Christine: "The Sugar and Soda Addict" becomes "The Athletic Actress"
This young woman struck me as someone who knew she was in trouble. When I met her, Christine was downing on the average over 40 ounces of fully sugared soda every day. Like the others, she ate mindlessly, picking and grabbing whatever was sitting around on location where she worked as an actress and ventriloquist. This one time cheerleader was now an overweight young woman in her later twenties, and this was holding her back from competing optimally when she auditioned for her work. Christine was on a mission. She wanted to achieve her "audition body" and she knew she'd have to awaken that sleeping athletic giant in her to make that happen. Christine also started the Fit to Live challenge with a lower than normal HDL, or good form of cholesterol. Her sedentary lifestyle and high fat diet was repressing the formation of more HDL. If she kept this up, she would be facing early onset heart disease. She would also have to survive the withdrawal from her toxic highly sugared diet. This was treacherous territory.
The good news is she lives with her supportive boyfriend who's a vegetarian. We didn't have to worry about hamburgers showing up on the dinner table. However, Christine was also a big time emotional eater. Her life is stressful and she takes so much to heart. Her boyfriend's mother was very ill and this was a stress that would normally send her right to the fridge. But she didn't do it this time. She fought and struggled and won in the end. On the first day of the shoot, although she was overweight and completely out of shape, she actually did much better than I thought she would. Although none of the participants survived the scenario, I think she was surprised at how well she did. She collapsed on the roof of the building after finally emerging from the building and it took quite some time to catch her breath again. What stunned her is that she is so young and in such bad shape in terms of fitness, and that if that scenario was real, she would have died. She was clearly not Fit to Live.
Despite an old knee injury that bothered her intermittently, Christine showed up for the physical training and really put out the effort. When I had done her initial body composition analysis, I was pleased to tell her that although she was carrying about 25 or thirty extra pounds of fat, she was also the owner of more muscle than average. Yep, there it was — her inner athlete. She was blessed with great genetics and now needed to get these muscles trained to not only burn calories more efficiently, but to power her up those stairs in the skyscraper so that she could save her own life. Well, she was not fun to be around the first week of the challenge when she was withdrawing from the sodas. Sure glad her boyfriend has a good sense of humor.
By the end of the second week, Christine really felt like a new person. She was already shedding fat, getting stronger and eating mindfully. Although she doesn't cook, she learned to eat every 3-4 hours and plan to take food with her on her sometimes 18 hour work days. Christine was not going to allow anything to get in the way of her mission — the audition body. By the end of the fourth week, her good form of cholesterol had normalized and Christine had shed over 10 pounds of body fat. Like all the others, Christine is continuing her journey. She's shed another 10 pounds and is hell bent on finishing this very personal challenge. That last shoot in the building was a much more pleasant eye opener. Christine learned the lesson of a lifetime. She was given a second chance to live and she went for it with all she had.
