Natural Bodybuilding, Figure and Fitness News

Model of Fitness Pulls Her Weight

 

Kim Ortiz feels the weight everyday. She feels the weight of being a good mother to her daughter Jessica, 14, and son Caleb, 11, and wife to her husband of 18 years, Ernest. She feels the weight of running her own business, C & J Traders of Moriarty. She feels the weight thousands of American working moms experience everyday, pressure to do it all. Or as she calls it, to be a super woman. She also feels the weight of a four-wheeler as she pulls it with her body on her farm near Willard as part of her training. Ortiz is preparing for the OCB Natural Southwest Classic, a figure and fitness competition, held June 6 at the KiMo Theatre in Albuquerque.

Download the EXACT same Figure Competition Diet used by Figure Pros. Figure Competition Diet

For the past 12 weeks of intensive training before the competition, she spends 45 minutes a day lifting, targeting certain parts of her body, and no more than 30 minutes of cardio five days a week. Her life has also changed, in more ways than one, by what she calls clean eating.

Ortiz knows a thing or two about coming back.

She has lost every hair on her body three times due to an autoimmune disorder, the first time at the age of 21. Eight months into her marriage, while studying civil engineering at the University of New Mexico, Ortiz decided she’d compensate for her hair loss. That’s where fitness came into play. She attributes her hair re-growth to eating clean. In other words, cutting out drinks with artificial sweeteners, and eating frequent, healthy meals. She eats every two to three hours, loads of veggies, sweet potatoes and whole chicken breasts.

Within three weeks of eating clean, she started seeing her eyebrows and lashes come back, and within three months she could go out in public without a wig.

“It was amazing,” she said. “Eating clean is so much more than looking good. I just turned 38, and I look better now than I did when I was 20. But I don’t just look better, I feel better.”

Ortiz wasn’t always the fitness model she is today.

“That’s what I’ve learned, everybody’s got something,” she said. “A lot of times it’s about weight. In high school, I was the girl who was a little overweight and unpopular. But I was standing in a bathing suit and heels at my first competition when it all of a sudden hit me. I’m not the fatso, bubble-butt I’ve been called all my life.”

Those names still haunt her from time to time, she said, but it’s what keeps her going. The secret to doing it all, is to find happiness within oneself, she said.

“In order to be the best wife, mom, friend, whatever it is, you have to make yourself happy,” she said.

For her, it’s taking 20 minutes for herself in the morning to run in her horse training arena, and spending time with her family hiking, riding and training horses, anything outdoors. Also, setting goals and reaching them, which is why she competes.

In the 12 weeks before a competition, Ortiz works out five days a week at Lifetime Fitness in Moriarty, with little to no cheating. She also gets a workout in her daily life. At the business she runs with her husband, Ortiz lifts hundreds of heavy hay bales and feed sacks. At home, she runs in their horse arena, and her husband made her a harness to pull their four-wheeler like in a “World’s Strongest Man” Competition on ESPN.

At the competition in June, she’ll be competing in fitness model and figure. She throws her own spin on the competition by designing and sewing her own fitness attire. In September, in honor of her martial arts background she made an outfit that said Knock Out Fitness, KO for her initials, and wore boxing gloves. For this competition, she and her daughter sewed cut-off jean shorts to biker shorts and will compete to “She’s Country” by Jason Aldean.

Her hard work is paying off. Since her first competition in 2002, she has about eight trophies for fitness and figure competitions. She won the American Natural Bodybuilding Conference junior division national title 2003 in both overall fitness and figure.

It seems Ortiz has it all together now, which she attributes to healthy eating habits, exercise and the confidence that comes with both. Her children are also an inspiration to her.

Jessica, her daughter, also lost all her hair, which has begun to grow back with help from clean eating.

“My daughter said to me, ‘It’s just hair.’ It’s one thing when it happens to you, but when it happens to your child it’s just devastating. But she was right, and it was so inspiring to me. That’s our philosophy; it’s just hair,” Oritz said.

Source - www.emtelegraph.com