an underlying fear of gyms because I was always afraid something like that would happen. I never could answer fully what exactly I was afraid of, until now. Now I have a pretty clear answer of that gut feeling. It was a fear of not being accepted, it was a fear of some sort of negative reaction that would send me right back to the couch, and it was a fear of wanting something and someone telling me no.

It happened more than a few times. It was confirming every fear I had about gyms, fitness clubs, going to the expo, etc.

Then just negative things kept happening with random people. I am going to admit- I could have just been hypersensitive to the whole event by then, or pms. I am not sure, but as someone who is usually ignorant and unaware of weight comments/this kind of thing- It was awful. I pretended not to notice or care, and just tried to forget all those little events making me feel so bad for being there.

Then, we came across the heavy lifters, the sumo wrestlers, the overweight athletes that were rocking medals and doing impressive things. I have NEVER been small. At my smallest I was a size six weighing 165 pounds. I have always felt “big boned” fat, overweight, huge, you name it. Seeing these athletes really picked me back up forcing me to remember I am STRONG. It also helped my husband bragged about how strong I was to this guy running an arm wrestling machine. The guy set it back to the female setting for me, and I owned it. I mean, the machine didn’t even seem hard after the first few seconds. He looked surprised, and wanted me to do it on the male setting but we were waiting in line for awesome swag so we kept moving- where I ended up winning a gym bag! I was beaming. I may not look like I belonged there, but I was more open to trying to talk to people after that. It was equal men and women who seemed to hand to my husband and not me, and believe me the women and men who were nice to me I took note of their samples, and products. I will be finding what works for me, and I will make sure to write glowing reviews to their companies. I have a “before”picture waiting for its after, and I can not wait to share this with the world.

I get told a lot that people do not care where you are at in your journey as a way to inspire me to go to the gym. That place I am so intimidated by, due to people like the product models at the EXPO.

I almost believed them, I wanted to believe them that people are nice to people early in their journey, but the truth is the expo only furthered my fear of judgement. Yes I am overweight. Yes I do workout and eat normal. Do I eat only tilapia and asparagus like some of the models there? Negatron. Will I ever restrict my diet like that? Not likely. I will likely always be a little “fat” in their eyes.

All I know is all my fears came true there. Samples were handed to skinnier girls, my husband, etc. before me in lines I was ahead of them in. Sweet.

So my fears came true, so what?

I am actually fine. I mean, don’t get me wrong I felt so morbidly obese initially. I am surprised that I did not call up the people that told me no one is judging you and saying ” I TOLD YOU!”. I think up until writing this post, I did not realize how much that day made me run harder the next day, made me reflect on a healthier me, made me research strength training/ supplements, and unconsciously spurred my Show me 30 Days Challenge.

Inspiration and motivation can come from such a terrible feeling. Maybe it is more powerful that way? All I know is I did not like that feeling, and I am ready to make more effort to never feel that way again.

Here are a few pictures of the event! Sorry I did not get very many. There were HUNDREDS of people, crowded aisles, and lots of pushing and shoving at the sweet giveaway booths.

So walking away from the experience, I learned a lot! It was like a product palooza. We tasted everything from egg whites, pre-workouts, bars, cookies, chocolate, ice cream, and the list goes on. They all had some sort of benefit. We took our time to grab pamphlets to go with out supplements, talk to the people, ask why, how much, what is it used for, how does it help, and most were so eager to tell us. The ones that were not? Eh. At least we got a free product. I also networked with some fitness bloggers, got a few training plans to start my strength training, and an overload of information I have no even begun to process.

I have never been to an expo, so I was blown away by the experience. (Yes, I skipped the Princess Half marathon expo at Disney this year- My parents picked up our bibs for us.)

I am emailing my doctor as I draft this blog post, I have Hashimoto’s and do not want any of the products interacting with my medication. I am a little excited though, as Hashimoto’s messes with my energy levels, and there are a LOT of energy products. It will be nice to see if this is safe for me to take/ helps over come the symptoms of my autoimmune disease.