Miss Marissa: The beginning

[miss_marissa]

Miss_Marissa lived a dual life, graduate engineering student by day, cocktail waitress extraordinaire by night! Her days consisted of waking up at 10 am and grabbing Qdoba or Arby’s on the way to the lab because she was “too busy†to cook. Work at the lab for 6 hours, head to work at the bar around 5 pm and eat more bar food. Work a 10 hour shift, drinking plenty of coke and beer because “it helps keep me awake†Finish the evening around 4:30 am and head for a greasy typical diner breakfast and then straight to bed. On nights she didn’t work at the bar, she spent her time in *drumroll please* THE BAR! Surprise surprise. Her saving grace was the fact that she was on her feet for 12 hours a day, walking around campus and at her job.

 

Once she settled down at her fancy big girl engineering job in a new city, things didn’t improve much. Since she was no longer walking as much, but her other lifestyle habits had remained the same, the pounds started to pack on. She deluded herself into thinking she was healthy because she ate salads and yogurts and stuff and went to the gym like once a week (always the treadmill). even though fast food and frozen dinners were still staples. The scale climbed past 160.

 

One week Miss_Marissa ripped a zipper on a skirt and busted a button on a pair of shorts and decided enough was enough! She waltzed into a nutrition club determined to try something differently than the handful of times before (doing P90X for about a week and a half and eat 1200 calories until LIFE happens and that eventually goes out the window). She signed up for a fit challenge with a cash prize and nutrition lessons and started her journey!

 

At her first fit challenge workout, she determined, she was not in fact, as healthy as she had deluded herself to be. The pounds started coming off slowly, but Miss_Marissa felt like something was missing. She continued to attend fit camps, but was not improving! Barely being able to do a pushup from her knees, she went home one evening and Googled “How to do a pushup†and stumbled upon NerdFitness.com and immediately soaked it all up!

 

After a few months of reading about weight training, and looking at the success stories wondering how she could get results like that too, Miss_Marissa pulled the trigger and stepped into her local gym, signed up for a membership and recruited a personal trainer to help her start powerlifting.

 

She started gaining muscle, getting stronger, and learning about her body. She started learning about nutrition and how to fuel her body properly. After roughly one year she competed in her first competition! And even though she was the worst lifter there, she caught the bug. Over 31 lbs were lost and about a healthy 10 of muscle were gained back.

 

Roughly two years after picking up her first barbell, Miss_Marissa now works a badass job designing stuff that goes into space, and hopes that someday she can go too. She trains at the #1 powerlifting gym in the USA and is constantly getting stronger and learning new things every day, being the biggest badass she can be.