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

by Scott Davis

  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 conduct
ed 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.”

  FAT FOLKS KNOW SOME things better than thin folks. We know just how deep the pink marks can go from being corded by underwear. We know what tastes good. And we know, better than most, just how important oxygen is. I got so fat that at times I could barely breathe. When it comes to living, air helps.

  This is why a big belly and sleeping don’t go together. It seemed as if the bigger I got, the sleepier I got.

  At my heaviest, I lived in the lazy man’s vicious cycle: Stay up half the night when no one else is around so you can stuff your gut as you please, and then sleep too long, lose valuable daylight and productivity, and set up yourself to repeat the same undisciplined regimen the next day.

  I still have scars from the double-edged sword of being my own boss. For an addict, it can mean having too much freedom. And in some ways how I make my living helped me gloss over my issues rather than address them.

  Comedy was my cheat sheet on life. It was my mask, my fantasy to escape reality. Deep inside, I felt bad not only physically but also emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. I grew depressed. I was tired and broken down. I was
pathetic. Yet I always turned to my humor, my “ministry” of making people laugh. Truth is, it ministered to me more than anyone. Making people laugh made me feel good and lent me worth, at least while I was onstage. It made me feel better if I could make someone else feel better, as if I’d accomplished something. To that end, I guess God used me in spite of myself.

  But while everybody laughed, my vicious cycle continued.

  My niece, Ashley, worked in my home office for several years, helping me book and coordinate my concerts and various chores. I had one ironclad rule for her.

  “If anyone calls before 10 a.m. and wonders where I am,” I said, “Just tell them I’m in the word.”

  That didn’t mean I’d squirreled myself away somewhere to study the Bible. I nicknamed my bed “the word.”

  It was an off-hand comment I made a few times, and I didn’t think it was that funny. But Mark Lowry cackled hard when he heard it. He called me one night at about 11 p.m. He knew I’d be parked in front of the television.

  “Man, my concert was sold out tonight, just packed,” he said. “They loved ‘the word’ story.”

  “Mark! You used my line?”

  “Yeah, they loved it,” he said. “I’ll tell you what, I’ll pay you for that joke.”

  Mark honored his word and paid me every month for a year to help him write. I’ve still got the contract somewhere. It’s strange, but I don’t consider myself a stand-up comedian who tells jokes. Most of my humor comes out of life experiences. I began coming up with funny stories for Mark, and he used some and didn’t use others. I helped Mark with his newsletter each month, reviewing it before publication. I made notes of funny items and suggested edits or additions. He wrote it, but I added spice.

  “I just supported you is what I did,” he joked on the phone one time. “Like a missionary.”

  I remember sitting in a room at Word Records with Mark, Martha Bolton, Cory Edwards, and Bubba Smith. Cory wrote the animated movies Hoodwinked and Hoodwinked Too. We’d sit around a big conference room table and throw out ideas for Mark’s next comedy video, one of the most invigorating ways of constructing comedy.