Matt Manning from Xenia, Ohio entered and won a 12-week fitness competition

May 14, 2014 16:19 GMT  ·  By

It’s never too late to change: change your circumstances, change your diet, change your body or, in short, improve something about your life. With proper motivation, everyone can do it, as the case of a 45-year-old engineer from Xenia, Ohio can confirm.

After a series of health scares, Matt Manning finally understood that, unless he did something to lose weight and get healthier, he would be in serious trouble in the long run. His luck had it that he also found the perfect thing to motivate him.

That was a 12-week fitness competition initiated by Bodybuilding.com, which aimed to find one man and one woman whose physical transformation from flab to fab was the most spectacular. It was aptly named the “$100,000 [€72,907] Transformation Challenge” and, as you probably guessed already, it awarded half of that amount to the female and male winner.

Matt happened to be one of the two lucky ones, as the Yahoo! News video report embedded below can confirm.

Of course, shedding 40 pounds (18 kg) and getting muscle definition implied a lot of effort and dedication on his part but, in the end, he came out as double winner, becoming the owner of a superhero body and richer by $50,000 (€36,453).

He says he intends to use the money on treating his wife – healthy, handsome, and loving man, imagine that. He credits his wife and his kids with playing the biggest part of his weight loss success story, because they supported him through thick and thin.

“I had had a few health scares, where I passed out, had to go to the ER by ambulance. Then also had some chest pains like six months later and then my dad had to have a heart valve transplant. So that really woke me up,” Matt says of what initially got him thinking about changing his lifestyle.

There is no “secret” for his new muscular figure; he lost the weight and gained muscle mass by following the classic “recipe” for success, which includes only one ingredient: hard work. Basically, he overhauled his diet to include only healthy, nutritional foods, cut out fatty, salty foods, sweets, and snacks, and hit the gym regularly every day.

“They said I look like a superhero now [laughs] which is, when they saw the after pictures. My daughter saw the after pictures she’s like, ‘Man you look miserable. I’d be miserable too if I looked like that’,” Matt says.