After just two weeks of disciplined eating and training, I was the slimmest I'd been since high school. Still, my thinner figure came at a price. I could not go five minutes without thinking about food, and by week four, it was physically painful to be in the same room as someone with pizza. My mood swings were out of control --like, I would cut a b*tch for cake and I screamed at a friend for telling me to turn right instead of left at stop sign...

"This is normal," Rockwell assured me. Basically, I was burning more calories than I was eating. My body was shedding fat. And my hormones were out of control.

For weeks, I agonized about a wedding I'd committed to attending with my boyfriend. It was the first time I would meet almost all of his extended family, and I had to be on my best behavior (which is difficult when you're ready to murder your beloved for eating a a French fry).

When it finally arrived, it was every bit as painful as I'd expected: I avoided the open bar, buffet-style dinner and cake table all night and instead choked down food from the premeasured Tupperware containers that I'd smuggled in.

To distract me from the fact that I was one of the few sober people at the party, I hit the dance floor hard. But after almost two hours straight of dancing, my body begged for food and I'd already finished my allotted food for the night. There was nothing else to do but dance through my hunger and exhaustion.

Finally, my boyfriend announced we were heading back to the resort/casino where we were staying for the evening. I couldn't wait to crawl into bed. But instead of going back to our room, we hit the slots with the other wedding guests. Everywhere I looked, posters of mouthwatering dishes taunted me. Even the overwhelming scent of cigarette smoke couldn't drown out the kitchen's fumes. I felt pathetic as I fought back tears and begged my boyfriend to return to our room so I could sleep through the hunger. Without judgment, he escorted me back to our room while I shielded my eyes with my hands the entire time.

If there's one thing you become when training for a bikini competition, it's a hermit. Restaurants play host to temptations, and bars teach you that soberly watching your friends get sloshed is not that much fun. So while my friends hit the Hollywood bars, I stayed home and prepped my meals for the week.

In the beginning, everyone was supportive. My friends would tell me how proud they were, and how much they admired my commitment -- especially when I started to dramatically slim down. While going out wasn't necessarily a huge part of my life before, suddenly I was much more aware of how much I was missing out on. And so were my friends. "We're so over this," a girlfriend said to me as I skipped out on yet another girl's night out. "We want fun Jess back."

Five weeks into my training, the loneliness set in. Friends no longer called and suddenly they were more annoyed by my dedication than proud. My dwindling friendships took a serious toll on my mental health, and there were a few nights I regretted ever committing to this.

When I wasn't at work or prepping meals, I was at the gym. To slash my body fat, Rockwell had me doing 40 minutes of fasted cardio in the mornings before work, plus an hour of strength training every day. My usual wake up time of 8:30 a.m. turned into 6 a.m. -- and I am not a morning person.

At week 13, she added high intensity interval training (HIIT) to my daily workouts, in the form of 25 minutes of treadmill sprints, to really get the fat cells burning. I was now hitting the gym three times a day, five day a week. Needless to say, the fitness center's staff and fellow gym rats became my new best friends.

Every night, I fell into bed exhausted, dreading my morning wake-up call.

Despite the challenges, my changing physique was giving me a whole new confidence, and in the bikini competition world, you need that -- especially when posing. Posing is one of the most important aspects of the bikini competition, and according to two-time Mr. USA winner and IFBB Bodybuilding Pro, Tamer El-Guindy, it can make or break your placing. "The girl next to you can have better abs, tighter glutes and chiseled quads, but if she doesn't know how to pose, she could come in dead last," El-Guindy shared at a posing workshop.

So, to keep myself from looking like an idiot, and to give myself a fighting chance at placing in the competition, I turned to one of the most successful posing coaches in the business, Kenny Wallach.

I showed up to my first posing session in Spandex shorts and a sports bra. (My gorgeous Angel Competition Bikini suit hadn't arrived yet.) Wallach took one look at me and said, "Are you wearing anything beneath your shorts?" Flustered, I informed him that I was rocking some bikini-cut underwear. "Good," he responded. "Take off your shorts."

I consider myself a fairly confident and open person, but when a complete stranger tells you to drop your pants (especially a guy), it can make you feel uneasy. "I'm a professional, honey," Wallach added, as if reading my mind. "This is strictly professional. I need to be able to see which poses are going to be the most flattering for your body."

I would spend the next six weeks twisting my body until my spine felt like it was going to break, flexing until I felt like I was going to pass out and practicing posing stances for an hour twice a day. The cherry on top? No one tells you that posing is as rigorous on the body as an hour-long workout, as multiple hours flexing and holding certain positions strains, stretches and works the muscle. There were mornings it was near impossible to get out of bed, because my back literally felt like I had been hit by a semi. But, as the weeks drew nearer to the show, my poses became stronger and more confident, and I finally started to see a competitor staring back at me.