WOW take a look at this transformation! We still can’t believe this change happened in just 7 weeks! She is BEAMING! Ashlee, we chose you as our female 7-week Spring CSE Challenge GRAND PRIZE winner!! You’ve just won yourself $2,500 plus our new Protein Flavor of the Month for an entire year! Swipe to read Ashlee’s story of persistence, hard work and dedication. She had started the CSE Challenge multiple times before going ALL IN this past spring. We couldn't be more proud of her for sticking it out and finishing strong! Have you started a CSE Challenge (or a few 😜), but haven’t ever quite reached the end? This is your reminder that you can fall down over and over, GET BACK UP and succeed! Sometimes you just have to wait for it to click! Never give up!

Congrats, Ashlee!

This was my 5th attempt at a Clean Simple Eats challenge and I am so proud and excited to have finished for the first time. I have had 4 kids in the last decade and have tried every popular diet, purchased multiple different meal plans, tried different proteins, and never finished a single plan. Not one. I would always give up halfway through a meal plan and have a million excuses as to why I couldn’t do it. I even tried Clean Simple Eats multiple times. I wondered what was wrong with me. I wondered why other’s could be successful and I couldn’t. I would often mentally best myself up after each failed attempt. I follow a lot of inspirational people on Instagram and saw a post one day about Thomas Edison and his 10,000 attempts to make the light bulb. This post talked about trying again and again until you succeed. It talked about how your failures in the past only teach you what to change and how to shape your choices for your next try. I decided in that moment that I wanted to be the type of person to fall down 700 times and stand up 701. I didn’t care if I had to attempt Clean Simple Eats 20 more times until I finished, I would try and try again until I finished the whole plan. So I tried again.

I choose to come back to CSE for two reasons: I have seen the plan work for other mother’s who have had babies and I knew if they could do it, so could I. Second, I am a foodie!! Out of all the plans I have tried (which are a lot) CSE food blows everything else out of the water! The food and protein is leaps and bounds better, even eons better, than anything else I have tried. And I am not just saying that to be nice! Being able to eat dang good food was a game changer for me and helped me curb my cravings.

A few things that helped me along the way: —the CSE journal. Writing my gratitude, affirmations and goals each day shifted my mental focus to focus on the positive instead of the negative. I would get so excited each day writing in the journal, it truly helped my mental game.

I experienced great results in the first two weeks. I was using a popular workout app and then had very little results in week 3 and felt what hit like a plateau. I researched “plateaus” in the CSE Facebook group. I saw a post by JJ Peterson where he said when he hits a plateau, he stays true to his nutrition and immediately switches up his workout and it’s something called “body shock”. So I tried that. I switched in week 4 to the Clean Simple Eats beginning workouts in the back of the cookbook and holy cow!! In week 4, I lost the most inches during that week than I did other weeks. I did another round of the beginner workouts in week 5, then in week 6, I switched to the advanced CSE workouts and lost the most weight in one week than I did previous weeks. I would be in a full-body sweat after each CSE workout and that didn’t happen with the other workouts I was doing. I could not believe how golden JJ’s advice was for me! It was a game-changer for me and made me feel like this process was an exciting science experiment on my body! I couldn’t believe how staying true to the nutrition and workouts completely transformed me. It was truly an incredible experience and one I will continue to use for the rest of my life.

Another thing that helped was staying true to nutrition and exercise through the weekend and holidays. In the past, I usually fell off the bandwagon over the weekend and on holidays or birthdays. I knew this time, to see true results, I needed to stay on track through those days and I did! It made all the difference.

Not only was this plan a win for me, but it was a family win. I told my kids they had to at least try everything I cooked and I have a son who is an EXTREMELY picky eater. After trying many of my meals, he decided he likes pineapple. This may seem small, but coming from a boy how hates all fruits and veggies, it was a huge win. My toddler was eating eggs with sweet potatoes and spinach and asking for more. Those small changes are things that have never happened in our household. I am so grateful for not only changing me, but the eating habits of my family. Thank you so much for truly changing my life and my habits. This was an experience I will never forget and I will cherish forever. By choosing to not give up and try again, I finally accomplished my goal. And you better believe I will continue the journey! Thank you from the bottom of my heart for creating this opportunity for me! Doing this made me realize I can ALWAYS try again and succeed.

GET MORE DETAILS ON OUR NEXT CHALLENGE.