I was fourteen years old playing for my eighth-grade basketball team when I had my first

encounter with a horrible curse named body dysmorphia. This self-induced ego destructor is very
common within society, especially among young adults and teenagers. In my case, as with many others,
this was the “big bang” of my fitness career.

As a result of my insecurities, I began to research and learn as much about nutrition and exercise
as possible. Within my first few months of working out and tracking my calories, I had lost twelve
pounds. However, I did not have much body fat to begin with. My mother eventually made me realize
that I looked unhealthily skinny, so right before high school, at 126 pounds, I had decided that in that
moment my bodybuilding journey would begin.

The feeling of overcoming my own eating disorder and taking control of my mind was one of the
driving motivational factors that propelled me through my lifting career. This was an incredibly difficult
task as well as one of my first life lessons that I had taught myself. I had to consciously ignore what I saw
in the mirror and on the scale and just trust the science and information that I had found in online
videos and articles. I learned how to accurately track my macronutrient intake as well as why food
quality and micronutrients are also important towards body composition and performance. In addition, I
learned that proper form was top priority during training, followed by focusing on compound exercises,
total volume of exercise, and progressive overload will all cause hypertrophic growth. Within my first
three years of bodybuilding and powerlifting training, I became one the strongest students in my high
school. However, I never believed that my physique was satisfactory. I could have always had less body
fat or more muscle, and therefore I focused more on what I was good at which was powerlifting. I
competed in a powerlifting meet and took home my first state record on the deadlift, but I knew I still
had a long road ahead of me.

After my first competition I knew I had to compete again in the future. A couple months later, I
decided to move up a weight class for my second meet in order to break more records. Within three
months, I had intentionally gained twenty pounds by consuming thousands of calories daily. My body
dysmorphia demon was haunting me even more, but I learned how to accept the fact that I was obese
because breaking records was far superior in importance. After reaching nearly two hundred pounds, I
decided that it was time to lose some weight. I remembered that I had the phone number of a
professional bodybuilder that I had met a while back, so I contacted him and asked if he would be my
coach in order to help me get extremely lean for a bodybuilding show.

Seeing my body transform every week was the most insanely interesting process to witness,
especially with it being my own body. This preparation for my bodybuilding competition was not a
perfectly happy road, however. I had to be as disciplined as possible when it came to my diet, cardio,
and training regimen. I was eating the same monotonous foods every day for nearly five months. During
this time, I had the most impressive physique of my lifetime, yet I was still always insecure with my
appearance. After losing thirty-five pounds and posing nearly naked on stage in front of hundreds of
people, it would seem foolish to think that I was not confident in my body. The night of my competition I
knew for a fact that I was lean enough, but as soon as I had my first piece of candy after the show, I
knew it would be years until I reached that level of leanness again.

I deservingly enjoyed myself the week after my competition, but in the months following I slowly
creeped back up to a healthy weight. The best that I had ever looked was also the unhealthiest my body
had ever been. Deprived of water and nutrients at around five percent body fat, I knew it was
impossible to maintain. This knowledge was irrelevant because seeing my physique slowly add body fat
unintentionally allowed for my long-time enemy, body dysmorphia, to become a stronger and stronger
force within my mind.

In the months after my bodybuilding competition I had to learn how to become comfortable
with my body and my appearance. It was difficult to truly believe that nobody actually cared if I was
bloated. I just had to constantly remind myself that I am my worst critic and that I am the only person
who will always see my flaws at first glance.

After starting my freshman year of college, my inner powerlifter began to feel a lot of rage when
my strength had stopped increasing. I decided to try a powerlifting training program and started eating
more food. As I learned about nutrition from my classes and online videos, I understood even more
about how nutrients affect the body. I figured out how to eat an absurd amount of food and gained
nearly thirty pounds in four months. I broke more state records, however I suffered the worst
heartbreak after my competition. The ending of this long-term relationship sent me down a rabbit hole
of depressive emotions for a few months. I undoubtedly gained at least one thing during the recovery
from my heartbreak, and that was to not care as much about how I looked all the time. The amount of
subcutaneous and intramuscular water retention that I have in my body really does not matter that
much; it’s not that serious.

This was the mentality that I have had this entire summer and it is what has really helped with
overcoming my body dysmorphia. In addition to this ideology, I started meditating and listening to a
famous speaker named Alan Watts. I learned a valuable lesson from him, that life is like a dance; the
point is not to reach the end, but to enjoy every moment.

Another piece of wisdom that I picked up during my meditations is that you are always going to
want what you do not have. When you are cutting you want to be bulking and when you are bulking you
want to be cutting. This cycle will repeat itself until death, so there is absolutely no reason why you
should wish you were doing or had something else. Instead, it is in everyone’s best interest to
appreciate and enjoy their reality because that is the true secret to happiness and possibly the meaning
of life.

With that being said, it is extremely important to take care of your mentality as well as your
physique. This essay was supposed to be about fitness tips, which anybody can learn about from the
internet. My personal advice towards staying in shape and living a healthy lifestyle is to realize that your
body is never going to be perfect, nobody is going to judge your physique, and to really try to enjoy
everything about your life. Instead of wishing you could improve a certain part of your physique, try to
look at your body from someone else’s perspective, especially someone who does not work out. Body
dysmorphia is definitely an effective driving force in bodybuilding. However, it is an unhealthy and
unsustainable weight to carry on your shoulders.

I am not advocating to be satisfied with your physique and that you should not improve your
body composition. Bodybuilding is an incredibly tough sport that requires a lot of intrinsic motivation.
Rather than attaining your drive from a negative insecurity, figure out what you can do to achieve a
specific goal and work your heart out to be the best version of yourself that you could possibly be.