THE TWO PARAMEDICS STOPPED in their tracks when they got a load of me. I lay moaning on the couch in my living room. I wasn’t married yet and lived on the family farm with my mother. To this day, I live in the same house I grew up in. At any moment I can walk into a room and smack dab into a flood of memories.

My bad back had flared up. It was about 1995 and I weighed about 280 pounds. I fluctuated among several different weights through the years. The pendulum swung from relatively healthy, as when I met Donna, to pleasantly plump and sometimes all the way to gross.

When I lay on the couch in severe back pain, I was stuck on gross.

I was in the middle of a tour and had to cancel all of my concerts for two months. My poor mother didn’t know what to do. One day, the pain intensified and I couldn’t budge an inch. We had to call 911. Due to my size and the pain, I called paramedics to the rescue.

The embarrassing part was that they didn’t come to take me to the emergency room. They came to take me to a doctor’s appointment. I couldn’t make it to my family doctor any other way.

Thankfully, the ambulance didn’t blare its sirens as it rumbled into my yard. They knew it was a non-emergency emergency. I heard the baritone of the engine and the swish of the air brakes as the burly paramedics scrambled to gather their effects and make their way inside.

When they walked in the door, my vision of “burly” vanished.

The paramedics were women. Little women.

The ladies walked in and stopped in their tracks when they saw this massive beached whale with a locked-up back and full bladder.

“Oh my,” one of them said before she knew it. The other paramedic leaned toward her partner and whispered without turning her face.

“We might need some backup.”

I wanted to crawl under a cushion. I’ve heard of police needing backup, but paramedics?

My dainty helpers dispensed with the required blood pressure and heart rate checks, asked me a few questions, and radioed the situation back to headquarters. They didn’t exactly have a walkie-talkie code for “lard-butt needs a lift,” so they just said it—in a professional manner, of course.

“Um, yes, um, we’re on location. Subject is incapacitated and is more than we can handle.”

The radio squawked. “What’s the problem?”

“We need more manpower, sir.”

“More manpower? What do you mean?”

“Sir, we need assistance to lift him. He’s a large individual.”

“Can he not shift onto the gurney?”

“No, sir. He can’t move on his own. Terrible back pain. We gotta have some muscle here.”

Pause.

“Listen, we’re, uh, we’re—are you sure you can’t move him?”

She was nodding before she pressed the button. “Positive.”

Pause.

“10-4. Assistance on the way.”

Right about then I would’ve signed Dr. Kevorkian’s release if he wanted to help send me on to Jesus.

The wait seemed interminable before a fire truck full of men—burly men—wailed into the driveway. I guess they blared the siren because indeed no code existed for my predicament and for them it qualified as an emergency call. I was as red as their truck.

A few minutes later, they lifted and pushed the gurney into the ambulance, its legs folding underneath and jolting more pain throughout my back. It may have been the quickest completion of any assignment in Henry County Fire Department history.

The ambulance jostled toward the doctor’s office, siren silent. The driver stopped at traffic lights and stop signs. It was a slow ride, an expensive but necessary lift into town.

Imagine that. I needed the dadgum fire department to lift me into an ambulance, and I needed a dadgum ambulance for a doctor’s visit.

I’ve seen cable documentaries about morbidly obese people who couldn’t move and whose rescuers tore down walls so forklifts could pick up the patients on their beds. I never envisioned I’d need a group of civil servants to help me make a doctor’s visit.

Dr. Blissett had been my family doctor since I was kid. Every time he saw me in my adult years he told me to lose weight. He never failed to scold me. When we arrived at his office, the ambulance sat idling. Several moments passed. I didn’t know what was going on and began to wonder whether Dr. Blissett was in the office. The paramedics didn’t even bother trying to get me out of the ambulance because they knew they couldn’t lift me back in.

Suddenly, the back doors swung open. There he stood, scowling at me.

“I told you!” he yelled. “This is ridiculous.”

I don’t think he said another word. He gave me some kind of painkiller on the spot so I could at least function and get to the bathroom. He whipped out his prescription pad and scribbled.

“Here,” he said, snatching a sheet off the pad. “But you have to lose weight.”

And he slammed the door.

Andy’s Advice

Even the ambulance ride wasn’t a wakeup call. My back eventually improved, but my physique and outlook didn’t. Though I recognized I had a problem, though I admitted my addiction, though I was embarrassed by it, I still plowed into the buffet line.

The reason? For years I practiced one of the most prevalent Golden Nuggets: Enjoy the Freedom Fries.

That means I took liberty to eat anything I pleased and refused to accept responsibility for my actions. It’s one thing to admit a problem, but it’s quite another to own it.

I had to take personal responsibility for my habits by not passing the buck. It wasn’t a glandular problem, it wasn’t my grandmother’s fault, and I wasn’t gravitationally challenged. I didn’t have a fat gene. I had a fat piece of bacon in my mouth.

If you want to stay fat or get even fatter, enjoy the freedom fries. They’re crisp and salty and are crazy good with a cookies-and-cream milkshake, but in the end they clog up your heart in more ways than one. They block out common sense and offer a deceptive escape to only one kind of freedom, the freedom to choose to remain in a gut rut. They also block out communication with God. When you eat like I did, it’s sin, and sin stymies communication with God. It’s hard to hear a still small voice when you’re scraping your plate.

I’m not a medical doctor or a scientist, but I know everyone is different and faces different challenges. I also know most people are experts at making excuses and passing the buck.

In my case, I’d pass the buck and ask somebody to pass the mac-and-cheese.

I didn’t see my weight as my responsibility. How could it be my responsibility since I was born this way? Since my mama made me clean my plate? Since I have a problem with metabolism? Since my daddy was fat too? It wasn’t my fault, and since it wasn’t my fault…hey, are those brownies over there?

The devil didn’t make me reach for that appetizer either. I had to admit to myself I had a choice, and I learned a person chooses to eat to become what he is.

The movie Shawshank Redemption features several poignant moments, none more full of gravity than when lead characters Andy Dufresne and “Red” Redding sit in the prison courtyard with their backs against the cold block walls late in the movie. A resolute Andy has just emerged from a long turn in solitary confinement, and he does little more than stare and speak monotone through one last conversation with his buddy before escaping Shawshank prison. Red knows something is wrong. He protests Andy’s desperate talk but can only listen as Andy spits out a line that still resonates with me.

“Comes down to a simple choice, really,” Andy says. “Get busy livin’ or get busy dyin’.”

Every overweight person needs a Shawshank moment. We need to realize the sobering truth that every day we either get busy living or get busy dying. Our choices make or break us. People make time to do what they really want to do. If we really want to lose weight or eat healthy foods, we’ll do it. When I really wanted to eat, I ate. Many nights, I lay on the couch until Donna fell asleep in the bedroom because I knew I could sneak out to eat and she wouldn’t know it. Some people sneak out at night to see someone else. I snuck out to see burgers. I had a fling with the Dairy Queen.

I sacrificed sleep or work—and risked the possibility of a traffic ticket—to binge. Drive-thrus are open late, but some of my favorites close at 1 a.m. Sometimes I had to wait on Donna to fall asleep so I could race to the restaurant before it closed. Johnny Law likes to cruise around at that hour looking either for drunks or addicts trying to score drugs. I was an addict, but by the time the cops got to me I’d have grease dripping off my chin.

I wasn’t always big, so for me that was another strike against the “genealogical predisposition” excuse. Some people are big their entire lives. In elementary school I was thin. I have pictures of myself as a child when I looked almost gaunt. I grew bigger in junior high and high school, affecting everything, especially in high school. I enjoyed playing football and I was good at it because I could knock people backward off of the line of scrimmage, but I wasn’t the good-looking football star. I was the kid whose mom bought his pants in the Husky section. That was one of my original embarrassing episodes.

When I reached college, I went for the hunk look. At least I tried.

I dated the same girl for three-and-a-half years at Liberty. One time she broke up with me, and I didn’t say a word to anybody except my roommates. I fasted and prayed for five days. I didn’t see her and didn’t stalk her like I wanted. I stayed away. A week later she saw me after chapel and said, “Hey, whatcha doin’?” Wink, wink.

We got back together. But during that period, I worked like mad in the YMCA weight room, where I did bench presses, squats, situps, curls, shoulder presses, dead lifts, and various other torture techniques. I almost passed out as I lifted weights during my fast, but I stayed in shape.

One day I stepped on a set of scales and weighed 159. That stuck in my mind because I hit that weight only one time. I stayed in the 160s during that busy time period, but my average weight during college was 175. Then when I got out of college my weight started moving up to the 190s and higher.

All of which goes to prove my point.

I believe 99.9 percent of people can lose weight without surgery or pills or gimmicks—if they want to. I believe the Bible when it says these desperate cravings come from within. I also believe all of us have unique circumstances we face that can make the road to health easier or more difficult. Call it environment or upbringing, but it’s another substantial factor in the equation.

Notice I didn’t call it an excuse. I called it a factor. It’s a reality, nonetheless, one that I know better than anyone because of the first time I saw an ambulance parked in the driveway of my farm home….

Ho Cakes and Frog Legs

Liberty College used a brilliant stroke of marketing during my senior year of high school. It sent a performance group to my school.

While their intentions were to evangelize, the performers left an incredible impression upon my young heart. One of their songs, “Love Them While You Can,” became part of my own show years later. I remember one of the lead singers introducing the song by saying, “You need to go home tonight and tell your mom and dad you love them.”

Charles Davis was larger than life in ways innumerable. He reached 280 pounds at his heaviest, a man’s man with a barrel chest and a laugh that echoed. It never felt cool to go up to my 280-pound dad and put my arm around him and say, “Dad, I love you.” So I never did. He was big into sports, especially football, which he made me play. In fact, he made me play every sport. I was pretty good at football. I wasn’t good at basketball, but I played it. I was so bad that they created a new position for me on the basketball team: tailback. The coach looked at me and said, “Get your tail back on the bench.”

Whatever the sport, my dad attended every game.

It was a Wednesday when the group from Liberty urged us to go home and tell our parents we loved them. I remember I went home and purposed in my heart to tell my dad I loved him. I don’t know why, but I just…couldn’t. I still don’t know why.

The very next day, I was called to the school office. My brother waited on the other end of the phone line.

“You need to come home,” he said. “Dad is not well.” When I made it home, a fire truck and an ambulance sat in the driveway.

My dad died later that day.

I will always regret that I never took the opportunity to say, “I love you.” He was fifty-seven years old when he died, and now that I’m forty-eight I realize how young he died. Doctors told us he had blood clots in his lungs, and every time he stood to his feet the blood clots moved. One eventually reached his heart and killed him. He had suffered from phlebitis, an inflammation of a vein that leads to blood clots, and wore a leg brace for some time.

My mother knew I loved her because I told her all the time. We didn’t get along perfectly though. I learned to bicker by watching my parents, who fought just like other parents. Our frying pan was on a frequent flier program when I was kid. But I’m glad I told my mother I loved her because she died in my home in 2001.

Both of my parents were big people. Yet I’m convinced both could’ve lost weight if they wished. We just weren’t conditioned to think that way. I grew up in an era when health wasn’t on the forefront of society’s consciousness. Instead, almost every meal was an event, and my mom excelled at it.

Her name was Geneva—Jean for short. She cooked big Southern meals, and my dad scarfed them down. Mashed potatoes and gravy, steaks, fried pork chops, and gooey macaroni and cheese. We counted helpings, not calories. My dad cleaned his plate every time. But then he would do something a lot of folks may find uncouth.

I watched him many a day as he rose from the table, took his clean plate to the sink, and then used his fork to eat out of the pots on the stove.

Dad loved food so much he experimented with it. He once made pancakes with beans mixed in just to see how it tasted. It was horrible. But he would try anything and loved all kinds of food.

My great-grandmother on my mother’s side was 102 when she passed away. She never counted a fat gram, carbohydrate, or calorie. She never measured food. She certainly never dealt a stack of Deal-a-Meal cards. But, by golly, she ate biscuits and gravy every day. She made a bunch of regular biscuits but saved enough dough for one big one. She called it a Ho Cake.

I’ve told that story in Vermont and they looked at me like, “Huh? Ho Cake? What is that?”

It’s a biscuit on steroids, a flat one with a good crust. My great-grandmother would cover the Ho Cake with sorghum syrup and mix it up on the plate, then wash it down with an ice cold glass of milk. We called it “Good Vitamin D Milk” back then. At supper time, she ate green beans with fatback in it. She ate like this and yet lived until she was 102. Her daughter passed away at 94.

Farm life revolves around food. Most of the time, you’re simply raising your keep, whether it’s livestock or crops. We had both.

I had a pet pig as a kid, and we ate him later. How’s that for loving food? Poor fellow limped around the pen as we worked on him one leg at a time. I mean, he was a pet. We didn’t have the heart to eat him all at once.

I don’t remember his name, but I remember shooting and cleaning him. My dad tried to teach me how to kill a chicken so we could eat the thing, but I couldn’t ever figure out how to ring a chicken’s neck.

Few varmints were off-limits, and we didn’t kill anything we didn’t eat. We went squirrel hunting, and my neighbors taught me how to make rabbit boxes so we could catch rabbits for a good meal. We killed and cleaned turtle and my mother made turtle soup. We had frog legs. We floated onto our little lake in an aluminum boat at night and used a huge beam of light to shine back toward the banks. When we saw two beady little eyes staring back at us we pointed right between those eyes with a .22 rifle and scrounged up some supper. The bigger the frog, the meatier the leg. Tastes like chicken.

Every year, my dad tended a large garden. One of the reasons I don’t maintain a garden now is the emotional scar I carry from my childhood garden. On Saturday mornings when most kids watched cartoons and played, I had to hoe the garden or pick okra. I remember one Saturday morning I was on the phone with a girl from school. My dad said, “C’mon, we’ve got to go work in the garden.”

“OK, be there in a minute.” I kept talking on the phone.

“C’mon, we’ve got to go,” he said.

“OK, just a sec.”

I kept on talking. He called out again. I kept talking.

A few minutes later, the door to my bedroom swung open. He whipped out his knife. I felt my eyes widen. Suddenly I wasn’t talking any more. He grabbed the phone line extending from the wall and cut it.

“I told you to come on,” he said.

I was in the garden in a matter of seconds. And I had to fix the phone myself.

Charles Davis was serious about his food. Yet I was just getting started when it came to learning bad eating habits.

Too Young

Liberty College introduced me to a whole new world of eating—literally.

Not long after I reached campus, a friend wanted to try out for SMITE—a group of traveling singers like the one that performed at my high school—and he asked me to go with him.

I relented only because I was a homesick freshman eight hours away from Stockbridge. I needed something to pass the time. I’d call home and whimper, “Mama, I want to come home.”

Dad already had passed away and she had no one to back her but she still said, “You’re not coming home because I’m not losing my deposit.”

After the first round of SMITE tryouts, they handed us the words to “God is So Good.” A lot of the candidates were big-time music majors and well-known performers on campus. At the time, I had no idea who they were and didn’t care.

I sang and apparently did well but I still didn’t care. I probably did well because I didn’t care. I didn’t feel the slightest pressure. I just walked onstage and wailed away.

As I made the early rounds of cuts, much like an early version of American Idol, I realized I should take it more seriously because a scholarship hung in the balance. At one of the final cuts, we had to sing in front of everybody—including all of my competitors and other students from past SMITE teams. We sang “God is So Good” again. The piano guy started the song and I belted it. This time, something wasn’t right. Piano Man stopped after a few moments.

“Let’s try that in a different key,” he said. That was the polite way to tell me I stunk.

We switched the key and I sang OK. A guy already on the team saddled up next to me afterward.

“I’m not supposed to tell you this,” he said. “You didn’t do so well that time, but Roscoe Brewer really likes you.” Then I felt the nerves. Roscoe was the big cheese, one of Dr. Falwell’s top lieutenants.

Out of 160 candidates, I was one of fifteen people named to the team and awarded a full scholarship for the rest of my college career. I had a strange mixture of emotions. I celebrated doing well, but deep down I did not want to be a part of a missions group that traveled overseas. I sat there after hearing the great news and it dawned on me that in a matter of months I would be headed to Brazil. I didn’t want to go to Brazil. I wanted to go back home to Georgia.

My tune soon changed for one reason. Food.

Not only did I earn a full scholarship to Liberty and the privilege of traveling around the world, but I also got to eat like crazy. Within two weeks after I made the team, they said, “We’re going to introduce you to the world.”

Fresh from my tiny hometown in the Deep South, I found myself in the middle of Manhattan in a matter of weeks. We spent a week and a half in New York City, the melting pot of the world. They took us all over the five boroughs to meet people of different ethnicities and to introduce us to various cultures and foods. We also witnessed to people on the street. It served as an introduction and training session for our group—and for me when it came to food. It was a delicious time. I count it a blessing in many ways, but I also look back and realize it helped set into motion some destructive appetites and habits.

In the first weeks of real freedom in my young life, I began making choices that conditioned me to overeat.

Brazil had unbelievable steakhouses. If you’ve ever tried a Brazilian steakhouse like Fogo de Chao here in the States, you understand. In Brazil back then, an all-you-can-eat meal at a steakhouse cost only five dollars. Today, it’s still only about seven bucks.

I’d look like the Michelin Man if I lived in Brazil. The coroner’s report would read, “Death by meat.”

I went to Korea and tried the Kim-chi (fermented vegetables). I went to South Africa and ate anything they put in front of me. At one Asian Indian restaurant, I loved the food even when it was so spicy hot few others would touch it. One skinny guy in our group walked out looking like he had a tumor on his ankle. I looked down at his foot as he walked a little stiff-legged.

I pointed at the bulge on his ankle. “You OK?” I asked.

He nodded and smiled. Then he pulled off his shoe and sock. He had stuffed all his hot rice into his sock because he didn’t want to offend our hosts. He had finished with the only clean plate in the joint, and they had doted over him. My mouth and stomach were on fire, but I still laughed at his Curry Fried Ankle.

In American Samoa, the locals conducted a traditional tribal night and cooked a whole pig for us, head and all. I think it still had some hair on the carcass when they served it. Most of our group turned up their noses. I just cut around the hair and gnawed away.

They passed around half a coconut filled with a passion fruit concoction. I was known on the team as the guy who would try anything. Give it to Scott. It was like the old Life Cereal commercial: “Give it to Mikey. He’ll try anything. Hey Mikey!”

I’d never had a bad meal in my life—until then. In American Samoa I tried tofu and it tasted like a sponge.

I now know all of this played into my food addiction. That may sound like a rationalization, but I think it’s a reality. I know my struggles with weight and food were more a product of environment and personal choices than they were genetics. I had a problem with a Jean all right, and she could fry up a mess of pork chops.

More often than not, we are the sum of our individual decisions. That’s scary stuff, but the Bible backs it up.

In Proverbs 23:7, wise King Solomon states that a man behaves like he thinks. I like the King James translation: “For as he thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Even if what we believe about ourselves is not true, our behavior will reflect our belief in that lie. The Bible says Satan is the father of lies, and he uses lies to deceive us into believing wrong thoughts about ourselves, other people, and many other subjects. The Bible also says he comes to steal, kill, and destroy. At the same time, it says he disguises himself as an angel of light.

He can make everything sound amazing, including food. He can make mundane menus appealing. He can make commercials so appetizing we can almost smell them.

And every bit of it is designed to steal our joy, kill our hope, and destroy us all together.

Satan knows his deceptions are effective because we’re no different than his first victims. Those of us who struggle with weight control have no trouble understanding why Adam and Eve suffered The Fall over food. Now, obviously, the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil was merely the object that revealed hearts already tilted away from God. From the very beginning, the enemy of our souls has pursued one basic deception: He wants us to believe that anything other than God will fulfill us. Is it not telling that our first stumbling block in this area—the first thing Satan used to draw out our self-centered desires from deep within us—was food?

‘Course, if it had been an Oreo tree, I would’ve busted hell wide open in the first two minutes.

The same desire that came from within Eve to drive her to pluck off the one fruit she wasn’t supposed to eat is the same desire that makes you and me reach out in a repeated, mindless, habitual, indulgent fashion to gorge ourselves.

That’s why we can’t say the devil made us do it. We do it to ourselves. It comes from within. Adam and Eve didn’t have to order the Good-and-Evil Blue Plate Special that day, and I don’t have to pull out of Taco Bell with a greasy-bottomed sack at 12:56 a.m.

Wise King Solomon also said, “Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it spring the issues of life” (Proverbs 4:23, NKJV). That is one of the most well-known verses in the Bible. I’m ashamed to say it’s so familiar I zip past it. Now read the next line.

“Put away from you a deceitful mouth, and put perverse lips far from you.”

Ouch.

I’ve read that many times without thinking about it in the context of food. Its primary warning is toward speech, but it is not a stretch to ascribe the same truth to eating. My watering mouth can deceive me so easily, and my old eating habits were nothing if not perverse.

In the same way, Proverbs 13:3 draws a bullseye on my little dieting heart:

“He who guards his mouth preserves his life, but he who opens wide his lips shall have destruction.”

I think I’ll write that verse in calligraphy and use a QWLCA magnet to stick it on my refrigerator door. I wish someone had read Proverbs to me while I was globetrotting with SMITE. Instead, I had to learn these truths the hard way.

As Dr. Blissett would say, my weight problem was my fault. It wasn’t a glandular problem. It wasn’t because someone was too harsh to me in second grade. And it wasn’t even heredity, unless you consider learning the bad habits of parents heredity.

No, my weight problem came one bite at time. And to prove it, those Proverbs say a mouthful.

Part of my wanting to lose weight now is because I didn’t want to end up like my father, dead at the age of 57. Toward the end of my fat years, Donna looked at me one day and said, “Don’t you want to be around for Dylan?” He’s our six-year-old grandson. Before he was born, people asked us what we wanted to be called as grandparents, and I said, “Big Daddy.” My dad was called Big Daddy. That’s what Dylan calls me.

My personal doctor now is a Korean fellow in his 70s. He’s a great guy, but he needs to work on his bedside manner.

I met him about a year before I began the QWLCA program. I had never laid eyes on the man, but I waited in one of his exam rooms, all 300 pounds lapped over a little table. In walked Dr. Kim. He didn’t say my name. He didn’t say hello. And he didn’t smile. He opened the door, stopped in his tracks when he saw me, and asked one question in his clipped English.

“You ever hear Weight Watchers?”

That’s the first thing my new doctor said to me. It stung, and it was rude, but, like Dr. Blissett before him, Dr. Kim tried to get my attention.

“You too young. You too young to be this big,” he said. “You can do it if you try. You can do it.”

Indeed, I was the only one who could do it.

While they were only trying to help, it didn’t matter what Donna and the doctors said. It didn’t matter that firemen had to lift me into an ambulance for a doctor’s visit. It didn’t even matter how many bad habits I picked up from my family and from traveling the world.

What mattered is that I accepted responsibility for my food addiction. I had to sign my name to it before I was liable for it. To escape it, I had to own it.

I visited Dr. Kim after my huge weight loss. He was elated because he felt like his little lecture helped, which it did. He asked me to write down everything I had done to lose weight so he could share it with his other patients who tell him they can’t lose weight.

“I want to hand it to them and say, ‘Yes, you can. Read this,’” he said.

He was satisfied when I told him I was writing a book about it. He asked for copies for his patients.

“Maybe we can take a photograph of us together,” I said. “We’ll put it in the book so everyone will know who the doctor is who blurted out that I needed to be on Weight Watchers.”

He nodded and smiled. I saw his wheels turning, but this time he bit his tongue. Maybe it was my imagination, but I could tell he was thinking of the photograph and wanted to give me another zinger:

“At least now you don’t need wide-angle lens.”