From Atkins to Vegetarianism All the Way to Venus Index

Today we have an interview with Carrie Gleason. Carrie was third in the last Venus Index Contest in the Open Category.

Check out her photos:

This is how you take perfect pictures for the Venus Index Contest.

How to Work Out to Get an Ideal Body

When Carrie first saw her pictures she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. She literally asked herself whether that’s really her. And that happens to a lot of people after a transformation. Your body changes faster than your mind. It’ll actually take a while for you to accept and believe it’s really you, especially if you were used to something completely different for the past twenty years.

Carrie always felt confident in her clothes and felt like she looked good, but she wasn’t that comfortable in a bikini. This is a pretty big difference. Clothes can help you show your body, but also hide certain areas that would be exposed otherwise. You could say it feels ‘safe’ in clothes.

If you are not a Victoria’s Secret model who is used to spending her days in lingerie in front of a camera, you can go years wearing the same clothes not realizing you have gained some weight.

And like Carrie said, she wasn’t overweight, but she just didn’t have that slim waist and toned body she has now. The Venus Index finally gave her confidence to feel great and sexy in a bikini again.

She always focused on weight and didn’t think of specific measurements or exact measurable goals.

In her own words: “That’s what I love on the Venus Index, it’s not about the weight, it’s all about the proportions and shape of my body”. And that is the point, you can build a body that is ideal and attainable for your height, instead if trying to attain the body of a genetic freak fitness model.

Carrie loved the fact that she can basically design her body and use specific workout structures to reshape it. The Venus Index is about getting to a specific, measurable goal that comes from a mathematical formula that is based on your height NOT weight.

She always felt she needed to improve a bit, but thought that the best way to get in shape is by spending countless hours doing cardio and hundreds of crunches.

In high school she did sports like every other girl and since she wasn’t exceptional in any of them she decided to start exercising to keep her weight in a healthy range.

She started going to the gym, but really to do just running on a treadmill and stair-master. She thought that lifting weights would cause her to grow and become big and bulky.

There is this common misconception that lifting weights will somehow turn you into some freak and you will look like a female version of hulk or like some female steroid enhanced bodybuilder.

That is not what really happens. A woman’s body is different from a man’s and you can’t build the same muscle size as men even if you wanted. Female bodybuilders who desire the same muscular development as a man start taking drugs to take it to that level…and that is where it gets ugly.

For you weight lifting is just a chance to tone your body into its natural and most attractive and healthy shape. This is where the Venus Index comes into play.

The most attractive look is the hourglass shape. This realization probably doesn’t come as anything new to you.

Well, the best advice is usually the one you already know.

Take a look at your training, do you train in way that supports this fact?

When Carrie got over her disbelief that “weights equal big muscles”, she approached it from the wrong starting point. She did what all the magazines told her to do, training one muscle group per day the way advanced male bodybuilders would train.

Your Workout is really a tool for you to tone and shape your body, if you want to achieve the ideal, you need to pursue the hourglass shape and this requires a specific workout structure.

Like Carrie said, now she is lifting weights for a reason, not just randomly throwing them in however she likes. The workout suddenly has a purpose!

The next thing she had to get over was the ab training. In the past her belief was always “train your abs, make them bigger” and the fat will suddenly melt away and you will slim down. This is common fallacy, think of it this way, would you make your biceps bigger to make them leaner?

Doubt that, so why would abs be any different?

In order to have slim feminine abs, you need to look at your diet, uncover the challenges and find a way to lose fat.

How to Approach Diet to Get the Best Body Possible

In the past Carrie could be diagnosed with Orthorexia. She tried the Atkin’s Diet, she was a vegetarian for a while, then she went vegan, and then she ended up eating only raw and organic food.

When she found Venus Index and its diet protocols, her husband went literally into “Oh God, what next” mode. But this time she didn’t go to extremes.

There is really only so much stress you can handle at once and with starting a contest and doing strength training, restricting yourself from food choices and what your body craves could leave you in a bad place.

This is the beauty of the calories in and calories out idea of Venus Index.

You can have anything you want, you just limit the amount and take what you crave.

Carrie followed the Eat Stop Eat protocol and fasted two times a week for 24 hours. She basically stopped eating one day at 6 pm and started eating again at 6 pm the next day. She would fast at work and keeping herself occupied with several tasks, not thinking about food and not being in close range to a fridge. On the days she wouldn’t fast she would follow the Anything Goes Diet approach and basically ate what she wanted, but kept the calories low.

As far as the food choices goes, nothing special here, Carrie enjoyed tuna with eggs, coffee with cream, chocolate and other usual foods like anyone else. She didn’t even pay much attention to protein.

The biggest realization was that she can just walk away form food and not harm her metabolism, but quite the opposite and not feel guilty after eating chocolate, because she no longer viewed certain foods as bad.

Now she feels confident and more attractive and her new challenge is figuring out how to stay at maintenance and keep the perfect Venus body all year round.

This when you want to keep the pendulum swinging as little as possible and use stuff like nano diets (fasting) and mini diets (dieting hard one week of the month) to keep your waist slim, weight down and hourglass shape most defined.

Take Home Message from Carrie:

• Everybody should enter the contest. It motivates you and gives you focus for 12 weeks, you have a start and a finish
• You can go totally covert, only her husband knew what she was doing and even he didn’t know about everything
• Get involved in the community, that is what Carrie relied on the most, she even read through the past winners’ blogs to get more inspiration and motivation
• Don’t tell people what you are “going to do”, but rather tell them “what you did” instead
• Be aware of maintenance and that it requires a different kind of effort
• Pictures give you more objectivity than a mirror
• It’s about body re-composition not about how much you weigh
• Don’t expect to gain pounds of muscle quickly, it takes time to build muscle and shape your body

Words & phrases mentioned in the interview:

• Alisha’s interview – From her first contest and from her second contest
• VT – Venus Transformation – Stands for the contest that is held at VenusIndex.com three times a year
• Venus Index Workout – Workout that Carrie followed to get to the contest shape
• Podcast archive – Podcasts that helped Carrie with getting in shape and staying motivated all the way to the end of the contest
• ESE – Eat Stop Eat – Diet and lifestyle protocol that will help you stay on track with your weight loss while enjoying social eating events at a same time
• AGD – Anything Goes Diet – Diet protocol to help you gradually lose weight week after week
• Venus Index Community – You will never find a more outgoing and friendly community then this one

Listen to the interview here:

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