MARK LOWRY AND I missed a good chance to be twins. Not that he’s ever been rotund, but our life paths are remarkably similar. I think that’s why we became such good buddies despite the fact I’m so much funnier and better looking than he is. Sometimes I have to work to draw him out of his shell.

We both make our livings as Christian humorists and singers. We both are Southern boys. We both attended Liberty. We both suffer from common maladies. Mark is open about his battle with ADD, and I’ve always had an ADD problem too. I add a lot of helpings to my plate and I add a lot of items to my buggy and I add a lot of toppings on my dessert.

Mark is best known for his work with the Gaither Vocal Band, but we’ve passed a lot of mile markers together. I appeared in several of his videos, wrote for him, and hung out with him on some of his tours.

When I visit our old college town of Lynchburg, Virginia, I often stay with Mark’s parents. His father, Charles, is an attorney who was on retainer for Dr. Jerry Falwell. According to Mark, that was enough to keep his dad with a full-time job. Mark’s mother, Bev, taught psychology at Liberty. They have an apartment in their basement, which allows me to stay at least one night on the road for free. I’m cheap, so I’m fond of the arrangement. Plus, I get to fellowship with old friends and escape another sterile and lonely hotel room. One year, I wound up wishing I’d splurged on the hotel room.

The Lowrys have a beautiful home. In their basement apartment is a nice bathroom, a veritable sanctuary for a man who values the peace of a daily constitutional. In that nice bathroom is a fine commode. And on that fine commode during my visit was a bit of an indulgence for a man who values the peace of a daily constitutional. It had a comfortable, smooth, expensive-looking wooden seat.

I don’t know if it was mahogany, walnut, hickory, oak, pine, or glossed-over particleboard, but it sure felt good. Especially for such a wide expanse.

I have to preface this story by saying the wooden seat was already cracked a little before I sat on it. I just want you to know that.

Somewhere within the tranquility of the moment—probably about Page 2-B of The Lynchburg News and Advance—something popped beneath me. The snapping sound reached my brain a split second before the searing pain did. It was something akin to a hornet sting in a very bad place.

I yelped like a coonhound.

When that seat snapped underneath my weight, just enough flesh wedged into the crack of the seat that it left an indelible mark way too close to the crack of my seat. It’s not easy to dance when your pants are around your ankles. I managed to keep my balance as I flailed and rubbed.

I shined my bottom toward the mirror to check whether I had a gaping wound. Gaping, yes. Wound, no. I had only a small red mark surrounding a rising white welt.

I found myself in a bit of a bind. Upstairs, my hosts surely heard the commotion and wondered whether they needed to dial 911 to stop the burglary in progress downstairs. What could I do—act like it didn’t happen? I couldn’t exactly play it off. Broken hardware was involved, and duct tape would’ve been too obvious.

So I did what any good comedian would do. I grabbed the broken half of the seat and waddled upstairs.

“Mr. Lowry!” I yelled as I held up the seat. “Ummm. Your seat broke.”

He looked up, shook his head, and laughed. Thank God for the Lowry humor gene. Such is life for a fat man. You live. You learn. You break things. And you laugh a lot, especially when it’s such an effective front.

Bless his heart, Mark Lowry bore the burden of my weight more than once. One year, my mother and I visited him at his home when he lived in Nashville. The guest room featured two antique twin beds. I slept in one bed and mom slept in the other. The beds were gifts to Mark from a well-known Christian singer. They were old…like, Bunker Hill old. They popped and creaked when you rolled over. It was a natural alarm clock when somebody shifted in the other bed.

My bed groaned under my girth, begging for relief that finally came sometime in the middle of the night. As I flopped over on my side, the foot of the bed collapsed to the floor. The concussion rattled the walls. My mom muttered something—I was too incoherent to make it out—but my size paled in comparison to my laziness. I didn’t try to fix it. Too groggy to lose sleep over it, I inclined myself with my head up and my feet near the floor for the rest of the night.

The next morning I thought, “Great. I broke Mark’s bed, and not just any bed but a gift from a famous singer. I assumed Mark heard the loud crash and called his parents to whisper, ‘Tubby did it again.’”

Another time, I broke my own guest bed at home. I grew so big and snored so loudly that I had to sleep in our guest bedroom to enable Donna to get some rest. Plus, I stayed hot and sweaty all night and Donna suffered from hot flashes at the time. She felt she was the source of global warming and just knew Al Gore would track her down. My heat combined with her heat was too much. She let me know she wasn’t sleeping in the Easy-Bake Oven another night.

One night I turned over in the guest bed and a whole side of the bed fell off of the frame and thudded to the floor. Once again, I didn’t budge. I just wallowed around and slept uphill so I wouldn’t fall out.

I laughed off such incidents, but the reality is they happened. And they happened for one reason. I was fat.

People who saw me gorge myself always asked me, “Why do you eat like that?” I have an acquaintance named Marty McCall who sang with the group First Call, which provided backup for Sandi Patty. Marty joined Mark Lowry and me at a Gospel Music Association meeting many years ago. We weaved through the booths on the convention floor, and as they heard my wheezing for breath the subject soon turned to my obvious weight problem.

Once Marty realized I was comfortable with the topic, he opened up: “Why are you so big? There has to be a reason. What motivates you to stay big? Why don’t you lose weight? There has to be some mental or psychological reason for you to be this way.” He asked these questions in the flow of the conversation and wasn’t being rude or too forward. I wracked my brain but couldn’t come up with an answer right then.

For years, I thought about those questions. Why was I so fat, so enamored with food, so utterly lost about what to do about it? Had I been abused as a child? Did somebody shove Twinkies down my throat in nursery school, or what? There was nothing I could pinpoint. I’ve just always loved food.

I’ve had people tell me you’re supposed to eat until you’re full. It was their subtle way of encouraging me to moderate. I always replied with my motto: “Well, you’ve got to plow past full. If it tastes good, you push through that full barrier and keep going.”

I eat for the pleasure of it. A lot of people suffer addictions—drugs, alcohol, pornography, sex, the Internet. Food makes me feel good. It’s my drug of choice. I enjoy the taste of it. I enjoy feeling full. I enjoy having something in my mouth. I’m sure Freud wrote a very boring volume about that somewhere. Admittedly, I got to the point where I felt miserable and wanted to wear only stretchy pants.

We’d head out to a restaurant, and I’d think, “I’m putting on my sweatpants because this one is all-you-can-eat.”

I’m sure lineage played a part in my obesity, but not as you may think (as I will show you in a few chapters). I’ve heard big people use the line, “I feel like there’s a thin person on the inside trying to get out.”

Not me. I was just the opposite. My umbilical cord was fat. Even when I was trim as a child and physically fit in college, I felt like I had a fat person on the inside trying to get out. Yet I refuse to use lineage as a scapegoat. As I will explain, my primary problem of horrific eating habits started in college and blossomed into full-blown addiction as an adult.

First Corinthians 19:20 says, “Do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price; therefore, glorify God in your body and in your spirit, which are God’s.”

The same Paul who calls my body a tent in 2 Corinthians 5:1 also calls it a temple in 1 Corinthians 3:16. One description deals with the frailty and impermanence of the human condition, and the other proclaims the majestic truth that the Holy Spirit permanently makes our hearts His home—His temple.

It’s easy to skim past a key phrase in that last sentence: “Therefore, glorify God in your body.” I often glorified God in my words. I told people about Jesus. I shared my faith. I just didn’t share my dessert. If you reached over toward my plate, you might’ve drawn back a nub. I certainly didn’t glorify God in my body, though I came awfully close to being named the Eighth Wonder of the World.

I finally made a commitment to QWLCA because I had to do something. My life was at stake. And Lord knows I’d tried just about everything else.

Diet Roulette

The unspoken prayer request of all fat people is that they’ve just started a new diet. It’s a part of life.

I lost count of how many diets I tried over the years. If somebody was pitching the latest craze, I was buying. One year, I was on five diets at once just to get enough to eat. I loved the liquid diet because I figured out how to do a roast beef smoothie…with a biscuit-and-gravy chaser.

I’ve told that joke before at some conservative churches and they laughed but stared at me, grinning with eyes widened, because they couldn’t believe I said the word “chaser” in church. That’s barroom lingo.

Lutheran churches don’t care. They understand.

I became desperate for a diet that would work. Technically, I was desperate for a diet that would work while still permitting my horrible eating habits. I wanted somebody to invent a weight loss pill called “Sleep-Away.”

When I’m home from the road, I’m usually tired. At home, I like to be sedentary because I make a living on the move. I often park in my recliner in front of the TV, sometimes well into the night.

I love watching QVC and the Home Shopping Network. Donna is different. She likes department stores and malls. She’ll shop for hours in what must be some feminine therapeutic ritual I’ll never understand. I accused her of shopping too much the other day.

“Who do you think I am, Bill Cosby? Have you checked the mailbox for the royalties lately?

I could hear her huff behind me.

“You’re addicted to shopping too,” she said. “You’re just too lazy to get off the couch and go to the store.”

Point taken. I am lazy, which is a huge part of my huge problem. I sat watching TV a few nights ago and the remote control lay on the floor just out of arm’s reach.

“This show is boring,” I said to no one in particular. Then I looked at the out-of-reach remote, paused for a moment, and said, “Well, I’ll give it a chance.”

You can see why the diets didn’t work.

I tried Deal-a-Meal after watching Richard Simmons sob his way through an infomercial. I made fun of the guy, of course. He acted so sweet with his big, bouffant hairdo and high, silky shorts. But then halfway through the program I pulled out the Visa and dialed the 1-800 number. Six to eight weeks later I received a deck of cards in the mail.

Now understand, I grew up in a strict, fundamental, 1611 King James Version-only independent Baptist church. We didn’t go to movies. We didn’t dance. And we definitely didn’t play cards. But I learned how to play cards with that Deal-a-Meal deck because it had pictures of food on it.

Donna would pull a card and show it to me.

Broccoli.

Broccoli? I grunted and shook my head.

“Hit me.”

Cauliflower?

“Hit me again. I’m going for the cheesecake.”

The deck allotted a certain number of cards for each meal. You don’t eat the cards, but they tell you what to eat. I ran out of cards by 9 a.m.

I looked over at Donna and said, “Get me another deck.”

I tried the Hollywood Grapefruit Diet. It helps if you like grapefruit. Plus, I worried I’d wind up like all the emaciated starlets in Hollywood who need to eat a sandwich. I think I’d rather be fat than be able to count my bones and veins and trip over my swollen lips. Of course, no one would be able to detect my misery since my face would be Botoxed into a permanent smile like the Joker from Batman.

I downloaded a diet off the Internet in which I ate only cabbage soup for three days. The instructions didn’t say anything about flatulence. I was self-propelled for days. Besides, try living off cabbage soup two or three times a day. Cabbage soup today. Cabbage soup tomorrow. Here a cabbage, there a cabbage, everywhere a cabbage cabbage. Did I really think that would work? It tasted halfway decent only with a couple of sleeves of soda crackers or a slab of cornbread, which defeated the purpose.

I realized the only diet worth trying is one I could maintain the rest of my life. I didn’t need another Band-Aid covering the scratch where I itched for a few impassioned days. I needed a heart transplant. The change had to stick.

Speaking of sticking…

I once tried a Chocolate-and-Milk diet. I took Ex-Lax and washed it down with Milk of Magnesia. I sat on the toilet for a week. I sat there so long my butt went to sleep. It’s a moment you’ll never forget when your tail tingles. I was stuck to the commode and had to rock back and forth to get the blood flowing to my legs so I could stand.

I even tried the Atkins Diet. I loved it for a while because it allows a lot of foods I like to eat. But it’s all meat and little or no bread, pastas, and “white foods.” That got old, and then came the nasty media controversy over whether it was a healthy alternative.

One of the reasons I like the QWLCA plan is it permits real food and is balanced among the major food groups. Still, when people approach me and ask me about this plan, I tell them I realized the only effective diet would have to start in my mind. It had to be a mental thing, because every diet out there will work if you really want it to work.

That includes Weight Watchers, which rates foods on a points system and allocates the dieter so many points a day and so many flex points a week. I found out those flex points don’t roll over like cell phone minutes. You can’t save up those suckers for later. You have to use them.

After one of my concerts, my music partner, Billy Lord, and road manager, Eric Jackson, joined me at a restaurant. I don’t know if many men have a tendency to spill food on themselves when they eat, but I do. As I burrowed into my meal, it dawned on me that I was on Weight Watchers. And I was binging again.

Billy swallowed a bite and sat up in his seat, craning to look over the table. He motioned with a finger.

“You’ve got a little something on your shirt,” he said.

I looked down and frowned.

“I’ve got more points on my shirt than I’m supposed to have for the whole week,” I said. “So there’s the third course.”

I have nothing personal against Weight Watchers. Great company. But Weight Watchers wasn’t ideal for me because they guaranteed I’d lose a pound a week. My attention span is short. I need instant gratification. I like TiVo because I can watch my show right now. I love the microwave. I love the iPhone. I want to see results yesterday. A mere pound a week didn’t cut it. I needed bigger results and a suddenly smaller waistline to see something worth the pursuit.

I couldn’t find a plan that motivated me enough to stick with it until I found QWLCA. Theirs was the only approach that broke a nasty cycle miring my every previous attempt. That cycle became my seven deadly sins of weight control. In this book, I share my experiences, mistakes, and lessons at each of those seven stages to offer folks in similar situations a way of escape.

Golden Nuggets

I love chicken nuggets, especially crispy ones. ‘Course, I would gnaw on them even if they were sopping wet with grease. I thought of chicken nuggets when I remembered the seven steps I used to lose weight. Don’t get your hopes up. I haven’t invented a cure-all chicken nugget diet, but there was a time when I’d been willing to try that one too.

While I’ve proven I can master a diet and lose major weight, that’s not what I’m good at. I’m good at eating—really good. And not just eating anything but eating everything, especially stuff that tastes terrific and pumps you full of artery glue.

In the spirit of the awful habits from which I escaped, I propose seven steps certain to work miracles for your waistline—if you want to keep expanding. I call them Golden Nuggets: Seven Sure-Fried Ways to Stay Fat or Get Even Fatter. They’re in jest, of course, but you’ll get the idea as we go along. Just do the opposite of what I did for most of my adult life while pursuing these steps that have a profound (and round) effect on your waistline, and you’ll probably lose a lot of weight and live a long time.

Golden Nuggets: Seven Sure-Fried Ways to Stay Fat or Get Even Fatter

Swallow the Truth

Enjoy the Freedom Fries

Welcome to Waffle House

Supersize It—with a Large Diet Coke, Please

Fly Solo: Where Even the Airplane Food Tastes Good

Dessert Your Will

Place Your Order Anywhere But at the Lord’s Table

I used to think a one-size-fits-all formula for weight loss didn’t exist and if I had one Bill Gates would be my butler. And this would be the last diet book ever published.

But the truth is this could be the last diet book ever published. If everyone ate as healthy as the QWLCA plan ascribes, all the other diet plans would go out of business. Meaningful and lasting weight control is about eating healthy.

If you struggle with weight control or overeating like I did, I encourage you to unlearn these seven steps. You’ll have to walk with me through the next seven chapters to examine how each of these changed my life and how, with God’s help, I regained control at each vicious stage. Believe me, it was a God-sized task.

It all began with that first step: Swallow the Truth. That’s where the Lord met with me in the most personal of ways, tapped me on my fleshy shoulder, and curled His finger at me to put down the burrito and come to Him.