“Are you a man in a bikini?”
“What’s your ‘ladyboy’ name?”
Bodybuilder Doreen Yeo doesn’t feel angry when she receives such questions.
The 27-year-old does, however, get embarrassed, and can only bravely smile and walk away.
When she’s with her husband Mohamad Haris, they’ve been mistaken for a gay couple, and are often subjected to looks of disgust. They are so used to it that they aren’t bothered anymore, but Haris, 29, won’t hesitate to defend his wife if he has to.
“It’s ok if people are curious about her physique, and want to take photos with her, but some give offensive looks like she’s committing a crime. Sometimes I don’t tell her if I see people giving us weird looks,” said Haris, who works as a personal trainer just like Yeo.
Yeo added, “He’s with me most of the time and when people criticise me, he won’t be able to take it. He has seen the hardship I went through as a bodybuilder and thus knows what I have gone through.”
Poor self-image
Yeo’s buff physique may have earned her the gold medal in the open bodybuilding category at the 12th Southeast Asian Bodybuilding Championships in June, but she was not the most athletic person when growing up.
In fact, at 14, she was exempted from all fitness tests and classes due to a car accident which left her with a torn knee ligament and slipped discs in the neck and back.
By the time Yeo entered university, she was mocked for being too skinny: at her height of 1.64m, she weighed just a petite 45kg.
Then there was the pressure from her mechanical engineering course – but thankfully, she found her place of solace.
“I was studying all the time and I needed another channel to release stress. That was how I found the gym. I went to the one in school and started going every day, each time I had a break,” she shared.
She started reading up and bought protein powder to aid her workouts, putting on 8kg of muscle within a year, while her waistline remained unchanged.
“In university, students dress well but I was skinny, weak and didn’t have much friends, so I wanted to be different,” Yeo explained. “I wanted to become strong and toned. The desire to improve my poor self-image was what kick-started my passion for working out in the gym.”
Dealing with negativity
It was a poster for Muscle & Fitness War, a bodybuilding competition organised by NUS Health & Fitness Club, that gave her the idea to go into bodybuilding.
Fired up with the determination to compete and stand on stage one day, Yeo kept training even though she received nothing but negativity all around.
Her friends thought she was crazy, her colleagues at work said she wasn’t good enough and other gym-goers would ridicule her training methods.
Undeterred, Yeo continued to train while balancing her work schedule.
She became a trainer at True Fitness – where she met her husband – then a master trainer at Celebrity Fitness, before stepping out on her own as a freelancer this February.
Source: https://sg.sports.yahoo.com/blogs/fit-to-post-sports/singapore-bodybuilder-triumphs-over-public-scorn–image-issues-091034283.html
