Kayla Itsiness Guide
No matter how many salads I ate, no matter how many smoothies I drank, no matter how many seconds I shaved off my mile, I needed the bikini-body trophy before I could truly consider myself healthy. My health was now tied to my beauty, and while I’d always thought of myself as a woman with a sound outlook on body image and beauty standards, this was new territory. I know that celebrities and models in movies and on magazine covers are photoshopped, airbrushed, unnatural. In other words, not real life. Then social media came along, and isn’t that supposed to be real life? The burden of keeping body-image issues in check has always been on us, the followers, rather than on them, the manufacturers of these problematic standards. I’m supposed to know that pictures don’t give you the full picture.
I’m supposed to be happy with my progress even when it doesn’t match the perfect bodies on my feed. I’m supposed to know that a bikini body is just a body in a bikini. I’m supposed to know better. Well, I don’t. I’d started working out in the first place with the goal of having a baby; now I found myself secretly wanting to postpone getting pregnant to achieve this new standard. I dove deeper into absurdity when the “proof” never showed, and flip-flopped into thinking that pregnancy would actually be a great excuse for not having a bikini body.
You know, take some of the pressure off. Make no mistake, I eventually felt mortified about the direction in which my train of thought headed, but only after I scraped together enough good judgment to take a step back and jump ship from the BBG online community. I realized that social media is a trigger for me.
I’ve learned to follow responsibly. I've since moved on to, a program created by a husband-and-wife team who don't put the focus on appearance at all (at least from what I've seen in their videos). It's all about improving your strength, flexibility, and endurance, and it's been fantastic. I'm on week 20 of Fitness Blender, and I do not follow the program on social media, just to be safe. There’s no doubt in my mind that my experience with BBG would have been more body-positive had I opted not to follow Kayla Itsines on Instagram. Despite its awful name, the Bikini Body Guide is actually a good workout program — great, even. It’s quick, challenging, effective, and inexpensive.
The PDF guides are easy to follow. There’s a balance of high- and low-intensity exercise. The difficulty progresses every week.
Kayla Itsiness Meal Plan
There’s even a thrill that comes with finishing one workout, and of course the entire 12 weeks. That thrill should have nothing to do with how you look in a bikini. Now that I’ve unfollowed Kayla Itsines, that’s going to be enough for me.