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Meet the British Instagram fitness sensation who was overwhelmed by panic attacks and starved herself by eating only 300 calories a day – all in a desperate attempt to stay lean and trim because she had huge insecurities about her body.
But the young woman has turned over a new leaf and has gained more than 6kg in muscle by eating more and training less.
As a teenager, student and YouTuber Lauren Tickner from Surrey in England was determined to become slender and put herself through gruelling workouts in the gym seven days a week. She’d been bullied in her early teens for being overweight and hated her appearance, so went to extreme measures.
“I was doing 50 minutes of HIIT [high-intensity interval training] on the cross trainer seven days a week, and eating barely anything,” Lauren says.
But when she was 16, Lauren started having daily severe panic attacks. That’s when she decided to make a change and researched ways she could gain weight in a healthy way, which led her to try out weight training.
At just 44kg, the 20-year-old gradually started to increase her calorie intake to 800 a day and then to 1 200 a day. She now hits the gym five to six times a week and mainly focuses on weights with an occasional cardio session.
“I track my macros [macronutrients: fat, carbs and protein] and train in a way that really is going to maximise my strength, so I stick to really heavy weights and do a low number of reps,” Lauren says.
For Lauren, who has more than 107 000 followers on Instagram and 15 000 subscribers on YouTube, weight training has given her body a shape she’s totally in love with. She also tries to emphasise the importance of people taking care of their mental and physical health.
Lauren even created her own hashtag on Instagram, “#StrengthFeed in order to encourage people to share their journey on becoming physically and mentally fit.
“If you don’t take care of your mental health your life in general will suffer,” she says.
Sources: Magazine Features
