Blake Gauthier has been through a lot of ups and downs in his life.
Gauthier is a 47-year-old heart attack survivor and a man who has shed more than 200 pounds of fat since 2018.
All that hard work paid off on the weekend as he was crowned the winner in the new radical body transformation category at the Toronto Pro Show over the weekend.
"I am still in shock, it feels surreal," said Gauthier.
"I have gone through two body transformations. I had lost a lot of weight and then I gained it back and having health issues and lost it again so when I first lost the weight almost 10 years ago I thought about trying to do a bodybuilding show back then and it just feels like 10 years of work I have finally actually done that. I just cannot believe that I was actually a part of that and something on my bucket list I was able to check off."
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Gauthier was among 15 bodybuilders invited to compete in the unique category. He says he felt a unique feeling of comradery with all the competitors due to all the obstacles all of them had overcome to get on stage.
"All of us had the same sort of experiences having gone through some sort of a health scare or some sort of a trauma that caused us to gain the weight in the first place and then to lose it," he said.
The judging system for this category was different too.
"When you were on stage there were two big video screens on each side of the stage and so when they were giving a little bit of our story they were actually showing our pictures of what we looked like before," Gauthier explained.
"What it was, there were 15 points based on our story from me going through my heart attacks, hurting my knee and the amount of weight you lost. Everything like that. The other 15 points was based on how you looked at that moment on stage."
Gauthier is hoping the win can help boost his personal training business so he can help others.
"With this having won the event I have actually have had a couple of new clients sign up just in the past couple of days," he said.
"I want to help other people reach their dreams because I know what it takes to make a transformation like this, it is not easy to do and if I can help people reach their goals, that is what I am trying to do right now."
