“If I can do this, what else can I do?” A Message from Neghar Fonooni
Neghar Fonooni is a fitness professional on a unique mission. Unlike most fitness models and health coaches out there, Fonooni is not posting perfectly photoshopped images of herself — rather, she does just the opposite.
By exposing her “off-season” bikini body to her followers, she allows people to see the real thing. What real fitness models look like. In real life.
Neghar Fonooni is the founder of the EAT, LIFT, & BE HAPPY website and blog. She initiated a girls gone strong movement, which supports women striving to achieve their fitness and life goals simultaneously.
Fonooni believes that diet and excercise should be stress free and drama free. Though her loving and passionate writing style, Fonooni communicates a message of self confidence, will power, and determination in her blogs. Her blog and video topics include strength training, mindful eating, and intuitive exercising.
Photoshop, plastic surgery, and corrupt advertising has skewed our perception of what it means to be “healthy”. Female beauty, as portrayed by popular media sources, has been reduced to nothing more that a thin-toned-hemogenic ideal. Fonooni’s website, movement, and social media platforms are intended to re-educate and redefine female health.
Fonooni sends a powerful message of confidence, body-love, and positive self-image in her writing. Her repetitious rhetoric engages her audience and her use of second person creates a call to action. By promoting women to embrace their insecurities, she sets them free from shame and self hatred.
“My darling, extraordinary, powerful woman in arms, I want you to open up, release the shame, and detach from the story that you’re meant to play small and keep quiet about the very real, very nasty, very normal aspects of being a women in today’s world…
I want you to give yourself permission to be exactly who you are — no apologies, no excuses, no asterisks.” -Neghar Fonooni
“We’re learning that we can help each other talk about periods and cellulite and sex and trauma without shame. I want you to affirm that doing so is an act of defiance against a dark and dangerous force that commands that you stay small at any cost so that you can fit neatly within it’s standards”- Neghar Fonooni
The idea that you need to starve, perform endless hours of cardio, or deny your body in any…is NOT healthy. Fonooni aims to shift the female mindset on excercise from being something you need to do into something you really, truly, genuinely enjoy doing.
When I first began my bikini fitness journey, my coach asked me what my fitness goals were.
My mind went blank as I tried to come up with something unique, something admiration worthy. Something that wasn’t overly cliche or slightly self-depreciating, like the magazine voices cheering me on to ‘loose-weight’, ‘get skinny’, ‘be hot’.
After some very long seconds, I meekly declared my goals were to “feel confident in a bikini” and “be able to do a pull-up”.
After less than 3 months of dedicated strength training, I am proud to announce that both of those goals have been achieved. As my training has progressed, so have my goals. Ambition and drive to hit new personal records in the gym have motivated me in all other aspects of life.
During a you-tube interview with Neghar, she states “The first time I did an unassisted pull-up…I thought, ‘If I can pull myself up and over this bar, what else can I can I do?”
My body and goals undergo continual progress and change. Doing ‘one pull-up’ has become ‘five’. ‘Feeling confident in a bikini’ has turned into ‘getting a 6-pack’.
New goals have emerged from the progress I made along the way. Goals I would have never even thought of setting, such as like maxing out my deadlifts, bench-presses, and squats.
Questions I have learned to ask myself during my bikini fitness journey.
What life goals do you want to achieve? (Both short and long term)
How do your fitness goals line up with your other life goals and aspirations?
What goals have you already achieved? And what goals are you currently working on, that you never even previously dreamed of doing?
By asking these questions, we force ourselves to take the time to honor the little achievements made along the way. Progress photos have taught me a great deal about the importance of tracking small changes. No one can see the day-to-day changes happening on themselves. Everyone hates taking that initial progress photo in the beginning of your journey, because we all just want to get to the end.
Taking snap shots of your life work in a similar same way. Marking the starting line is essential to noting the distance travelled at the end.
“In The Princess Bride, Vizzini (the Sicilian criminal mastermind hired by Prince Humperdinck to kidnap and kill Buttercup) told his cohorts Fezzik and Inigo to go back to the beginning if they ever got into trouble. So I went back to the beginning, because often times the beginning lays the foundation for the rest of the adventure.” — Neghar Fonooni
Remember your beginnings. The place where you started got to where you are now. The place you are now can take you any destination you choose. Make sure to acknowledge and prize each beginning so that you can amaze yourself at the end.
