The war against those F#*@ing bumps!
According to Scientific American, 90% of women are impacted by those dreadful bumps. The bumps haunt them every morning, noon and night. Every time they catch a glimpse of themselves in the mirror, the bumps jump out at them like that damn Freddy Krueger in Nightmare on Elm Street. Unless they were gifted with supermodel genetics, those terrible bumps are something they live with and pray go away.
The bumps I am referring to are cellulite. Fitness magazine defines cellulite in simple terms: it’s basically pockets of excess fat that have squeezed between the bands of tissue connecting muscle to skin. If you wonder why men do not have cellulite it is because the bands connecting skin and muscle are very different on men than women. Men have thicker bands, there are more of them, and they form a crisscross pattern (as opposed to the vertical pattern on women’s bodies).
As an active person, one would assume cellulite is something I have never seen while looking down as I walk around in shorts, or happen to meet in the reflection of the mirror as I put on my pajamas. Wrong! I was born into a family that has pasty skin. Although my family has blessed me with some great genetics, pale, thin skin seems like a curse. Everything shows!
If you knew me almost nine years ago, you would have seen me in my last trimester of my first pregnancy. Let me tell you, looking in the mirror at my buttocks and thighs was like opening a package of Dean’s Cottage Cheese. I would stand there in utter shock thinking, “how in the hell do my legs look like this, even after working out my entire pregnancy?” Every night I did every Jane Fonda-type exercise imaginable, while reminiscing about my stair master or elliptical workout I did earlier that morning. Don’t believe me, ask my husband—I was psychotic. I did not gain a ton of weight during my pregnancy, but somehow those dimples were all over my lower half.
A few years ago, I experimented with my fitness regime to see what physical changes I would endure. I cut out running and cardio-based classes to focus on weight training. I squatted, dead-lifted and lunged with heavy weights and witnessed crazy results. At one point I was the strongest I had ever been in my entire life. My legs were solid—too big if you ask me—but guess what, there was still a slight presence of cellulite. Again, I asked myself, “WTF?”
Fast forward to today. I have come to realize the cleaner I eat and more I exercise, will minimize the appearance of cellulite. There are some things you can control, and others you cannot. This is one where look in the reflection, tip your hat, wave your middle finger at those bumps and move on. I encourage all of you to do the same.
—Jen Knuth, Owner FITT-RX
Check out another great article written by Helen Sanders, main editor of Health Ambition here.