I am pleased to announce the winners of the Body Transformation Challenge III:  Team Challenge.  Congratulations to all our winners.  It was a very close competition.  Your results have been the best that BTC has ever seen!  You guys have inspired me tremendously.  I know it took a lot of hard work and dedication to achieve the results that you did.  You guys have a lot to be proud of.

Thanks to everybody who participated and donated in the challenge.  I hope your participation in the challenge was a positive experience.  Please continue your training and keep your journals posted.  I look forward to your continued success.

And now for the winners...

Congratulations to everyone who participated in the BTC III: Team Challenge.  I'm happy to see so many impressive transformations.   To be honest, I was a bit reluctant to post up my results because everyone had such amazing photos!

CONGRATULATIONS

for completing the BTC III:  Team Challenge.  Thank you guys for help making it the biggest challenge we have had so far.  I hope you guys got alot out of participating in the challenge.  I look forward to seeing your after photos and results!

Deadline to Submit After Photos and Results:

The deadline is 11:59:59pm Sunday, July 11th.  Please get these in as soon as you can.

Photo courtesy of WhirlingPhoenix

I've been seeing some downtrodden responses in the forums to the effect of, "my training is not working."  In light of this, I thought it would be helpful to address some common, but overlooked mistakes in training.

To begin, here are a couple excerpts from one of my favorite books, Maxwell Maltz's Psycho-Cybernetics that gives good insights into how we can use setbacks and negatives to our advantage and help guide us toward our intended goal:

Image courtesty of The U.S. Army

If you've ever started an exercise or training routine, you know how frustrating it can be when your gains start to slow down and stagnate. Maybe the scale shows that you have stopped losing weight, or you're unable to add more plates to your bench press. Whenever we stop making gains, we call this reaching a plateau. Plateaus, in any area of life can be discouraging. No matter how hard we train, it seems we're not making any progress. But like a mini peak on a mountain, there is always a way to get to the summit.

Progress Photo - 5/26, start of week 7

Stats

Weight - 161 lbs

Going off raw diet

I went off the raw diet after week five.  I was not able to meet my daily caloric requirements while on this diet.  I was losing weight and had dropped to a low point of 150 lbs at one time.  This included a drop in bodyfat% as well.  However, the drop in weight was too drastic and out of line with my goal of gaining body weight.  So in the best interest of my goals, I decided to let go of the diet and allow myself to eat meat products and cooked foods.