I promise not to drag on about my entire weight history. Here are the basics.
I started out as a relatively skinny lad:
I became overweight for the first time in high school. By the time I reached adulthood, I vacillated wildly within a range between 230 and 315 pounds for the next 25 years. When my wife Erin and I met we were both overweight, but still blissfully happy (and yes, I married UP in a big way).
After getting married, we ate out….alot. We soon packed on enough pounds to land ourselves in the morbidly obese category. This is us at a church Christmas banquet in 2005.
In 2009 Erin lost about 100 pounds. And 11 years later, those pounds have never returned! She solved the riddle, I did not. This is us at Christmastime in 2010.
In fact, not only did she figure out how to lose all of her excess weight and keep it off, she eventually became a Weight Watchers meeting leader, weight loss coach, and even a spokesmodel for Weight Watchers Canada.
Needless to say, this led to a certain “mismatch” between us. I saw that Weight Watchers worked perfectly for Erin because she is a natural “rule follower”. So much of her identity is based on her “yes” being “yes”. She has naturally high integrity, including with promises to herself. Given this constitution, she enjoyed the flexible boundaries that WW provides. That’s not to say that losing and maintaining a 100 pound weight loss has been “easy” for her; I still watch her put time and effort in every single day. She just found a program that naturally fit with her personality.
Needless to say, our difference in size (and therefore divergent underlying food beliefs and practices) has caused a good deal of conflict for us over the years. It was difficult for her to watch me try and fail again and again and again.
Then in 2016 I discovered a number of abstinence-based programs that mostly follow the 12 Step Model. A few books also helped me. I promise to go into more detail about this in my blog. By 2017 I had lost 100 pounds; more than I had ever lost in my life. Here is how I looked at Christmas in 2017.
Finally, I matched my wife. Finally, I had some peace with food. For the first time I had found a way of eating that I could sustain…if I remained willing to follow it.
Unfortunately, after a year of living this way I began to falter. You can read my post-fall analysis here. I began having lapses; small ones at first. However soon enough, the pull of sugar and flour took hold in my heart once again and I faltered. I gained my weight back. Every pound. My newfound joy was reduced to pain.
Now I have once again taken on my “successful” way of eating, but with a few tweaks. The first is that I am bringing God into my journey. I have always been reluctant to do this for some very specific reasons. One is that in hindsight I realized that I wanted to lose weight for some pretty worldly reasons. I realized that my focus was not on God or his glory, but on my own. It is hard for the Almighty to support an effort that is made against the flesh if it is only designed to feed some other craving of the flesh (James 4:3).
Along the way, I have learned a good deal from the scriptures about this whole topic. In fact, in the past six months I have written more than 40,000 words of material about the subjects of the flesh, a biblical view of excess weight and overeating, and a number of other similar topics. It is my desire to share these with you as I fight my own battle. Won’t you join me on this journey?
I believe that my flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.