If My Body is a Temple, Then I was a Megachurch

by Scott Davis

  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.

  I’VE STUDIED THE BIBLE enough to know the temple in Jerusalem featured large courts as gathering places for different groups of people. King Solomon’s Temple, destroyed by the Babylonians around 586 B.C., had two major courts, the Great Court and the Inner Court. Jesus visited Herod’s Temple, destroyed by the Romans in 70 A.D. It featured several courts, including the Court of the Gentiles, the Court of the Women, the Court of the Priests, and the Court of the Israelites.

  If you’d seen me a few years ago, you’d have known my temple had a food court.

  The first of my seven slim-proof Golden Nuggets will do wonders to keep any personal temple in dire need of remodeling.

  Swallow the Truth.

  For years, I swallowed the truth and everything else I could get my hands on. I refused to admit I had a problem, especially in one intensely personal way I will detail later in this chapter.

  I told myself my eating habits were fine. All I would admit to was, yes, I had a spaghetti stain on my shirt. I rationalized in ways that now seem laughable: If God didn’t put all those burgers, fries, and desserts on Earth to enjoy, then why did He make them so finger-lickin’ good? I had different ideas on displaying the full Gospel. As large as I was, it didn’t get any more full. I saw no sense in talking about the 500-pound elephant in the room, especially since I was the elephant.

  I knew the truth because I knew God’s Word. But I wouldn’t admit the truth because I loved my addiction more than I loved doing the right thing. It led to one place.

  It led to a personal hell.

  The War

  Have you ever noticed the root word of diet is die?

  I’m not sure if that has a physical or spiritual connotation, or both. I know it feels like you’re going to die when you’re big and starving yourself. I know sometimes you think you’re dying for a bite to eat. But I think the spiritual implication is more appropriate. To diet is to die to self in a real way, a way that can make a fat person camp out in Romans 6 and 7.

  I can’t tell you how many times I planned to die to self when it came to food. I would say, “OK, this is the day. I’m gonna lose the weight starting right now.” Every single time—thousands of them—I had only honest, good intentions of following through.

  I would start out great, going most of the day without a morsel or perhaps eating certain foods to obey the diet du jour. But then it happened. For some reason I’ve yet to comprehend, I stumbled. I ate something not on my list and invariably felt I blew it.

  “Well, I’ve messed up, so I might as well eat whatever I want today,” I said. “I can start the diet fresh tomorrow.”

  Ah, the twisted logic of a fat man staring at a cabinet full of Little Debbies.

  Here’s the wicked irony: Because I knew I would start over the next day, I awarded myself permission not just to eat but to go crazy for the rest of the day. It’s not an exaggeration to say on some days I scarfed down nearly every edible item in sight. I felt half bulimic. I had the binging part
down.

  My work schedule didn’t help. I faced constant battles at home and on the road.

  I don’t have what most folks would consider a real job, but I am self-employed. I set my own schedule, a dangerous freedom when you have a size 50-plus waist. While at home, I constantly run errands to maintain my ministry and home. I make runs to the post office, bank, Wal-Mart, and Office Depot (I can at least fantasize about being neat and organized, can’t I?).

  For most people this would be a routine afternoon, but for me it was the battleground of my two warring halves: Supersize Scotty and Skinny Scotty.

  Supersize Scotty usually won, turning the afternoon jaunt into a perverted feast. Between each errand during my fat years, I wheeled into the drive-thru of the closest fast-food restaurant. Between each errand.

  At McDonald’s I ordered the $1 double cheeseburger. Supersize Scotty chirped into action.

  “Hey, it’s only a dollar, so it won’t matter much.”

  Skinny Scotty wagged his finger: “Uh, price has nothing to do with calorie count, big boy.”

  Many times, since the double cheeseburger cost little, I inhaled two of them. On my worst days, I threw in a Big Mac on top of the double cheeseburgers, and Supersize Scotty grinned with both cheeks full.

  Chowing and driving, I pulled into the post office, tossed the sack of empty wrappers into the trash, checked my mail, and took off again. After the McDonald’s meal, I still felt hungry, or at least thought I did, and Krystal beckoned. Again, in my addicted and illogical thinking, I talked myself into stopping. Supersize Scotty sat on my left shoulder and whispered, “The burgers are so little that they’re not even burgers. They’re bites. No harm.”

  Skinny Scotty sat on my right shoulder and dreamed of doing pushups again one day. “Don’t do it!” he screamed. “Don’t listen to Chunkalicious over there!”

  Chunkalicious always won. My routine included four little Krystals and two Chili Pups. I washed them down with my second Diet Coke. It was a diet drink, after all. Skinny Scotty giggled at the fallacy.