ON ANY GIVEN NIGHT at around two in the morning, flip over to QVC and you may hear the baritone voice of Scott from Stockbridge: “Yes, Julie, I love this broach. It’s gorgeous.”

When I finally married in my mid-30s, I needed two-and-a-half years to get out of debt from the junk I bought off of TV and stuffed into my closet.

Like the Gut Buster. Yeah, that really worked.

And then the Ab Lounge. My pastor says any exercise equipment with the word lounge in it ought to tell you something. I laid it in front of the fireplace to take naps on it.

I bought a treadmill from the Home Shopping Network. I used it for a week. Now I position my recliner beside it so I can kick back and watch TV while I walk my dog on it. I have a little leash to keep him safe, and he pants and drips and pants and drips and cuts his eyes at me and would cuss me in dog language if he had the breath.

I bought that little cow telephone. It’s shaped like a cow, has spots like a cow, and even rings like a cow. Moooooooo.… Moooooooo. It’s so annoying I can’t wait for the answering machine to pick up. I won’t even tell you what it does when I put it on hold, but it puts the chip in microchip.

I bought a voice-activated remote control for my TV. Have you seen one of those things? I scream into it: “Channel Five!” and it goes straight to Channel Five. It has a glitch though, especially when the TV is too loud. The nightly news teaser will come on and say, “Tonight at 11…” and, poof, it changes to Channel Eleven.

I’m enamored with the latest and greatest. Even if I don’t buy it, I’m interested, and I love keeping up with the latest products. This fascination with all things new explains why I had to have the best gadgets during my weight loss. If I could figure out a way for something to help me lose weight, I wanted it.

I had a blender I used every day to make my strawberries-and-protein supplement shake. It was a good blender, but I always wanted the Vita-Mix brand blender, what I considered the Cadillac, Mac-Daddy blender. My juicer made too big a mess and I was too lazy to clean it up. Problem was, the Vita-Mix blender was expensive, like, the-wife-will-pout-for-a-week expensive. I never wanted to spend that much on a blender, and from the start Donna protested.

When I was single, I made the same amount of money as I do now but I had nothing to show for it except junk. I had every computer and electronic gizmo out there. When I got married, Donna put a stop to that. She’s the boss when it comes to money, and for good reason. Sometimes it’s like I’m a little kid and I have to work on her for a while. It took a year for me to wear her down and get that big blender. She said, “That’s stinkin’ expensive for a stinkin’ blender.”

I wore her down through a masterfully crafted guilt trip.

Honey, don’t you want me to have every resource possible to be successful on my eating plan? This blender will help me eat healthy and lose weight. Don’t you think it will pay huge dividends? What price tag can you put on my health? ….

I join several guys at my church to start each new year with a time of fasting and prayer. We’ve done this for four years now and it’s grown from six guys to about fifteen. We pray and share weaknesses, trials, and struggles, and I cherish the time. I bought the original juicer to prepare for that week. I decided to abstain from solid foods but juice veggies to maintain electrolytes and nutrients.

I dreaded cleaning up after juicing, and my research sold me on the Vita-Mix blender. I can throw in whole vegetables and fruits, peels and all, and it liquefies everything. No mess. I bought it so I could drink everything without the cleanup.

I use it every day to juice vegetables and make soups. Back when Donna balked at the price tag, I tried to burn up the old juicer. But it just wouldn’t die. I threw in all manner of stuff in bulk. She was in the next room and heard the blender struggling to grind: Whirrruuuuuugggggrrrrrrrrrrruuuuuuugggg. Then came tell-tale smell of an electrical burn.

Donna yelled at me. “You’re purposely trying to burn that up so you can get the new one!”

“No I’m not,” I said, waving my hand above the blender. “Whoooee, where’s that smoke coming from? Hope the alarm doesn’t go off.”

My fascination with technology turned out to be a boon during my weight loss. I’m a fan of all Mac products. I have Mac computers for my marketing and promotions company, Third Heaven Imaging, and I adore my iPhone, iPod, and iPad. I keep waiting for them to come out with an iPizza because it would look terrific, taste great, arrive at your door on time, and be lighter than anything on the market.

Using my iPhone and iPad, I downloaded a couple of apps to chronicle everything I eat. This came in handy during my QWLCA checkups.

My favorite app is called My Net Diary. You enter your profile of how much you weigh, how much you want to weigh, and your exercise amount, whether it’s sedentary all the way up to extreme. The app then calculates how many calories you should consume that day.

On the QWLCA plan, you don’t count calories during the weight loss phase. Instead, you watch portion sizes and kinds of foods. You do the same during maintenance after you’ve reached your goal. It’s helpful to count calories during maintenance since many more foods are allowed, and at that point the staff likes to keep track and assist you.

After I lost weight and reached the maintenance stage, I saw a health expert on the news. He claimed if you eat 1,000 to 1,200 calories a day, you will lose weight regardless of the food you eat. If it’s cake, you’ll still lose weight as long as you don’t take in more than 1,200 calories per day. I can’t say I wasn’t tempted to try it.

His main point: If you eat the right foods, you can eat a lot and it would be a very healthy 1,200 calories per day. It’s a misconception that 1,200 calories is not enough food. It just needs to be the right mix of the right foods.

When I go to QWLCA, I’m able to tap the My Net Diary app and hand the staff my iPad with a detailed list of everything I’ve eaten during breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks for a week. At the end of each day, it calculates the food I’ve eaten and provides my totals for calories, carbs, protein, cholesterol, and my Aunt Bessie’s blood pressure reading. The detail is astounding.

I can type in my weight loss plan including my starting weight, current weight, goal weight, and target date to reach my goal weight. It then calculates whether I’m overweight for my schedule, provides my basal metabolic rate and body mass index, and prescribes the number of calories to consume that day if I want to maintain or lose weight. The basal metabolic rate is the amount of energy our bodies need to function at rest. This accounts for up to seventy percent of calories burned each day and includes the fuel needed for our hearts to beat and lungs to breathe.

The app also features an exercise chart to keep track of how many calories I burn in an intense workout or a morning stroll. It tracks water intake. It provides charts to help track weight loss. It has a library with tons of articles. It’s a wonderful tool to keep track of your entire effort.

Another app called Tap and Track is a quick reference tool if all you want to do is watch calories. You can tap it and search the database for a burger and it’ll show you its caloric value.

I’m not getting paid to endorse any of this stuff, but I love the little apps. They help me even during the act of eating. I’m a fast eater. Though I lost weight, I still wolf down food. I go T-Rex on my plate and come up for air to see Donna finish buttering her toast.

That’s a no-no. I’ve learned in the science of digestion our bodies need about twenty minutes to send the satiety signal to our brains. The communication says, “Hey, I’m full now. I don’t need anything else.”

If we eat too fast, we pack in so much food within twenty minutes that we’re way ahead of the signal. By the time the signal hits, we’re bloated like the Kool-Aid man.

With my iPhone, I’m able to tap an app and key in my information between bites. It helps me slow down. I’m not trying to ignore Donna, but it gives me something to do as I learn about the food on my fork.

At the beginning of my QWLCA maintenance, I chose to listen to the expert on the news and limit myself to 1,200 calories per day. It was my choice, and QWLCA didn’t have anything to do with it. I examined what I ate on an average day and discovered that’s about how much I consumed during my weight loss.

“I’m losing weight on that many calories,” I said to myself. “So I’ll try to keep it at that.”

I got plenty to eat at that rate if it was the right kinds of foods. Donna couldn’t eat it all on some days. She pushed her plate away several times.

I saw her leave leftovers one time and thought about another news report I saw on 20/20. It featured a guy who eats less than 1,000 calories a day. He tries to consume no more than 700 calories a day and has been doing it for nearly two decades in an effort to push the limits of longevity.

The same report showed a caloric study with apes. One ape consumed 500 to 600 calories per day. The other ape ate whatever he wanted. The ape that ate fewer calories appeared twenty years younger than Sloppy Boy, who looked like I did after running through the airport.

The whole theory focused on the fact that we eat way too much in America, far more than God designed for us to consume. We’re literally eating ourselves to death. The guy who eats about 700 calories a day is only 150 pounds and wants to live until he’s 120 years old.

With my luck, I’d be weak and delirious and step out in front of a bus at age forty-eight.

Some people would say, “I don’t want to live that long if I can’t eat. I’d rather die at 60 and be able to eat what I want.” Yeah, well, I’d rather stick around for my family.

Based on all these latest news reports, it appears we’ve been duped into believing the daily caloric requirement is 2,000 calories. That’s the figure the government and food industry consider an average for Americans, and it’s the standard used on nutrition labels. You know how good the government is with numbers. Most people eat more than that even though many experts believe we should consume fewer than 2,000 calories per day.

After all, it’s possible to eat 2,000 calories a day and grow to the size of Jabba the Hut on Star Wars. Two thousand bad calories are killers. The kinds of calories we eat can be just as important as the amount.

Try the Calorie Dare of eating 2,000 healthy calories in a day. Some people may not be able to reach the 2,000-calorie mark. It’s a lot of food if it’s the right food.

If we eat healthy, it’s easier to stay under that threshold. A healthy salad of greens has few calories. A tasty piece of grilled chicken can have fewer than 200 calories. Asparagus and other veggies rate low on the caloric meter. Eat such foods three times a day and that’s a lot of food and few calories.

Verbal Slap

Perhaps the biggest secret of weight loss is momentum. I’m not sure anything is more crucial than compounding interest. This term has more than one meaning for me. I needed something to hold my interest.

I have to see results to motivate me to continue. When I hear slow burn, I don’t think of the safe weight loss rate of some diet. No, a slow burn describes how mad I get when my snail-pace diet won’t let me have a slice of Mello Mushroom’s jerk chicken and pineapple pizza.

I want to see and feel myself shrinking so my confidence goes the other direction. This is a huge reason for my fifth Golden Nugget: Fly Solo, Where Even the Airplane Food Tastes Good. If you want to stay fat or get even fatter, go it alone. Live and eat in a vacuum, where no one holds you accountable or challenges your selection of Ho Hos for supper.

In this area, the term helping doesn’t refer to portion size.

I stayed faithful and disciplined on the QWLCA approach because it not only taught me an easy, low-maintenance plan for eating healthy foods but also provided the ultimate customer support. The QWLCA strategy includes real people who coach, encourage, and correct clients with amazing clarity and gentleness. And why wouldn’t they? Most of the staff members were clients too.

I missed only a few days despite my busy travel schedule. I didn’t mind the visits. The people were nice. Everyone in the office had used the plan to lose weight. They made it fun.

On Wednesdays, they provided motivation classes and cooked sample recipes. The group time built camaraderie. Before long, it felt the same as hanging out with a great small group at church. I wanted to keep my appointments because the staff had become friends.

They maintain a progress board on the wall. If you lose three pounds or more a week, you make the board. I saw where some people had lost as much as seventeen pounds in a week. I lost twelve pounds my first week because I was huge. It was mostly water weight. I think I tinkled it off, but I didn’t care how it came off as long as it came off.

The progress board stoked me to keep going every week. When you see one of your advisers write a double-digit number on the board, it makes you that much more determined to match it or beat it the following week. It’s like the home version of The Biggest Loser. It becomes a competition against yourself, the kind that is productive as opposed to Skinny Scotty vs. Supersize Scotty.

One week they weighed me and walked over to the board and placed my name in the top slot. I had lost more weight than anyone that week. I grabbed my phone and took a photo of the board.

The QWLCA staff kept things light. I didn’t have to do what they said, obviously. And sometimes I didn’t. Sometimes I walked in after eating an extra bowl of strawberries. Maybe two extra bowls.

“Oh, you can’t do that. C’mon now,” the ladies would say, and I’d take my verbal slap on the wrist and try to do better the next time.

The QWLCA folks asked me to record everything I ate each day to monitor my progress and make adjustments. I discovered it’s a flexible approach. I also learned it’s so finely tuned that eating prohibited foods or portions has an immediate effect. Even when I cheated by eating too many portions of an approved food, my weight loss slowed.

“Most people love our program, but we get a few people who complain,” the QWLCA owner told me. “I get some letters from irate people who wanted to lose forty pounds and they only lost twenty.”

He said his typical conversation went something like this:

Customer: “This is not working.”

“What do you eat? Are you eating according to your plan?”

“Well, yeah, but I have to have my three glasses of wine at night.”

“Then you’re not following your plan. You’re cheating. If you followed your plan, you’d still be losing.”

He’s right. When I plateaued after a while, QWLCA earned its money.

I had followed the plan almost perfectly and lost a lot of weight when my momentum bogged. They tweaked the regimen and introduced specific “breakers” to fan the metabolism flame. It reminded me of the times I worked out with weights and hit a wall and couldn’t get past a 225-pound bench press. I had to do something different to push through the burn to get a new bench press max.

That’s what QWLCA does. They change the diet and personalize it to find what works to crank the fat-burning dynamo again. I didn’t eat cheese on the plan, but then out of the blue they allowed me to have mozzarella cheese for a few days. Don’t ask me why or how, but it worked. It wasn’t like I had strands of mozzarella hanging from the corners of my mouth, but I lost more weight the next week.

Sometimes the breaker included more protein and fewer carbs. I’m a meat-eater, so I didn’t mind.

Once again, the accountability proved crucial.

I didn’t have to think through this diet. I didn’t count calories. They told me what to do and I did it. And when I stepped on the scales each week, the counterweights moved a little more to the left.

“Pick from these foods,” they said. “Here’s your proteins, here’s your carbs, here’s your vegetables, here’s your fruits. You pick.” So I did. Eight ounces of this. Three ounces of that. It was like ordering from a menu with terrific variety.

Most people who cheat on a diet will lie afterward. I’ve done that. On this plan, I learned to be honest no matter how painful the moment. The QWLCA staff and Donna reminded me to take ownership of my failures, my successes, my entire campaign.

Typical Visit

I lost 132 pounds in large part because of what I’m about to describe. Without my visits to the QWLCA clinic, without their policing and support, I don’t lose the weight.

I believe the majority of overweight folks are like me—sometimes we need a pat on the back and sometimes we need a kick in the rear. My target was pretty hard to miss. I had to visit the clinic every business day for the first two weeks. If I didn’t appear as scheduled—even during maintenance—they hunted me down on the phone.

A typical visit to the clinic started in my bedroom closet and chest of drawers.

I wore as few clothes as possible for an appointment that by necessity is up close and personal.

Every time you go in you’re motivated and want to see you’ve lost weight, and clothes weigh something. It may be a few ounces, but that’s a few ounces that ain’t actually me. If you wear the same kinds of clothes and go to the clinic at roughly the same time every visit, your scale readings should be consistent. Your lightest readings typically come after you awake in the mornings and go to the bathroom.

I started showing up at QWLCA just before they opened. I stood out front in sweatpants, tapping on the door and fogging the glass as I peered in.

“Come on,” I shouted through the door. “I’m going to start blowing up if you don’t hurry.”

I usually wore slip-on shoes. I’ve noticed young people sometimes wear pajama bottoms as their pants out in public. I was 47 but I wore pajama pants twice to the clinic. Donna scolded me. I just shrugged.

“Maybe people will think they’re golf pants,” I said.

I always carry keys in my pocket with two large chains full of keys. Sometimes I’m walking onstage at concerts when I remember to take off my key chains so I don’t sound like the singing janitor clinking around. I always remembered to pull out my keys and wallet and take off my wedding band and watch before weighing. I even took off my glasses. Then I kicked off my shoes and climbed onto the scales.

One time I stopped at the clinic in nice clothes because I had another appointment afterward. I took a pair of sweatpants in a bag so I could change for my weigh-in. I wanted every advantage to stay motivated, and I knew sometimes clothes and shoes weigh four or five pounds. It takes a lot of cloth to cover a big boy. When I changed in the bathroom and walked out, the ladies smiled and shook their heads. I wasn’t the first person to do that.

The QWLCA owner told me he walked in to the weighing area at one of his locations in Houston and stopped in his tracks when he saw a large lady standing buck naked in front of the scales, ready to weigh. Startled, he realized she refused to allow anything—literally anything—to get in the way of her weight loss.

I understood her desire. I wanted to see that scale drop every time, and I counted ounces. I weighed 201.2 ounces one time after weighing 201.7 the week before. If I didn’t count ounces, then all I would’ve noticed is the scales stayed at 201. Instead, I benefited from five ounces of momentum. At the same time, it’s discouraging to go in, step on the scales, and see no loss. And it’s maddening when you’ve actually gained weight.

The key is never to give up.

That’s where the counselors help. When you haven’t lost weight or if you’ve regained a little, your tendency is to say, “Forget it. I’m headed to McDonald’s. Then I’m going to go lay under the Frosty machine at Wendy’s and have somebody open the spout.”

The counselors step in and say, “It’s OK. Let’s change it up a little bit.” In one week they can help you escape a plateau.

After going in every day for the first few weeks, I tried to go in twice a week for the remainder of my campaign. I looked forward to the encouragement. You feel lighter when someone lifts you. Like meetings for Weight Watchers or Alcoholics Anonymous, you get the support of other people and make new friends and compatriots in a common struggle. We joked and laughed and had a good time.

I want to love people to Jesus, so I told them what I do for a living and talked about God and progressed toward sharing His story with them. Like Mark Hall says, “You have to earn the right to speak truth into people’s lives.”

After the weigh-in, the QWLCA staff took my blood pressure and recorded it. Then came the meat and potatoes, so to speak. Each session, a staff member took the time to sit down with me, review my food log (either handwritten or on my iPad) and counsel me.

They provide a booklet of general guidelines, but the most effective strategies came from my office sit-downs. They offered multiple approaches—Plans A, B, and C—and helped pinpoint the right one for each individual or for each week.

It’s all personalized, and that’s the reason it’s important to make the office visits. I could hand you my QWLCA booklet and you might be able to pull off weight loss on your own. Yet the plan wouldn’t be as intuitive or effective—and it certainly wouldn’t be as fast and fun—as going to the clinic.

This essential accountability trains you to eat healthy and monitors all the little things that add up to big results. The staff ensures you get the proper amounts of water, salt, and fat content, like lite butters and oils. I could not have asked for better input. They even designed a travel strategy for me.

“I’m going to Seattle this week,” I said, “And I’ll have to eat in restaurants.”

“All right, here is what you do. Make sure you tell the restaurants to cook it this way and do this and don’t do that.”

They even checked on me when I traveled. One day my phone rang while I was in another city, and I felt my jaw drop as I recognized the clinic number on my display.

“Is it going all right? Do you need anything?” the clinic worker asked. “Tell me what you ate, what you did.”

And they’ll slap you upside the head if you don’t do it right—in love, of course.

After losing 132 pounds, I went on a maintenance routine in which I followed the habits I developed. But I added more variety (and occasionally cheated enough to regain a little weight; more on that later). Six months after I completed my big weight loss, they still called and loved on me.

Each visit takes fifteen or twenty minutes, depending upon how much I cut up with the crew. I never failed to get my money’s worth, which brings up the next most pressing subject: cost.

Bottom Line

When I walked into the QWLCA clinic for the first time, I learned I could afford to lose weight in more ways than one.

I also knew by the end of the visit I couldn’t afford not to do it.

The cost, like the plan, is different for everyone. You pay only for the amount of time you use the QWLCA clinic, and that time is based upon the goal weight you provide in your initial interview. They guarantee you’ll lose a certain number of pounds per week if you don’t cheat, and they’re able to pinpoint the future week when you’ll hit your goal weight. Then they charge you per week.

The less weight you have to lose, the less you have to pay since you pay based on the number of weeks you’re in the program. It’s not cheap but it’s reasonable. However, the cost motivated me. I wanted to get what I paid for. It’s human nature to do something half-heartedly when you have no real investment in it. I’m a firm believer in having skin in the game, especially when the skin needs liposuction.

If you hit a wall and need a breaker for a week, that doesn’t count toward your bill. They help you get going again for free. They sometimes have promotional contests and announce, “If you lose more than three pounds this week, you get a free week added to your program.”

The clinic asks you to pay the entire fee up front but will work out a payment plan if needed.

Inquiring minds always get around to the money. I love to keep people guessing on how much it cost me to lose all this weight and learn a new way of eating. Drum roll, please….

It cost me a little over $1,000 to lose 132 pounds. I paid about $7.58 for every pound I lost. That’s the bargain of a lifetime—literally a longer lifetime. In the interest of full disclosure, I probably spent that much again on the QWLCA products, but that was my choice out of convenience. I didn’t have to buy them.

What’s the price tag on being around for Donna and my grandson when I’m sixty?

How much is it worth to be able to feel good about yourself?

I remember steamrolling through my weight loss, the pounds almost dripping off of me, and thinking, “If this cost $3,000, it’d be worth it for my health and other reasons.”

People spend $3,000 for Lasik surgery to see without reading glasses. Losing weight can be infinitely more important than acquiring 20/20 vision. Either you do this and lose all the weight, or you hope no one else is getting Lasik surgery because you don’t want them to see all your rolls.

The best endorsement I could give the program is that, knowing what I know now, I would do it all over again without hesitation. It was worth every trip, every minute, every dime.

And yet it was only part of the picture. I was so addicted to overeating that I needed more than just the QWLCA staff. I guess if Warren Buffet lived up to the way I prefer to pronounce his last name and needed to lose weight, he could afford to have the QWLCA folks go home with him. I couldn’t.

I needed something else—someone else—for all the other hours of each day. In the next two chapters, I’ll share how two friends made all the difference.