Team Berns Fitness: it's a wrap!

After 12 weeks, 1,000 lbs of chicken breast and tilapia, and hundreds of carb-deprivation induced mood swings later...it's over. Europa was this past Saturday and it may have been the most eye-opening experience of my life. Truth be told, I have never, EVER been comfortable with being in a bikini. I know i say that all the time and everyone always responds with an eye roll and "yeaaahhh right". I am dead serious. I grew up 20 minutes away from the beach in the bikini capitol of the West Coast and if you peruse all my photo albums, you will find maaaayyybe 3 pictures of me at the beach in a two piece. Three pictures in which will probably be me lying down and/or covering the mush i considered to be my abs. I woke up in a panic on Friday morning when it occurred to me that i would not only have to be onstage in a bikini, but i would be in front of a panel of judges analyzing every square inch of my body. Terrifying. I may have busted my ass and and look night and day different from what i did in March... but i apparently wasn't allowed to bust through a wall sized picture of my formerly fat self to show how much i had changed (a la Biggest Loser), i was just being judged on how i looked that day, which i thought was great until i walked into the competitors meeting. No one in that meeting appeared to have a body fat in the double digits, and everybody looked amaaaazing. It completely unnerved me and made me want to slink into the corner till it was all over. All i could do all morning was compare myself to every single girl in the room...i had to keep reminding myself how far i had come and while i may not be exactly where i wanted to be, i was a far cry away from where i was. As soon as my cohorts (Angela and Nina) were by my side, i felt soo much better. They reminded me i was only in competition with myself, even just being there was a huge accomplishment in and of itself.

Day 2--our makeshift 'dressing room'
just happy I'm almost done!

The entire day was a whole lot of hurry-up-and-wait and by the time we finally got onstage, it was right around midnight (we were supposed to be done at 9pm) which was exhaaaauusting. Luckily for us, we have an amazing support system of family and friends-turned-family members that were there the entire night, keeping our spirits up with us backstage. Then came the incident with spray glue. On a good day, i should never be given an aerosol can of glue and be told to use it to glue my bikini bottoms on...so to do that when the last carb i had was a day ago and i was pretty much brain dead, resulted in me spraying my ENTIRE ass with glue and then attempting to pull my bikini over it...definite fail. For the rest of the night, everything i sat on (I'm quite forgetful) stuck instantly and i had to rip it off like the world's worst band-aid, thus ripping off small portions of my spray tan. ha! All's well that ends well right? All i really set out to do was not make an ass out of myself and not finish dead last... I placed 9th out of 18 contenders in my height class which isn't too shabby for a first run! Best part of the entire contest was....the Cinnabun & cinnamon roll sugar cookies waaaiiiting for us the moment we walked off!

I owe huuuuge thanks to Nina for not just believing in me enough to do this but for the endless support, help with workouts, allll my nutrition plans, diet tips, bikini advice, and everything i could have ever possibly needed to get thru this process. She is a trainer that should be in her own class...she is amazing. I have learned a HUGE amount of nutrition, bio mechanics, posing, etc from this woman and will be forever grateful for our amazing friendship &lt;3 Going through this journey with her and Angela was the only thing that got me through it. Everytime i wanted to throw in the towel i could look over to either one of them looking just as tired as i was, powering through on the stairmill or choking down dry chicken and plain green beans and saying "we got this!"...which got me to suck it up and make it through the cardio sessions and boring meals everytime.