The True Obstacles Of My Bodybuilding Prep

In 16 weeks of bodybuilding prep, I faced numerous obstacles head on. I was tested over and over again, forcing my resilience to stay true, and take me to the finish line. Now being 2 days out from show day and looking back on the past 16 weeks, I can say that I am proud of conquering every obstacle that arose.

Transcript

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Yo, what's going on, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Life Unfiltered. I'm your host, Tiker Perka, and today we're going to be talking about all things prep. Why? Because I am two days out of show day, and I was doing a little bit of reflecting today, and I just realized how crazy of a journey I've actually had. And it's so funny because all throughout the process, a lot of people are asking me, you know, like, how's it been? How has prep been? Like, has it been extremely hard? How much food are you eating? How much card year are you doing? This or that. I've always felt weird about the answer that I had. And because my answer is that prep for me went smoothly. And at least I thought it did. Um, but leading up to today, I was just doing my reflecting and kind of thinking back to all of the shit that I've been through. And you know what? I don't know if I can say that it's it was that easy. Like, I have truly overcome and conquered so many different obstacles all throughout this 16-week prep. It feels like a lifetime. It feels like a lifetime of prep with the amount of shit that has happened. And it kind of made me laugh because I was just like thinking about this. And I'm like, you know, like, oh, prep's, it's been pretty good. Like, you know, it's it's it's been a challenge, it's been hard. I've really had to push myself, but I've actually had a pretty smooth prep. It's been pretty easy. And I hate to say that it's been easy, but it's been great. And that was always kind of my answer to people. And then I was just thinking about it today, and I just could not stop laughing at how ridiculous this prep has actually been for me. And this is my very first one to keep in mind. So, of course, there's gonna be a lot of obstacles that come up along the way. There's gonna be a lot of things that you learn along the way, and things are never gonna go as expected because, especially for your first prep, whatever you're expecting going into it, throw it out the fucking window because it is so far beyond what you're going to expect. And I think it's just one of those things where you have to roll with the punches, let it all come, let it all happen organically, and take everything head on. That's really the best possible advice that I could give. I didn't know what to expect going into it, but I think you expect the extremes. Like, at least that was how I felt about it. I was like, oh my god, this is gonna be like insane. This is gonna be the hardest thing that I've ever done. I'm gonna be like so far mentally gone and tapped, and I don't even know if I'm gonna make it through this. This is gonna be such a test. But um, it's truly not like that at all. And of course, I didn't actually feel like I was not gonna make it through prep. Like I was so well prepared and in such a good mental space going into this. And that was one of the reasons why I actually did want to compete in bodybuilding in the first place. Uh, if you actually go back a couple episodes on my podcast, I do talk about the reason on why I actually wanted to get into bodybuilding so badly. Um, and it's primarily all about the mental test for me. So if you're curious about that, go back and listen to that episode. Um, but today we're talking about prep. So two days out, uh, I'm feeling great, I'm feeling good. You know, the hard work is essentially done, right? It's two days in. We're just coasting now, and it's, you know, practice, practice, practice as far as posing goes and bring the best package we can. Peak perfectly. That's the goal. I'm very confident that we will. Super confident in my coach, a lot of trust in him. It's been such an unbelievably great process with him. I'm honestly eternally grateful to have him in my corner and on my side, as well as both of my posing coaches as well. Those guys are fucking awesome. My prep, thanks to everyone, has just been very seamless. It's been amazing to have the support that I've had in my corner with all these guys. So, yeah, it's it's funny. So, just dating way back to the middle of January, that was when I started my prep. And I was itching for it. I was itching to go into prep. I was so ready for it. I was ready for months. We did like an eight or a nine-month build with my coach, like a pretty good like stint of an off season, packed on a ton of muscle mass, ton of size, uh, worked on the dynamics and just kind of creating and shaping the actual physique for a men's physique category, right? So that was obviously the goal. You kind of want to know what category you're gonna fall under and what you actually want to be going into and what suits your body type because those are the things that you want to work on to develop your body. So um, yeah, we had a good long off season and I was just itching to get into prep. It's so funny, right? You can just be so excited to get into it, and then within your first, you know, let's say like six to eight weeks, it starts to really catch up to you and it gets hard. And you know, you kind of ask yourself, Oh, like it's so funny. I wanted to get into this so badly. What was I thinking? But um, yeah, so we started prep. I was living in Bali at the time, it was great, it was awesome. I actually lived pretty far from my gym at that time too when I started prep. So I actually started with, I don't want to say a disadvantage by any means because it really wasn't, but I was a lot further away from my gym, which made time kind of consumption a lot more challenging because I just didn't have the same amount of time to kind of spread out and put across like my personal life, my work life, my prep life. Everything did become prep pretty immediately for me because of the time frames and time restraints that I had. So I started prep and immediately I was like, I'm gonna wake up at five in the morning every single day. I'm gonna go for my walk, I'm gonna go for like an hour-long walk at uh 5 30 in the morning. I'm gonna get like 7,000 steps in first thing so I can front load all my steps and I can space out my day. And I actually did that. I did that for a very long time when I was living, I was living about 20 minutes away from the gym. So it was like I couldn't really just go hop on a treadmill. That wasn't an option uh unless I wanted to drive really far. But the problem with that was since I was so far, there was more of a back and forth. It's like, okay, well, if I wanted to go do cardio in the morning, then I'd still have to drive back to my house. Then I would have to go back for my lift later, blah, blah, blah, etc., etc. Right. There's so many back and forths and trying to balance my work life on top of that. It was just a little bit crazy. So yeah, I would wake up at five in the morning, start going for these huge walks at 5:30 in the morning, get about seven, eight thousand steps in to start the day. And that was like that was great because I front loaded everything, made it a lot easier, but obviously that did kind of catch up to me pretty quickly, too, right? Like, you're kind of having these long days, especially from waking up early. And of course, I was still going to bed pretty early at that time. But as things kind of progressed and kept getting deeper into prep, my my clock just kind of adjusted a little bit. I was uh staying up a little bit later and then getting like not nearly enough sleep, and sleep's a pretty huge focus, of course, right? So um I ended up moving a lot closer to the gym. I got sick of being so far and just commuting nonstop and trying to find that kind of time balance. It was really, really hard after a while. So I moved super close to the gym. I was like seven minutes away. Uh, and then I started going in at like 6 a.m. The gym opened. I was there at 6 a.m. every single morning for cardio, and I just started religiously doing that. So um, that was kind of a fun little sort of test and obstacle to conquer there, just to even start my prep. It was like I was just so locked into that mindset though that I was gonna do whatever it would take, regardless. Like it didn't bother me to wake up at five in the morning and go out for a walk. On top of that, too, it was January in Bali, which is peak rain season, and it just fucking rained day after day after day after day. It just rained nonstop. I would be going out for walks in the pouring rain, getting soaked, or I would go out and it's not raining yet. Cool, oh a nice warm day, it's 27 degrees, you know, and then boom, huge, massive rainstorm blows in. You're you're stuck out there in a t-shirt and some shorts, like getting absolutely drenched, right? Either having to wait it out or you just walk through the rain, which honestly, I just started doing that pretty often because you get to a point where you just don't care anymore. It's like, well, I'm already gonna get wet, I'm not gonna sit here and waste my time trying to stay dry and then try to find a little window to run home. There's just no point. Like, just make the sacrifice, go for it, and uh make it work. So that was what I did. Um, and then yeah, moving to the moving closer to the gym that helps massively. Uh, and then there was this one day I was in the gym. This is like, this was a weird, weird thing. Like, I don't really ever get sick too often. I'm not the type of person who gets sick. I eat super clean, I'm super active, I'm very well hydrated, I exercise regularly. Like, I don't get sick often. And I was uh hitting this one push session this one day, and I was so dizzy, and I was kind of like thinking maybe this is kind of the the typical prep stereotypes that people talk about, you know, like a lot of people get like lightheaded, kind of like dizzy. A lot of some people will faint, like just weird things, kind of right, because just lack of nutrients and things like that, especially when you're pushing yourself to the extremes in the gym. But um, so that was weird. That was really, really weird. I was super dizzy, got home, and things just like progressively got so much worse. This was probably in like must have been week four, I bet, of prep, not even super deep into it. Um, but it was hitting me hard. Uh, and then I got home and I definitely knew something was wrong. So I had to actually call medics to my house. I had literally these doctors come to my villa in Bali, hook me up to an IV that they brought, pumped me full of a shitload of vitamins, electrolytes. Um, they took my temperature. I can't remember what my body temperature was, but it was absolutely through the roof. Blood pressure was super, super high as well, um, well above what it's meant to be on a regular level. And um, so they pumped me full of all this stuff. It's crazy what Bali has as far as access to like just medical ingredients, things, whatever you want to call it, to cure things that you have. Like, it's unbelievable. They can give you things that legally probably a lot of other countries would not give you or would not offer you without like prescription and stuff like that. So I was hella grateful for that. These guys showed up, spent like an hour at my house, hooked me up to like three or four different IV bags, just pumped me full of a bunch of stuff, immediately brought my temperature down, um, brought my blood pressure down, everything was great. I felt like a brand new person, like within probably five or six hours after they left. Like I quite literally felt incredible. Um, and that was thank God for that, because this really could have taken me out for like, you know, a good solid week of prep. And although it's in the earlier stages of my prep, being around four weeks in, one week that really throws you off can basically fuck your whole entire prep, right? And what you're working hard for. So sometimes it can be hard to bounce back from stuff like that. And a lost week, especially if you were already a little bit, let's say, behind or on a pretty tight time limit. I wasn't, thankfully. Like we were well ahead of it. The game, so I had you know more flexibility with this stuff to kind of get over these little hurdles if they did happen. But if you were someone who was really like in that time crunch, one week could absolutely ruin your entire prep. So um so grateful to have those guys show up to the house and and make me uh heal me basically, make me feel a lot better and get right back at it. Like within I think two days, I think I took one day off the gym and I was right back at it, like pretty much almost at 100% again. So um that was crazy. The thing about living in Bali as well was there is there was always endless travel. So every 60 days I had to leave the country. So trying to be in prep and travel all the time is not ideal, like, really truly not ideal at all. You do not want to travel, like one, you just don't feel like it. Two, as a bodybuilder, you are just so stuck in your ways when you have a routine. You don't want to do anything outside of your routine, like you just enjoy that structure in your life. I'm still like that to this day at the end of prep. I was like that at the beginning of prep, I was like that before prep. I will be like that forever after prep, it doesn't even matter. That is just, you know, when you when you're someone who's super invested into fitness or into bodybuilding, you have a routine, you love it, and you don't want anything to change. So when you travel lots, it throws off your routine and it throws it off pretty hard, right? You can you can be prepared, you can be as prepared as you can possibly be, which I always am, no matter what when I travel, but the unexpected happens. I was on this trip to Malaysia. I was just doing, I was like, I was in like again, mid-prep. We're probably must be in that six to eight week range or something like that at this point. And I got to make a visa run out of Bali to go to Malaysia. And I was like, fuck, I don't want to leave, like I just don't feel like it. I'm gonna book a flight out of Bali first thing in the morning, super early. I'm gonna fly back from Malaysia the very same day later that evening, and then I'm gonna do it in like a 13, 14 hour span. That was my big plan. And people do this all the time, so that wasn't like a crazy thing to do by any means. Malaysia is, I think, like two and a half to three hours away from Bali. Um, so of course, cool, have it all booked, amazing, and you don't think of complications because you expect everything to go perfectly. Well, first things first, I listen the morning of my flight out of Bali, I get an email nice and early in the morning. Your flight has been pushed from like it was like from like 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. And then my flight leaving Malaysia to come back to Bali was like 3 p.m. So there was gonna be a one-hour window where I would be able to catch this flight back home if everything went perfectly. And that was just bound not to happen. Like that was a given. I was like, am I really gonna be able to catch this within an hour? I think it was actually less than an hour now that I'm thinking about it. I think it ended up being 30 or 45 minutes. It was something ridiculous where I was like, there's just no way I'm gonna catch that. Like, I know it. So I was trying to like reschedule and cancel and do all these things, and of course, they're non-refundable tickets, so now you're losing money on all this kind of stuff. Um, the the flight got delayed even longer, so then there was really no way that I was making this other flight, regardless. It got delayed like an extra hour, so I completely missed that flight. Got stuck in Malaysia for the night, had to spend money on a hotel, had to buy another flight back home, lost hundreds of dollars there with that. Stress was high. Uh, I did bring meal prep with me to Malaysia, but I didn't really consider hey, maybe I'll get stuck there overnight, and I didn't have anything the next day, right? Thank God I always travel with my freaking food scale. I will always fucking travel with my food scale. And this is the exact reason because it's got me out of a pinch so many times. So I stay at this hotel, there's a continental breakfast the next day. I flew out super early in the morning. I was like, I need the fucking quickest flight out of here. I'm getting the fuck out of Malaysia, I'm going back home, I'm hitting a training session, I'm getting right back into routine. That was the plan. Uh, so I woke up nice and early, brought my food scale down to the continental breakfast, being the prepared guy that I am, thank God for that. Uh, and yeah, it was pretty shit. So if you've never been to like any Asian countries, really, there is so much fried food. Everything is fried. They love to douse everything in oil and deep fry it, and just it is not great for options. It's really not good. Their breakfasts are very different. They'll eat like rice and things like that for breakfast, which I mean was completely fine with me. Um, so there was there was rice and then there was boiled eggs. Scrambled eggs I didn't want to touch because I knew for a fact those were going to be cooked with a shitload of oil. So I took some of the boiled eggs, popped the egg yolks out of them, just ate the egg whites. I had some rice. I think I had some like uh some sort of toast of some kind there with jam. I was able to weigh everything, so all was good. I was able to have my breakfast the next day, and then I headed right back to the airport. Uh, hours and hours later, so I'm absolutely starving by the time I get back to Bali. And the way it worked out, lucky enough, even the day before that, my coach had offered me a free meal for the weekend because we were on a good track, on a good pace. Uh, we're good, we were good for a good little replenishment. So I got back to the airport. I couldn't even really like have this free meal. Like, I had these these plans of like, oh, I'm gonna go to like a you know, a good restaurant in Bali. There's so much good food there. I get back to the airport. The first thing I see is like Johnny Rocket's burger, and I just fucking went and devoured a double patty burger with some fries and just got food in me. I was so hungry, like absolutely starving. Because even that night before, when I was stuck in Malaysia, I couldn't eat anything. There was nothing near my hotel except for one restaurant, and everything was completely fried. And it was just, I just couldn't, like, I just knew it was the the guilt weighing over me on if I was gonna have that meal was ridiculous. It was too high. I was gonna one, I would just feel like shit, it would ruin my stomach, probably hunched over the shitter the whole time, anyways. So there was no way that was an option. So yeah, getting back, had a burger fries right away. Uh, and that was it. I was like, oh man, so it's just so funny. The the things that come up uh through travel, and as I say, through prep, like it is just unpredictable. That my my entire prep has been so funny, it has been absolutely hilarious. So um, the next one again, resorts. While we're on the topic of travel, is like I booked my flight home from Bali. I was gonna come home to Canada, I think like five weeks or six weeks early, or something like that, maybe five weeks early. And uh, for whatever reason, I don't know. I was so set on booking the shortest flight I possibly could. I didn't want to fly for for super long. I also didn't want that to interfere with my eating schedule and my prep. Like, like I said, I'm just so set in my routine and in my ways that I wanted to avoid anything that was gonna throw things off. So I booked this flight, which was supposed to be like this, you know, 21-hour flight, one of the shorter ones that I could get, because there's always a delay uh or always a layover, no matter what, wherever you go to Bali, there has to be a connection somewhere or two, depending what flight you book. Um, so I was intentionally trying to book this 21-hour flight. I was like, because all the other flights are 30 hours, and I'm like, there's no way in hell am I flying 30 hours back home in prep on low food at this time because that was close, you know, five weeks out. Like, there was just no way that I was gonna do that. And somehow I booked the wrong flight, didn't even notice it until like the day before I was leaving. I'm like, why am I flying for 31 hours? Like, what? What is this? What this is not my flight. And turns out somehow I booked the wrong flight. So I have now a 31-hour flight from Bali back to Vancouver. Um, with what did I have? I had two connectors. I think I flew to Taipei, spent like not long there, I think only an hour and a half, and then I flew from Taipei back to Vancouver, which is only a three-hour drive from my city, my home city. But I had a uh I had an eight-hour layover overnight in the middle of the night in Vancouver airport. And I had to wait for this this layover, even though it's only a 45-minute flight back to Kamloops, the city that I currently am in and my parents live in. This was like a whole big thing. So I ended up getting, you know, you're so close to home, but yet you have an eight-hour layover in this airport that's like so close to where you need to be. It was terrible. So yeah, I got there, spent the night overnight. The time changes completely backwards and completely different time zone. So it's the middle of the night in Vancouver. We're talking like 1 a.m., 2 a.m. 3 a.m. I'm just watching the clock tick down. I'm wired wide awake because the time zone in Bali, well, that would have been the morning, it just would have been a normal day. So no rest for me. I'm basically not sleeping at all. On my way there, I mean, I brought my meal prep on the plane. I had to turn down every single meal that was offered to me on the plane, and I the way it kind of worked out with these, I calculated it all with these time zone changes. Like all I could eat on this plane from Taipei to YVR to Vancouver was 150 grams of chicken breast. That's it, nothing else, no carbs, no rice, no potatoes, no veggies, no anything. I could only have 150 grams of chicken breast. So that is what I ate on a 13-hour flight from Taipei to Vancouver, and all I had was that and a little bit of hot sauce, and then I get to Vancouver, and then I'm stuck in the airport overnight. And oh man, like what an absolute disaster, right? So the funny thing about all of these things is like thinking back now to how much shit I actually did deal with through this prep is unbelievable. And I never batted an eye through any of it. I never questioned it, I never got down on myself about it, I never like stressed too hard about it. Yes, I was definitely stressed in some moments, but I never like freaked out about anything, got overwhelmed completely. I just, I just took everything as it came. I would have a little giggle to myself, I would laugh, I would think it's funny, and I would say, ha, this is just like, this is such a funny prep life. Like I just everything kind of became funny. And I think when you can keep yourself in a mindset like that and just embrace the process and embrace life and all the obstacles that come with it, you're gonna be a hundred times happier with everything that you're actually dealing with because you're out of a negative mindset. Like, what is a negative mindset gonna do for you other than cause you more overwhelm and more stress, which is not gonna be good for you and your cortisol levels and for you trying to lose body fat, especially in a bodybuilding prep. Um, so you know, it kind of goes to show you how mindset is truly just everything, right? So Bin Ho. Home now for the last four weeks or so, I guess. Um, a lot of other things have come up along the way. I've had some other personal issues and personal stuff going on that I've been dealing with, lots of added stress with that. Uh, visa applications for Australia, where I'm gonna be moving in a couple of months, tons and tons of stress with that. Uh, a lot of money thrown at them, too. You know, we're about 5k in on a visa application for Australia, so that's a huge thing. I've been really trying to mitigate my stress with that and just take it again as it is. That's life, right? Sometimes you gotta roll with the punches, especially when it comes to finances. Everyone gets stressed out about finances. But at the end of the day, if you're putting money towards something that you dream of doing and that you actually truly want to do in that alliance with your life, the life that you want to live, the life that you want to create, then it shouldn't stress you out, right? Because that's you taking a step forward in the right direction, regardless, right? Uh, other than that, too, we've got like I've had to deal with my taxes being back home. So we've got tax bills, um, being in prep as well. Business has slowed down for me because I've personally spaced myself out. I've had to take a little bit of a step back just due to completely my lack of time and energy that I have to put into it. I was always curious if this was going to affect me or not. I was like wondering if I was gonna be able to manage it because I've always heard from many, many, many other coaches. Every time I'm in a bodybuilding prep, my business suffers. You just don't have the same energy, you just don't have the same mental capacity, you don't have the same amount of time to put into it. And I always thought, uh, like, I don't know, I'm sure I can balance that. But honestly, every single person who ever told me that was absolutely right. Sometimes you do have to just take those sacrifices, understand that it's a short-term loss, right? And then, you know, when you come out of bodybuilding prep, you get to put everything back into your business. And not only that, it's gonna actually reignite that spark for me. Like, I'm very, very excited to take that next step in my business once bodybuilding or once prep is over, once the show day's over, and everything like that, and really just kind of focus a lot of my time and my energy back into my business again, really grow and uh change some lives, right? So super excited about that. But I think one of the most underrated things, maybe not underrated, I think a lot of people do experience it, but but something I maybe wasn't as prepared for was a lot of the mental breakdowns. So the reason I wanted to come into this, as I said at the start of the episode, was for the mental battle and the mental test that it was going to bring me. And I do talk about this again in my previous episode. You should go back and listen to that. It's a really good one, actually. Um, but I don't think I was super prepared for the mental breakdowns. I also didn't know if I they were going to affect me. Like I was in an amazing headspace coming into prep. And that was like, I couldn't have been in a better place coming into prep. And thank God for that. I'm so grateful for that. And again, as I said, that's exactly why I wanted to do my first show. Is like I was in such a good mental space and such a good physical space as well. Um, but yeah, honestly, mental breakdowns just they hit you randomly, they come randomly, your emotions run extremely high, you're more irritable, more things bother you, things are a little bit tedious. You get kind of emotionally, I don't know, I guess like annoyed a lot easier. Uh, and yeah, you just kind of you can get frustrated pretty easily. Like I could just be driving in the car on my way to the gym, whatever some thought or something hits me, or maybe even nothing at all. I'm just kind of spaced out and I can just start crying. I'll just literally start crying on my way to the gym. Just like, you know, not I'm not bawling my eyes out, but like you just start to tear up, and maybe some tears stream down your face a little bit. And it's just kind of like, holy shit, like I'm very emotionally overwhelmed or overstimulated right now. Like, and honestly, there were many, many times where that happened, like, or I would just be listening to a song, watching a reel on Instagram, and something that would just be like a trigger in something that will hit you, and for some reason the emotion just comes over you, and you just have like a little bit of a breakdown, and it's like you know, it was a lot, it really was. It's been a lot to deal with sometimes. Um, I went through like a pretty bad probably I want to say three to four weeks, even up to last week. I would say like this week, peak week now has been amazing. I've been feeling pretty great, but my emotions have run so high and been so up and down for the last probably four weeks now. I've had a lot of random little breakdowns, a lot of random cries for no reason at all. Food noise got super high through the roof, probably three, four weeks ago as well. Uh, where for some reason, every like I was I had never had cravings like this in my entire life. My cravings were absolutely through the freaking roof, like nearly uncontrollable. Um, and then to the point too, it's so funny. Instagram can read your mind. All of a sudden, I have all these recipes and delicious things popping up on my Instagram, and then I'm going down a rabbit hole, like obsessing over these food items that I like just can't have or that I'm looking forward to having outside of prep, which is crazy because for me, like my eating habits have always been pretty good. I've always eaten quite well. Uh, and I've never really had cravings, to be honest with you, not like to a crazy extent by any means. So this was like a really new thing for me to deal with. And funny enough, I was actually talking to uh Jackson, the the owner of uh Undefeated back in Bali, the gym that I went to. And Jackson, I was telling I was talking to him about going into prep, and I was like, Yeah, you know, like I'm really excited for the mental test of this and everything like that. And Jackson told me, he said, at 6 p.m., when you're alone at home and you're starving, but you've eaten all of your calories for the day, you're gonna learn really fucking quick which type of person you are. And that stuck with me. That absolutely stuck with me because I remember I was looking, I looked him in the eye when he told me that. And I said, Yeah, you're absolutely right, like 100%. And I'm excited for that test. Like that was actually what I was looking forward to was like, how hard is this gonna be mentally for me, and especially in a food aspect, because that's one of the harder things to control. Like, I feel like I can physically, physically show up and push myself everything single day, even when times are hard, things are tough. But like I knew, like when food's low and you're starving, like as you said, which type of person are you? You're gonna find out really fucking quick which type of person you are, right? So, you know, it's been yeah, it was exactly that. Like it there was times, 6 p.m., exactly that, 6 or 7 p.m. All my food is done for the day. And I'm like, holy shit, like I need something right now. Like, I am fucking starving right now. And it's weird because that's your body, right? Like your body is always adapting, adjusting, your hunger hormones, your leptin, and your ghrelin are all out of whack. Like you're getting signals that are just so messed up. Your leptin is basically depleted and gone. You're it's not telling your brain that you know at your full anymore, but your ghrelin is through the roof and it's screaming, hey, we need food, we need energy now. Like, give us food. And that just doesn't shut off. Like those signals are just firing and firing and firing. So it's funny because like that's truly like a hormonal and psychological game that you have to play, and you're not in control of that anymore because that is internally within your body. Our body is actually wired to do that, it's wired to send those signals, right? So I had a really, really hard, like I want to say probably two weeks, didn't last super long, but two weeks where it was fucking hard. And I was just dealing with that, and I was like, holy shit, like, is this what it's just gonna be like for the rest of it now? And I was a little like overwhelmed at that time. Um, so Jackson was absolutely right. However, you know, which type of person are you? Do not cave, don't cave, don't cave, don't cave. It is such a temporary sacrifice, knowing, hey, I cannot have any more food, but you really get excited to wake up the next day and then you almost want to eat food earlier. So if I wake up at 6 a.m., I'm ready for a big breakfast at 6 a.m. But I know I have to still space that out because if I waited all that night from 6 p.m. to you know the next morning at 6 a.m., now I've had a 12-hour fast because I haven't had anything and I'm starving. If I do it again, I'm gonna run into that same problem and then it's gonna hit 5, 6 p.m. again. I'm gonna have no food left, and then I'm in a cycle. So you really had to be smart and space these meals out and understand like how to keep yourself full and how to like not let that food noise get to you, right? So yeah, it's it's been a crazy journey. I mean, I've faced clearly a hundred different obstacles. This is the entire story of everything that I've kind of overcome through prep. And like I said, it's funny, I didn't realize how much obstacles I've truly overcame in this prep, but I I've enjoyed, I've enjoyed every single bit of it. And that's funny, that's crazy to say I've appreciated this journey so much. I've had an absolute blast through it. I've had so much fun, it has been the absolute best. It has been so worth it, and it's crazy to think that now we're at the tail end, you know, now the party's about to start here. We're two days out, and then it's, you know, get under the lights, do your thing, have some fun, learn lots, take it all in, soak it in, spend time with family, with friends, with your coach, you know, thank everyone and just have fun, have a good time. That's literally all it's about. The work is done, and now it's just time to show up and execute, right? So, gonna bring the best package that we possibly can. I'm very excited for it. Um, yeah, we're gonna see what happens here, and uh, we will keep you guys posted on that. We're gonna do a post-show podcast for sure. Uh, when I can kind of gather my thoughts, see how everything went, see how I'm feeling, what kind of happened with results, what I've learned, what we can kind of work on for the next time, and uh come out swinging for the fences next year in the second show that I do. We're gonna take definitely the rest of the year off. But next year, 100%, I will come back and do another show. There's no doubt about that. I've already loved this entire process. The fun part is really just beginning with getting on the stage and then uh looking forward to the next one already, right? So soak it all in, gonna be present all weekend, have some fun, and uh really just take it for what it is. So thank you guys so much for tuning in. That is my crazy prep story. If you're someone who has never prepped, if you're thinking about doing a bodybuilding show, do it 100%. I absolutely recommend it. But don't do it if you're not in a good mental space or if you are inconsistent already within your gym routine or within your eating habits. I'm gonna make that crystal clear. You have to be so locked in on your mindset and so locked in on your actual eating habits and your consistency within the gym and your true desire to want more for yourself and to push yourself to a physical limit, basically, to see how far you can take yourself. If you're doing it for any other reasons outside of these things or outside of actually having a true deep purpose within yourself, probably not the best thing to do, honestly. Just don't chase a physique, don't chase an Instagram picture, an Instagram reel. Do it for yourself. Do it if it's something you truly want to do, and if you want to push yourself to that kind of stage, then do it a hundred percent. You will not regret it if you are in a good headspace for it. That's it. That's all you guys. Thanks so much for tuning in. We'll catch you in the next one. Peace.