Summary: Suzanne placed 5th in our Venus Index Contest in the Open category. She did a great job and transformed her body, just check out her photos: If you decide to improve your body, you need to expect and accept that there are going to be challenges along the way. What sets successful people apart from the average, unsuccessful ones is the fact that they are willing to do whatever it takes to overcome any challenge they encounter along the way towards their desired goal. If you can accept that road to success is not easy, the next step is to expect it to be hard and challenging. Once you expect it, you can prepare yourself to get over the roadblocks that will appear along the way. Like many other contestants Suzanne had her own personal challenges or how she calls it her "barriers" she had to get over. Barrier #1 Not Being Patient Suzanne admitted that the biggest challenge for her when it comes to getting in shape was being patient enough or if you believe that patience is a learnable skill then we could even say her biggest challenge was learning to have patience. And this is not true just in the fitness and health area of your life. If you want to take things to the next level and improve almost any area of your life, it will take a lot of patience to keep going till you succeed. Just take entrepreneurship as an example, even though this has nothing to do with building a better looking body, it's a great analogy. When you are building a company from scratch, it takes time, sometimes you end up bankrupt or like Steve Jobs fired from your own company and you have to start again and work your way back up. It's exactly the same with your body. If you are not happy with the way you look, you don't even remember being confident in your own skin or feeling feminine, then you need to accept that the change will take time and require some effort on your part. Sometimes it will even seem like there is no point in working on yourself. This is not meant to be discouraging, not at all, but you need to know what may happen in order to expect it and not be surprised when a challenge will appear. One of the biggest mistakes you might have made in the past is having distorted expectations. For example Suzanne thought that you can make a transformation very quickly. You probably might believe something similar and this is really not your fault considering all the quick fat loss (or get rich quick) scams you are facing all day long from TV or the internet. You probably expect results almost instantly, in a couple of weeks. Well, while you can lose several pounds of fat in just a few weeks, you can't gain pounds of pure muscle in just a few weeks, that's not gonna happen. Losing fat is not comfortable, but is still a pretty simple and quick process. Some people can lose yup to 8 pounds of fat a month, sometimes even more. However, you can't gain 8 pounds of muscle in just one month. Even guys have a hard time gaining muscle mass and they have 10 times more muscle building hormone than you! Yes, while you are more sensitive to testosterone, your body still produces very little of this hormone compared to guys. If you have ever seen claims like gain 30 pounds of muscle, it is either BS or it's possible only for male teenagers who have never been exposed to weight training before and still have juvenile muscle growth on their side. It's more realistic to expect just a few pounds of muscle gain over several months. As a woman you don't even need to gain a lot of muscle mass to truly change the look and shape of your body. A few pounds is going to transform your body shape immensely. Even one pound of muscle is an incredible difference. Barrier #2 Being Fixated on Weight & on the Scale The fixation on the scale and to your weight is pretty common for both guys and girls. Tracking your progress by weighing yourself can be tricky, because you never know if what you have gained is muscle or fat.
