Is this the New Normal?
As the current contest winds down to the end, some of you are preparing for a photo shoot and others decided this wasn’t your time for a contest.
This can be a time of excitement or disappointment.
A couple of weeks ago I encouraged those ready to forge on to the photo shoot to not let fear stop you. This week I want to encourage others. Most likely you made some progress but you aren’t giving yourself credit for because you feel like you did not “finish” the contest, but that is not true.
Sometimes the contests are simply not the right time for you. The lessons you learned in the last 3 months are still valuable for the rest of your life.
What we do here at the Venus Factor is like fish swimming up stream. Our lifestyle of impulse control goes against the grain of the rest of modern society. I bet even with a few mistakes you overcame adversity and many hurdles already. This is no small accomplishment. The skills are important skills to keep for the rest of your life.
Modern society currently has an obesity epidemic
To quote an article that ran in today’s Daily Mail Online:
A vast majority of overweight and clinically obese children in the U.S. believe they are ‘about the right weight,’ a major study finds – and nearly a third of all kids incorrectly judged their weight.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention studied over 6,100 children aged between eight and 15 and discovered that 81per cent of overweight boys and 71per cent of overweight girls believed their weight to be in the ‘right’ range, i.e. healthy.
Of children who were diagnosed as obese, almost half of boys and over a third of girls thought they too were of about the right weight for their age.
Notes:
OBESITY IS PART OF A CONTINUUM
NCHS Data Brief (From the Centers for Disease Control)
Normal tends to be relative. Kids growing up now are learning a new normal. Unless our habits change as a society this is the new trend. According to the NCHS Data brief people are consuming more calories and becoming more sedentary.
What we do at the Venus Factor is the opposite of this. Even though you are embarking on a perfectly healthy lifestyle you will be viewed as “extreme”. This makes the new lifestyle you are trying to learn become a hurdle. Any progress is hard earned.
It is not a contest, it is a lifestyle
The contest is a mere train stop en route to the rest of your life.
I have several coaching clients who started the coaching program to help them complete the contest. They ended up realizing that the time was spent learning some valuable lessons and have decided not to finish the contest.
This one most precious young lady put her lesson into words so beautifully.
Yes she wrote the note to me, and I left it as is, but there is nothing special about me, it’s the lesson itself that she learned that is priceless. We all learn this lesson when we get so close to our goal. I don’t think I can put it out any better than she just did:
Oh dear Roberta you are the most wonderful person I’ve ever known!!!
When I started the contest I was committed to starve myself and workout like crazy to get to my goal by the end of it, thinking that 10 weeks would go away like nothing! I thought you would support me on my plan to reach my goal, but instead you were honest and told me what I didn’t want to hear, that I was short and losing weight the healthy way would take longer. I was disappointed but realized you were right. I was tired of eating the way I was and relying on fasting to compensate for binging. I felt so lost during the long fasting and decided to listen to your advice and thank God I did.
It’s true my body is not quite at my goal, but it has improved a lot. And the most important thing is that thanks to you I learned to be patient, now I still have a goal, but not a deadline, I know if I keep going I will get there with what you taught me.
Thanks so much for what you do for me! I could never thank you enough. You coached me not for the contest, but for a lifestyle!
When people do the cycle of eat low and binge repeatedly I call this the “eating yo-yo”. It’s a point of plateau or even going backwards.
No matter how much it would make me look good to produce a bunch of contest winners by cheering on with “eat less, eat less” I won’t do it. It doesn’t look good when they rebound after the contest anyway. None of us need that. We need our lives back.
All those in this situation are within a three inches of the VI waist. This is a critical point where the body refuses to be rushed. This is where the Venus Factor “Theory of fat availability” and “Reverse Taper” come into play. You can’t make things happen any faster than the body will allow. The rate you build muscle is genetic. The rate you lose fat at this point is so low it might not show an indication on the body weight scale.
When you get to this point you can’t eat so low anymore. You also can’t eat too high or for a long string of days if you want to lose that last bit of fat, because you can’t eat low enough anymore to make up for it. It’s needs to be more of an even keel. I call this the calorie tightrope.
Our Venus contest winners all learned valuable lessons for life.
You are already a winner!
So the main thing to remember is that if you are learning to eat less for your deficit, or walk the calorie tightrope, or learning to make lifting weights a habit for life, these are all swimming against the stream of normal society. Each victory is hard earned.
No matter how far along you are in your goals, if you have been making progress it is a huge win. It’s a huge victory. Do not sell yourself short. Just keep swimming and never give up.
The deadline for submitting the VT11 contest final pictures is August 11, 2014 midnight. If you are in this contest and you are delayed due to waiting on photography final processing all you have to do is email me (roberta.saum@gmail.com) and let me know. The front page newspaper picture must be dated August 11, 2014 or earlier.
I look forward to seeing your hard work shine!
-Coach Roberta
(You can find me in the online community.)
Find out more about Venus Transformation contests:
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The history of VT contests
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UPDATE for 2014: Schedule of Events
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Contest Rules and Regulations
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