14 DAY TRIAL // Before she started weight training in 2003, English teacher Lisa Cross struggled with anorexia and put her health in danger thinking she would somehow get her perfect body. She would have never imagined that the perfect body for her would turn out to be the opposite of what she was starving herself for.
Since October 2010, 35-year-old Cross is UKBFF Ladies Physique Champion. She’s been weight training since 2003, and training for competitions since 2008.
She tells the Daily Mail that, though she was once willing to risk her health (and her life) for an ideal of beauty that equaled skinny with perfection, she knows better now.
With an impressive physique, Cross puts a lot of time and effort into her life-saving hobby, that of bodybuilding. She eats 10 meals a day totaling 5,000 calories (whereas before she would not allow herself to eat more than 500 calories daily), and spends hours upon hours at the gym.
More important for her than being physically active is having earned confidence in herself.
Many might disagree, but she considers herself more feminine and more beautiful than ever before, and she’s not ashamed to show off her well-defined, bulging muscles.
“As a bodybuilder you have to be critical about yourself because you can always improve but at the same time I finally feel confident in my own skin,” she says for the tab.
Considering what she’s been through while struggling with anorexia (she stopped eating altogether at 15), Lisa has every reason to be proud of her achievement.
She understands why not everyone “gets it” what is that attracts her to bodybuilding, and she even admits that she’s addicted to it, but she insists she would not have it any other way.
‘You do get addicted to it because you get addicted to the endorphins your body is producing in the gym,” she explains.
“When I’m training, that’s my time. It’s when I really feel at one with myself. I wouldn’t dream of bringing my phone into the gym with me and I get quite annoyed if people try to talk to me when I’m training. I honestly can’t imagine my life without bodybuilding – I love it,” Lisa says.
Below is a video of Lisa on stage, competing. Even if her muscular body is not your ideal body type, you have to give props to her for her dedication and hard work.
