HOTEL MIRRORS FOG UP after a good, hot shower in any city, which helps when you don’t want to see yourself naked. When I was big, I took long showers for two reasons. First, it took a while because I had a lot of territory to cover. Even my soap had stretch marks. Second, I didn’t want to inspect the results in the mirror. Steam became my friend. A woman told me one time there’s a difference between looking good and looking good naked.

Too bad that woman was my wife.

I don’t even remember where I was. I just know I was late for my flight to another concert in another town. The problem with so much shower steam is it makes you hot, and I was drenched in sweat just from getting dressed. When you’re 5-feet-9 and weigh more than 300 pounds, you get used to glistening in the morning even after you towel off. Sort of like pregnant women down here in the South, except we’re kind enough to say they “glow.”

The people mover from the airport ticketing counter to my gate wasn’t working, so I had to hoof it. Had you been in the vicinity of my mad dash through the airport, you would understand why it’s called hoofing it. I sounded like a herd of Sasquatch rumbling through Concourse B. And by then I smelled like one too.

Somewhere between ticketing and tachycardia, I had a revelation: There’s a reason overweight folks struggle to find clothes that look good on them, that don’t seem to show every rounded contour, that appear so form-fitting regardless of the cut of the cloth.

It’s because they’re usually wet.

As I reached the security station, I kicked off my slip-on shoes, whipped off my belt, unfastened my watch, and emptied my pockets. That’s a lot of maneuvering for a fat boy, so it took a few moments. My heart pounded, my forehead streamed sweat, and my drenched shirt stuck to my man-boobs as I finally hustled through the metal detector.

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeppppp!

I slumped my shoulders and rolled my eyes heavenward. A slight fellow who weighed maybe 155 pounds pulled me to the side. He was from the TSA, which apparently stands for Tiny Scrawny Agent. Which begs the question: What’s that little dude going to do if he comes across a fat terrorist? Like he was ever going to stop Osama bin Eatin’. But I digress….

“Sir, please come with me,” Mr. TSA said.

With my shoulders still slumped, I tilted my head in frustration and wheezed my way to a side section. I didn’t have the energy to protest. He waved his security magic wand, and for a split second I wanted to hear “Presto!” and look down and see that he had cloned himself into my clothes. I could see myself as Mini-TSA, thin and good-looking with my spiffy—and dry—royal blue shirt.

Didn’t happen. Instead, his security wand beeped.

I rolled my eyes again. Apparently I had a metal object somewhere on my very hot, very ample person. I stood with my arms outstretched, a bead of sweat puddled at the tip of my nose. I wanted to blow the sweat bead off my nose but it would’ve hit Mr. TSA in the face, and I was pretty sure that’s a felony. I struggled to catch my breath. My arms grew heavy. My glasses fogged and I couldn’t wipe them. Oh, the humanity. He waved the wand some more. I shifted my weight to the other leg as he bent down with the wand to check whether some protruding double-secret contraband had caused the weight shift.

“No, sir,” I said between heaves. “That’s really my calf.”

I stood and panted as my heartbeat pounded in my eardrums and his wand waved and his face frowned and his beeper shrieked and people stopped in their tracks to look at this live train wreck, and I just knew the laws of physics demanded that either electrocution or spontaneous combustion occur at any second.

I held up a finger to speak but nothing came out as I sucked more air.

I wanted to beg him to let me bend over so I could catch my breath and slow the palpitations. About the time I wondered why they would even bother with an autopsy (“After a transverse dissection of the mid-thoracic cavity, subject was noted to have an unusually enlarged heart.” YA THINK? I have an enlarged everything!) Mr. TSA peered at me with the wearied look of a man about to dive into chasms and crevices never before explored. He paused and stared, as if a stark and important reminder had hit him.

He reached for the rubber gloves.

I had a doctor’s office flashback and went from a hot sweat to a cold one.

As he patted me down, I couldn’t help but notice him wince. When I caught my breath long enough to hear anything but my own huffing, I realized why he winced. I was squishing.

As he patted my torso, I squished every time he moved a hand to another spot on my wet shirt. And it was loud. Real loud.

Squish, squish, squish.

“OK,” said Mr. TSA, a disgusted lilt in his voice. “You’re clear. You can go now.”

As bystanders gazed with raised eyebrows at the freak show, I realized the scene was the latest in a long line of humiliations over my ever-expanding weight.

I cracked some lame joke to move the moment along, which must’ve worked because he never told me what set off all the security beepers. I still don’t know what caused all the fuss. I guess he figured out that, yes, those were legitimate, good ol’ American rolls of fat and not a bundle of dynamite strapped around my midsection.

Mr. TSA turned toward his cohorts as I fastened everything back on to continue my rumble through the concourse. As I stepped away, Mr. TSA inadvertently caused my face to redden even more.

He looked over to a grinning co-worker and said, “I ain’t never doing that again.” The co-worker’s grin turned into a giggle as I hustled away.

The thought struck me as I picked up the pace again: It’s OK to poke fun at myself onstage, but life is much more pleasant when people laugh with me and not at me.

After a long, hot plane ride, I arrived at my destination and found the rental car counter. I’m notoriously cheap, so I had reserved an economy subcompact car, something just above a moped. I’ve gotten used to scraping my knees and elbows to wedge myself into rental Yugos over the years.

“Mr. Davis, we have reserved you a Smart Car,” said the lady behind the counter.

“Great,” I said. “Maybe I can just tell it where to take me and climb in the back seat for a nap.”

She smiled. At least somebody humored me.

“It’s in parking space A-12,” she said.

Parking space A-12? That didn’t sound too far away. Finally, I caught a break and didn’t have far to walk. I strolled out and began looking for my Smart Car, but when I spotted it I thought it was an optical illusion.

“Does it look small because it’s so far away?” I asked myself.

It wasn’t an optical illusion. It was just tiny. It was one of those new-fangled, two-passenger Smart Cars that look like a cross between half a Volkswagen Bug and Darth Vader’s personal spaceship. It was an egg on wheels.

“I didn’t know you could drive a Tic-Tac,” I said aloud. I didn’t want to drive it, I wanted to eat it.

The car was cute, but I wondered how would I ever fit through the door, much less drive the thing. As I sucked in my gut, I turned to back my way inside while reaching to grab the steering wheel as a handrail. I ducked my head as far as my belly would allow and collapsed backward into the driver’s seat. I’m convinced the passenger wheels came off the ground. “If I get out too fast,” I asked myself, “will this car flip over?”

A jet cockpit couldn’t have been any less comfortable. Even with the flexibility of a manatee, I could reach every window in the car, including the rear windshield. If I had engine trouble, I could fix it from the driver’s seat. As I started down the road and found myself sucked deeper into my seat, I feared I would need the car surgically removed from my body. At least I could wear it into the O.R.

About the time I merged onto a congested interstate, with bumper-to-bumper traffic threatening my life mere feet away in either direction, I had an epiphany. While I had come to similar moments before, this time I clenched my jaw in certainty. Not that you could see my jaw line, but it was clenched. The air conditioner strained to comfort a carcass that seemed to absorb heat like a space shuttle tile, the seat groaned as it bottomed out beneath me, and my puffy face looked with new resolve into a tiny rear-view mirror of a car I wore like a suit.

“I’ve got to lose weight,” I said to the fellow scowling back at me. “This time, I really mean it.”

So I did. I lost more than 100 pounds in six months.

It was the smartest car I’ve ever driven.

The Reformation

Before my weight climbed to 309 pounds, when I finally put down my chubby foot and said I had to stop killing myself one bite at a time, I kept computer records. I had wanted to lose weight for years. I’d say, “I’m going to start today,” and I’d be sincere but still fall off the wagon in a day or two, sometimes in just a few hours. I endured false start after false start.

At least I kept records of my past weights, recorded almost daily: 280, 284, 283, 282, 285, and on and on. When I decided once and for all to do something about my weight, I discovered that between my home computer and iPhone I had kept six years’ worth of weight records.

During those six years, my weight fluctuated mostly between 260 and 280 but eventually escalated to 290. Then, at the very end, it ballooned like never before and I huffed and puffed my way to 309. I tried to be funny even at this low point. My wife, Donna, walked into the bathroom and saw me sucking in my gut as I stood on the scales.

“Honey, holding in your stomach ain’t gonna make you weigh less,” she said.

“I’m not holding in my stomach to weigh less,” I said. “I’m trying to see the numbers.”

When I had to strain sideways to read my weight, I knew I had reached the level doctors call “morbidly obese.” Morbid is Latin for “You gonna be rootin’ daisies before long.”

I look at photographs of myself at that weight and want to cry. I was so fat that my eyes appeared swollen shut.

On November 2, 2008, at the age of 46 and roughly ten years after getting married, I started the eating plan that led to a lifestyle change that wound up changing me from the inside out. I shrank from 309 pounds to 177 pounds, a weight I had last seen in college, and achieved several objectives:

• I wanted to get healthy so I could enjoy life and live longer for my family. I was not only unhealthy but also could no longer perform many basic daily tasks without great difficulty. Or I couldn’t do them at all.

• I wanted to honor God at long last by taking seriously the biblical truth that my body is a temple. If my body is a temple, then I was a megachurch, and I’d just as soon be a tiny backwoods congregation. In my fat days, the name Saddleback took on a whole new meaning.

• I wanted to do the John the Baptist thing. He said of Jesus in John 3:30: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” I’m an evangelist at heart, and I don’t want anything to get in the way of the Gospel, least of all that I am an undisciplined tub of goo. For Him to increase in my ministry, I had to decrease in my waistline.

I wanted to morph back into an appealing man for my wife. Yes, I was being at least partially selfish there. I like bedroom waltzes just as much as Fabio, even when I was Flabio. I wanted my wife to actually desire me again.

Those objectives fall into three important categories: physical, spiritual, and sexual. That pretty much sums up being a man. I wrote this book to chronicle a life that was roundabout in more ways than one. The fatter I grew, the further it took me from effectiveness and contentment in all of these areas.

I make no apologies that this book at times will read like an unabashed advertisement for Quick Weight Loss Centers of Atlanta (QWLCA). I owe the company my reformed life.

Quick Weight Loss Centers are independently owned clinics in various cities around the country. They are not franchised from a single corporate entity, and each may vary in approach. I have permission from QWLCA to use their name and details of my plan in this book, so I refer only to their specific approach. The Atlanta clinic has many clients monitored by phone only, meaning the QWLCA program may be used by anyone in the country.

The approach requires changing how, what, and when you eat. Doesn’t any diet? The major difference is that your weight loss can be fast and substantial and is closely monitored and aided by trained staff during regular office visits or phone calls. I needed such close scrutiny not only for the accountability but also for health and safety during my monumental trek.

In Chapter Six, I detail my personal approach to healthy eating as designed by QWLCA. If you seek to lose weight and wish to use QWLCA, you will require a personalized plan as well. But the enclosed details of my plan will demonstrate how I shed 132 pounds, including more than 100 pounds in the first six months. Does it require sacrifice and incredible discipline? Yes. Does it require permanent lifestyle change to keep the weight off? You bet. Will it make a difference if once and for all you’re serious and not just blowing smoke at that puffy person in the mirror? Yes.

Will it change your life? Yes, yes, and yes!

If you follow QWLCA’s personal prescription, you’ll not only lose weight but also re-engineer habits to enable a healthy lifestyle and permanent weight control. They taught me how to be the master rather than the slave.

For that reason alone, their approach is biblical. The health-conscious approach and the results honor God.

You may have noticed I referred to my “reformed life.” Make no mistake, I’m enjoying a personal reformation. I call it Reformed Meology. I’m transformed in most physical, professional, evangelical, and even sexual aspects. I love the Lord Jesus Christ and finally decided to allow Him to have all of me. He just wanted to shrink the shell carrying me for my own good. He’s the only one who could’ve carried me anyway. He’s got the whole world in his hands, but I took up more than my fair share.

I could never say this until now: I know anyone can lose weight, even the most addictive of personalities.

Eating habits don’t come any worse than the ones I had: meal after meal, drive-thru after drive-thru, snack after snack. I could’ve had my own cable reality show alongside all the Duggars and the dwarfs except for the fact that they couldn’t fit a camera crew in the car with me.

This book will show you how you can have your own personal reformation. It doesn’t have anything to do with TULIP, like Calvinism, but it has everything to do with your Two Lips.

First, you’ve got to speak your conviction with those Two Lips and mean it. And I’m not sporting a Gucci suit and slathering on hair gel to spout off about naming and claiming anything. The simple truth is that when it comes to what you promise yourself you finally have to get dead serious. Or you just may get dead.

Anyone can make the kind of drastic and healthy lifestyle changes I did, and that includes you—if you really want to. If you don’t truly want to do it—and I mean the kind of “want to” that is a half-sister to “ticked off”—then you won’t. It’s that simple.

Second, if you are a believer in Christ, you have to understand that God has charged you to be the doorkeeper of those Two Lips. You have a responsibility to guard His temple.

Psalm 84:10 states that a day in God’s courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. You’ve probably heard that phrase dozens of times in your walk with the Lord or during your time in church. But have you ever noticed the next sentence?

“I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness.”

I had to make up my mind that my body, called a tent by the apostle Paul in 2 Corinthians 5:1, was nothing more than a tent of wickedness when I was a glutton enslaved to food. I’m not trying to throw guilt at you, but I want you to understand my mindset when I had my embarrassing airport escapades and later climbed off those bathroom scales and the figure 309 left me staring at the wall.

Notice I didn’t stare into the mirror.

I knew I would change only if I insisted on being a doorkeeper. I would guard what I allowed in the house of my God. He indwells me. I owe Him that watch care.

The Guarantee

It dawned on me that I couldn’t do it alone, however. Everyone can use help, accountability, and encouragement from a spouse or friend. Donna never had any trouble with her weight until she met me. She has never been fat, but I guess when you live with a compulsive, chronic eater for a decade, you tend to wear down and join in. Donna had put on forty pounds she wanted to shed. We often talked about trying to lose weight together, but when I saw 3-0-9 on the scales, I walked out and took over the leadership mantle that by virtue of bad habits I had abdicated years earlier.

This time, I didn’t ask. Rather, I lovingly but firmly let her know we were going to lose weight. All she had to do was follow me.

Still, I realized it wasn’t enough even to have Donna along for the ride. And it wasn’t enough to have just another diet. I needed a lifestyle change. I needed QWLCA.

“Let’s go,” I told Donna. “I don’t care what it costs or how long it takes. Let’s go.”

She didn’t argue, which may have been a first, and before I knew it we were face to face with a QWLCA staff member.

“If you don’t cheat,” they told us, “we guarantee you that by this date you will reach your goal weight.”

My goal was to reach 175 pounds. I was too big to be weighed on standard doctor’s office scales, but a few feet over they had a set of cattle scales. How convenient. My embarrassment faded when I realized the cattle scales were there for a reason. I obviously wasn’t the first cow they ever had to weigh. They saw my weight, crunched some numbers, and told me I’d reach my goal in about seven months, by Father’s Day of 2009.

That guarantee and the visual of my reaching a weight I hadn’t seen in almost 30 years—a svelte 175 pounds—was enough to solidify my resolve. I was convinced I was going to lose weight. Now I had inspiration to fuel my conviction.

It hasn’t hurt that I’m able to eat a variety of foods on the QWLCA plan. It’s not all one focus, like a diet with no carbs or all rice or all protein. It’s balanced. I eat fruits, vegetables, meats, dairy, and grains. I have limitations and foods to avoid, but my meals are varied enough that I don’t worry about cravings or monotony driving me back to Fatdom.

The QWLCA team guaranteed a weight loss of three to five pounds a week. On my way to losing my first 100 pounds, I averaged losing about four pounds per week. The bigger you are, the quicker it comes off at first. Maybe it’s because it’s mostly excess water. I lost 10 pounds the first week, and I could feel a little slack in my pants, shirts, and belt. Once I explain my personality a little more in later chapters, you’ll understand why such instant gratification motivated me to keep going.

People ask me how much I exercised to lose so much weight. Here’s the exciting part for overweight folks….

I lost 132 pounds without exercising. In losing my first 30 pounds, I couldn’t bend over, much less exercise. I’m exercising some now, but all I did to lose weight was eat right.

I can’t stress enough that I didn’t starve myself either. I didn’t eat too little, and I didn’t lose weight too fast. This was because I ate vegetables, fruit, and protein every day. I even drank coffee. I ate like one person should eat. I used to eat enough food for three people. Or a small village on some days.

You know how people who have lost weight say they feel better and more alive? Well, I discovered the reason for the cliché. It’s true.

I do feel better. I go to bed earlier and wake earlier. Discipline in one area has led to discipline in other areas. I’m more consistent in my quiet time with the Lord. I have more energy. I actually want to take the trash to the road now.

The QWLCA plan lived up to its name, and my quick weight loss stoked my fire to stick with it.

Some people want to know why my goal weight was 175 pounds. Mark Hall from Casting Crowns is a friend who serves as student pastor at my church and also travels with me to help conduct student conferences at Christian schools. He saw me before I reached my goal weight and said, “Why do you want to lose more? You look fine the way you are.”

Maybe. I’ve learned that you can cover up a lot with clothes, but some places need all the help they can get. The reason for the goal weight of 175 is more symbolic than anything else. It comes with a token, a prop, for motivation.

In my homesick freshman year at Liberty Baptist College (now Liberty University), I tried out for a traveling group called SMITE. The horrible name meant Student Missionary Intern Training for Evangelism. I know, it’s weird: “Come hear all about the grace of God with the SMITE singers.”

I wondered if we would go around hitting people: “I smite thee in the name of the Lord!” They’ve since changed it to Light Ministries, which makes more sense. It’s a missions team, and we traveled to thirteen countries and ministered with Dr. Jerry Falwell, the founder of Liberty, and SMITE director Roscoe Brewer.

During the time I traveled with SMITE, we stopped in Hong Kong. I discovered I could get a quality suit tailored cheaply there, and I bought a custom-made suit in Hong Kong when I weighed 175 pounds.

Before my QWLCA transformation, I found that suit in my closet. I stumbled across it just after my defining moment when I said, “I’ve got to do something once and for all about my weight.” I stopped and stared at the coat, my mind flashing back to Hong Kong and the sweet little guy who took my measurements.

I said to myself, “I’m going to get into this again.”

Less than a year later, I put on the jacket while weighing 177 pounds, two pounds shy of my weight on the day I had the coat tailored in Hong Kong. The coat has moth holes and it’s out of style, but it fits me. I admit it’s still a little snug.

But it won’t be for long.