Congrats to our Beyond the Challenge male winner, Grant! 🎉 If you’re thinking Grant looks familiar YOU ARE RIGHT! He was one of our Winter 2020 Challenge finalists! He has officially completed the last three challenges with us and will never look back! Grant has totally transformed his life. From health setbacks to healthy habits, Grant’s story is a MUST READ. Grant, we are so blown away by your dedication to making CSE a lifestyle. You've got $2,500 cash and our limited edition Protein Flavor of the Month coming your way for a year!!

Congrats, Grant! 

My CSE-inspired transformation began in January of this year. I was overweight and out of shape in a way that I'd never gotten to before. I had a new baby, a desk job that had me sitting all day. I had started to worry that I'd missed my chance at getting to my ideal point of fitness. One morning, while just yawning and stretching in bed, I threw my neck out. I had to go to a chiropractor, get shock therapy, and a steroid injection to put myself back in order. That was a breaking point for me. It was a reminder that I was aging, and needed to take better care of myself.

So I started on the CSE diet, and I got serious about my workouts. I enrolled in my first CSE challenge and lost more than 20 pounds. In my second challenge, I felt my fitness increase. My weight loss slowed, then leveled out, while my body fat percentage continued to lower steadily.

Then it was summer and I started the most recent challenge. I decided that this time, I was going to try to build my strength. I increased my caloric intake and refocused my workouts specifically to build muscle. I drank tons of water and tried to stay consistent with my sleep. And I feel like I didn't see as much progress as I wanted.

I've stayed strict about only taking my pictures at the start and end of the challenges, to give myself a chance to hopefully feel 'wowed' by the change. And this time I started to really wonder if I was going to see any difference at all. Then I started to worry about it.

At around the three-quarter mark, I hit on an important realization: that it didn't matter if I could see the changes so much as that I could FEEL them, and that I learned to love the lifestyle. The nature of getting in shape is one of diminishing returns. You see the biggest transformation at the beginning, then it tapers off. But the real victory isn't in losing a ton of weight or cutting a ton of fat. It's in developing the lifestyle. 

This challenge marks the period in my life when I learned how much I ENJOY eating healthy and working out. It's not a matter of accomplishing short-term goals during challenges, but of embracing this new lifestyle.

I'm so grateful for CSE and what it'd done for me. Thank you, and I'll see you in a future challenge!

I worked out 5 days a week, usually at noon, but sometimes in the morning if I had a more busy day. I've been doing calisthenic workouts. All bodyweight, but working progressions to make the exercises more or less difficult depending on my strengths and weaknesses. I've been using the THENX app for my workouts, and have been focusing on progressing toward a few specific abilities to help direct my plan.

GET MORE DETAILS ON OUR NEXT CHALLENGE.