I grew up being an overweight kid pretty much my entire childhood, and I was convinced that was just how I was born, so there was nothing I could do about it. In my senior year in school, I started kickboxing and working out, so I had quite a transformation and was finally living a relatively healthy life. However, after starting my professional career, spending countless hours at my desk and living a pretty sedentary lifestyle, in my late twenties going to the gym for a quick workout just stopped being enough. The downward turn came when I suffered a shoulder injury and spent over half a year working with a kinesiologist. I had gained quite a bit of weight, and started dwindling back to being overweight, feeling unhealthy and being disappointed with my body, so I had a decision to make. Do I settle for a life of being overweight, eating unhealthy foods, and neglecting my health or do I take control? I decided to use my free personal training session to see what can be done, this is where I met my trainer Cameron and entered the 60Day.

After talking to Cameron and setting my goals, we set a clear action plan for my workout routine and nutrition. My goal was to get in the best shape of my life and feel the best that I ever have. It was ambitious to say the least as I had almost 17% body fat, and was aiming to reduce it to 3%. We set out to vastly improve my diet, increase my workout intensity, normalize my workout routine and track my sleep to ensure that I was recovering adequately. Through personal training sessions with Cameron and all of the resources available at Life Time, we explored various workout routines that were personalized for my body and goals, which I never stumbled upon, even after years of reading online articles and guides. We broke my nutrition down to the macros, to see what I was lacking and what I need to reduce. However, with a busy lifestyle and non-stop demands at work, I found that eating right is not always easy, this is why I was glad that Life Time had a wide range a of supplements that helped me close this gap in my nutritional requirements. Everyone at the LifeCafé was super helpful in determining exactly what products I needed to hit my daily macro goals.

The toughest part of the challenge was the sustained discipline of keeping on track. Life happens; birthday parties, holidays, late work days, business trips, vacations, you name it. The most important part is to have a clear vision of your goals, and reasons behind them, this is the perhaps the most important thing I learned from Cameron. Once you set those and commit, Life Time takes care of the rest. By sticking with the program, eating correctly, and working out almost every day, I was able to reduce my body fat percentage from 16.8% to 5.4% and weight from 192 to 173 pounds. More importantly though, I have never felt better. Any kind of back and joint pains that I used to have at the end of the day, are gone. Clothes that haven’t fit me for years are finally mine again and I have more energy than ever. I was worried about my injury coming back with all this training, but by following a proper workout plan set by Cameron, I avoided this and I feel much stronger now.

Now where to go from here? Even though the challenge is over, the lessons have stayed. I am still on track to reach my goal of 3%, however, I have come to realize that it is just a number. It is more about your health, energy levels, satisfaction with your body and how you FEEL, rather than an arbitrary number on a machine. I hope to keep the lessons from this challenge for the rest of my life and stay on track, no matter what comes at me in the day to day. I do not see the end of this challenge as a finish line, but as a beginning of a healthier and better life. Thank you Cameron and thank you Life Time!