Asheville dentist and mother of three, Amy Haldeman, took home six trophies at her first bodybuilding competition, the Carolina Supernatural Body Building Championship in Spartanburg.

by Jess McCuan   .   photos by Anthony Bellemare

A year ago, Amy Haldeman couldn’t do four push-ups. But then what started as an effort to help a friend lose weight turned into a six-day-a-week, gut-busting workout routine that culminated in a bodybuilding contest this spring. “I’ve never really lifted weights,” says the Asheville dentist and mother of three. “Then, I was just amazed at how strong I was getting.” Apparently, everyone else was too. At her first bodybuilding competition, the Carolina Supernatural Body Building Championship in Spartanburg, South Carolina, in mid-June, Haldeman cleaned up, taking home six trophies—two in the women’s heavyweight class and one in the master’s category, plus three awards for “best poser.” “I think everybody who knows me would be shocked,” she says of her recent, wildly successful foray into bodybuilding.

In the beginning, her worst fear was that she wouldn’t look feminine. Last April, Haldeman, 37, agreed to start weekly workouts with a friend who needed to trim a few pounds. She had taken up running the year before but had quickly grown bored with it, so she started working with trainer Anthony Tiller at Underdog Performance and Fitness Training in Arden. Tiller, a longtime bodybuilder, puts his clients through unconventional workout routines that involve skateboards and obstacle courses and lifting water jugs instead of dumbbells. One day, Haldeman was intrigued when a few of Tiller’s female bodybuilder clients started talking up their training routines for the Carolina Supernatural contest. “My vision of a bodybuilder is a huge, bulky manly-looking person,” she says. “But then I saw these women—they looked feminine and they were skinny. I said, if I can look like that and be a bodybuilder, I want to do it.”

She started leaving for the gym at 5am. Occasionally, her three-year-old daughter Ella tagged along and played with toys or watched videos. “It was definitely crazy,” Haldeman says. Even crazier was the fact that she had to give up her favorite foods—pizza, hamburgers, French fries and donuts, all loaded with carbs, a no-no on a bodybuilder’s diet. At her dental office during the day, her colleagues teased her. “Here’s my five carrots and half a cup of cottage cheese,” she says. “That was hard.”

Instead of bulking up like she thought, she dropped ten pounds in a few months and looked altogether more trimmed and toned. Haldeman says she liked watching her body change but was a little unsettled by the pre-competition rigmarole, which involves painting your body with layers of bronze paint and then, on contest day, coating yourself in Pam cooking spray. “The Pam—it was just cracking me up,” she says. “I cook with the stuff…Seriously, I’m gluing, I’m Pamming, I’m spraying. What did I sign up for?”

In the end, her perseverance paid off, and she celebrated after the Supernatural contest by eating a whole ten-inch pizza (plus two Krispy Kreme doughnuts the next morning). Was it all worth it? Absolutely. “I’ve learned so much about myself,” she says. “Now I feel in my heart that I can do anything.”