Karen's Story As Told By Her Husband Frank
Karen's story is quite different from mine. Though she too had the fat genes, her biggest problem was her extreme shyness. She has told me she was so shy when teachers called on her to give a report or answer a question in class, she would never stand up to recite her answers. She was too self-conscious to stand up in front of a group of people.
When we first started seeing each other Karen was eighteen years old. Back then, I must have done most of the talking. When we'd go to her company parties, if she said two sentences for the evening it was a big night for her. She was so pretty and sweet it didn't bother me.
The years slipped by and before we knew it she was thirty-three and struggling to get into a size fourteen pair of jeans. One night while we were watching home movies with my mother, an image of Karen walking away from the camera flashed across the screen, and my mother exclaimed, "I know who that is by the size of her butt."
That did it! She resolved to lose weight and get back into her youthful figure again. She was sure aerobics was the answer to her problem. Karen was born under the sign of Sagittarius. So with typical Sagittarian determination, she aimed her bow and let loose the arrow that changed her life.
In our living room for a full year she jumped and twisted and stretched according to the best information she could find. She got so good at it she gained enough confidence to go on Jack LaLanne's T. V. Show and do his aerobics class live before the cameras. Part of Jack's program was to go through the group making individual comments on the participants, when he came to Karen he said, "This one is a twelve! That's two better than a perfect ten." The year of exercise was beginning to pay off!
While her progress had been good with the aerobic workouts, she was just a smaller version of what she was before she started exercising. Karen noticed I not only lost weight, but my whole appearance had changed. My shoulders and chest were larger and tighter while my waist was smaller and harder. So we hit the weights together. With the resistant type of workout, her body improved so fast that within a few months of pushing the weights, people in the gym were encouraging her to go into bodybuilding competition. I couldn't help thinking, "Karen, on a stage in front of a crowd of people in a bikini... impossible!"
As she continued to improve, competition became more and more appealing to both Karen and me. I had already brought home a couple of trophies from the Masters' classes and had a chance to observe the female contestants. Competition for women was still a new thing in the body building field. No one really knew what to look for in a female competitor.
Contests are not easy. It means hours of intense training and preparation. I knew once Karen made up her mind, she would stick to all training principles with dedication and tenacity. I encouraged her to go for it. Though the thought of getting out there on a stage all by herself was intimidating, she made the decision to take the plunge. Time was allotted for weight lifting, aerobics, posing and tanning. Of course, she still had to work at her job as well as do her everyday chores. For the next few years of competition, she averaged five hours nightly for sleep. Motivation can work wonders.
At her first contest, a local show in the San Fernando Valley, she came in third place and got her first trophy. The Daily News covered the event and used Karen's photo from the contest in their Life section. They also included a story on her views and training ideas for this new lifestyle.
With a placing to her credit, Karen decided to get really serious. Everyone at the gym was talking body fat, so we sought out a place that did body composition testing. The way to be defined enough to be competitive was to cut the body fat way down. We believed we were in excellent condition from all the training. The people administering the test thought we had to be pretty lean... but lo and behold we were still fat!
Unfortunately, we did not keep those original test scores. The method used was Hydrostatic weighing. That is, you are dunked in a tank of water three times then your score is averaged and they give you the results. I came in at fourteen percent and Karen came in at twenty-two percent body fat. Those were normal readings for a healthy person in that age bracket but hardly impressive for bodybuilding competition.
The result of the test was to send us back to the drawing board and it forced us to look into nutrition. Fat was out; protein was in with the vegetables and grains as our prime source of carbohydrates and fats. Our goals were ten grams of fat per day and one gram of protein per pound of body weight with lean carbohydrates completing the balance of allowed calories.
The plan worked! With the combination of aerobic work, strict nutritional practices and the weights six days a week we both dropped into the athletes range. Karen competed in seventeen competitions that year, winning most of them. Between the two of us, we won over fifty trophies in the next three years!
The big show in this part of sunny California was the Golden Valley Physique Classic. This competition always had a big turnout of quality contestants and that year was one of the biggest turnouts they had ever had up to that time. Karen walked away with top honors winning her height class and then the overall trophy!
That year the Amateur Athletic Union's Ms. America competition was held in Pasadena California and Karen had qualified to compete. After a really intense program and cutting her body fat as low as it has ever been, she wound up in the top three in the competition. The lady that won was more muscular than Karen, but I'm sure many felt Karen was definitely the most femininely fit woman in the competition.
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