In 2008 I finally dragged myself to the doctor for a very, very reluctant five-year checkup.
I walked out with a type 2 diabetes diagnosis, a weight north of 450 pounds, a size 56 waist, and 5X clothes I could only buy at the big-and-tall store. And somewhere in there, between the numbers and the diagnosis, I decided it was finally time to focus on my weight.
Quick note: I’m telling my story, not prescribing a plan. Diabetes, fasting, and major weight loss belong in a conversation with your doctor. This is simply the road I walked.
I had never been a dieter. Not once in my whole life. I’d watched my weight go down, then back up, then down, then back up — and I’d come to believe the yo-yo was worse than just being overweight. So I’d stopped trying. I remember my mom feeding me salads back in high school; I was overweight then too. I think I was on target with my weight at about four years old, and after that I was more than I should have been for most of my adult life. People called me “big guy” — a nice way of saying fat guy.
I hated being overweight.
Caring for everyone but me
But my life was full. Full of caring for other people. My wife. My two boys — I loved being a dad. The ministry. The mentoring. All those age groups over twenty years — the college students, the young adults, the adults. I did everything in twenty years of pastoral ministry except sit in the senior pastor’s chair.
And now I was confronted with a reality I couldn’t spin: in all those years of caring for other people, I had not been caring for myself.
The marriage was terrible at this point. We were one year away from my ex-wife running off with another man. She often made comments about how unattractive I was, what a horrible lover I was, what a terrible spiritual leader I was for the family. Every one of those cut deep. But they also did something I didn’t expect — they lit a fire.
The first thirty-five pounds came off easily. All I did was cut out sugar, sodas, candy, and some of the potatoes. I walked around the block maybe once a week. Then I hit the threshold: am I really going to start working on this more?
The crash
That’s when the ultimate crash happened. The marriage went. My emotional and personal world went with it. And the 2008–2009 real estate downturn wiped out the whole business. I was broke and living in my truck.
But I kept working on the weight — because now I was more motivated than ever to not be the terrible, overweight guy on top of everything else.
The voice in the mirror
One morning I was at the gym, taking a shower, because that’s where I went to take a shower. I was shaving. And I realized I wasn’t really looking at myself in the mirror. It was the weirdest thing. I took a step back and realized — no, I didn’t want to look at all of me. My face was round as a ball, and so was my body. And as I looked at myself, I heard a voice in my head say:
I hate you.
And I responded back, in my own head: Yeah, I hate you.
Then I caught it. Wait — do I hate myself?
The person I’d become was somebody I hated. And I thought, well, that’s not a good thing.
The turn
I came to grips with the fact that I was not caring for myself. In fact, I wasn’t loving myself at all. And I realized I needed to start practicing what I would grow to be happier calling healthy self-love.
That was the thing I had not done for years and years and years. I had not practiced healthy self-love.
So the self-hatred — and the understanding that I needed to practice healthy self-love — sent me on a new trajectory. That trajectory led me to a room full of people who’d lost a hundred pounds, waving a pizza box.
That’s where this story really starts.