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

by Scott Davis

  Several of Mark’s videos have gone gold in sales, and I appear in all but a few of them. We always played off of my size. In one video, I play Big Judd Brown. I wear a shirt sprayed down with water to make me appear soaked in sweat. I look horrible, perfect for a skit themed as “Big Judd Brown: You Never Get a Second Chance to Make a First Impression.”

  The video Remotely Controlled centers upon Mark watching TV while on his tour bus. It shows him watching his own comedy routine but he grows bored with it and changes channels. They’re all fake, obviously, but he lands on a channel on which the announcer blares, “Two beautiful women who love the same man, and that man is UGLY.” The camera focuses on me. I sit on a couch with a big cigar hanging out of my mouth and two gorgeous girls—I have no idea where they found them—on either side of me. They fight over me. It looks like something off of a silly reality show, which is ironic because scenes like two beautiful women fighting over a disgustingly fat guy are more fantasy than reality.

  In the past, a lot of my comedy routine featured my stories of growing up on a farm. I usually ran my jokes by Mark first.

  He’d laugh and say, “You need to put that in your show. That’s funny.” So I did. Even now, most of my stories come out of painful moments or arguments with my wife. Not that we’re going to divorce, but everybody has issues. As Dr. Falwell used to say, divorce is never an option. Murder maybe, but never divorce. I try to look at the funny side of our squabbles and tell the tales. Here’s a true story:

  Donna woke up angry at me the other day. Have you ever had your spouse do this to you? When she awoke, she was mad at me because I wronged her in a dream. She stayed mad for the first half of the day. I had to leave the house for a while. And it was dream.

  Telling stories out of life meant telling stories about my girth, but much of the fat humor covered my embarrassment. Instead of ignoring it and climbing under a rock, I thought, “I’m just going to get it out there, make a joke out of it, and get past it.” That was my way of dealing with it in public.

  How ironic that I could do it in public but struggled so mightily to confront myself personally.

  That’s a sign of a true addict, though. Put on a show. Act like life is grand.

  Ignore the obvious.

  Laugh to Keep from Crying

  Humor often comes out of tragedy. Some of the most famous comedians in history laughed at themselves to keep from crying. Former Saturday Night Live actor Chris Farley was one of the most hilarious comics I’ve ever seen. Yet I suspect at least some of his humor masked the pain he felt over his weight. Think about it. One of his most famous skits featured Patrick Swayze and Farley as male dancers. Swayze was convincing in the part because of his physique. Farley flailed in front of an entire nation on live TV, his hairy gut hanging out. The only way you can do that is to block out the shame, go the opposite direction, and get wild and crazy. It lets people laugh but it means opening yourself to intense scrutiny, and that is a scary place.

  The downside to that scenario can be deflating. Perhaps not every big person experiences this, but for me relationships could be minefields. It seemed at times that people liked me when I made them laugh. When I wanted to be myself, the picture changed. It seemed nobody cared to be around me. Maybe it wasn’t reality. Maybe it was just how I felt. When I weighed 309 pounds, it was easy to make people laugh when I joked about myself. But when it came time to be serious or deal with a relationship or talk about something personal, the reaction seemed to be more like, “Ohhh. He’s so pathetic. I don’t want to be around this.”

  That’s the reason I kept making people laugh. I had to ensure people liked me—all of me. Much of the material I’m developing now has nothing to do with being big. I’m discovering life has other funny subjects. But just as my baggy clothes draped my physical body, a lot of my old comedy draped my soul.

  Using comedy as a mask was therapeutic in one way, but it also worked against me. Why change my eating habits when being fat provided the primary fodder for my livelihood? Losing weight meant losing a huge chunk of my comedy routine.

  I stayed stuck in neutral for a long time. I knew I was obese. I knew it was my fault. I even knew it was sin. I just chose not to choose to do anything about it, and that bogged me in the mire of my next Golden Nugget: Welcome to Waffle House.

  True Southerners smirk with skewed pride in our Waffle Houses. The restaurant chain has something of a cult following. Most of the cult members wear size XL, but at least they’re faithful. Places like Waffle House make it hard for big folks to make up their minds to do something about their weight. The food is just too good.

  But the word waffle is more dangerous to a fat person as a verb than as a noun.

  If you want to stay fat or get even fatter, keep waffling in the same status quo. No need to put any thought into what you eat—or how much or when or whether it’s dead or alive. Just keep chewing the same fat, saying the same lame lies to yourself over and over. Refuse to get better. Let your mind wander the buffet of life. Indulge your food fantasies. Continue being large and less than you can be.

  I know it so well because I lived there so long.

  I hated being stuck at this stage. It felt like jail and yet I held the key all the while. Come to think of it, that’s part of the punishment. I couldn’t make up my mind to do something about the status quo even though my quo was sickeningly large. While this step is the catalyst to regaining control over weight, it also happens to be the toughest aspect of losing weight.

  People ask me everywhere I go, “What made you stick with this diet?” That is the foremost question I face, and for good reason. Everybody, and I mean every single overweight person who’s ever strained to button his jeans, has struggled to make up his mind to do something about his waistline and then stick with it.

  So, what gives? How do we make up our minds not just to lose weight but also to lose weight permanently and forge a forever kind of change? I don’t know if it’s possible to pinpoint a one-size-fits-all answer. It’s different for each person. For the longest time, I couldn’t offer a viable answer even for myself.

  It’s reflexive to blurt out a canned response like, “I don’t know. I guess I just wanted to get healthy.” Well, duh. Everyone wants to be healthy.

  I had dozens of motivations to lose weight, some of which I share in the rest of this chapter. But what flipped my switch for the last time?

  To be honest, I didn’t know my answer until I sat down to write this book.

  Counting

  Walking around in a Serotonin-induced haze is not my idea of fun. I used to stay so drowsy that I’d nod off in a car wash. Then I found out one of the reasons for the constant fog. It’s called sleep apnea, and it’s a condition in which a person intermittently stops breathing during sleep. The lack of oxygen diminishes restful sleep and leaves the person tired throughout the day. I didn’t realize I had it until my wife told me.

  One morning, before the period in which Donna banished me to the guest bedroom to sleep, I awoke gasping for air sometime around 3 a.m.

  Donna stared at me and looked at the watch in her hand.

  “You went a minute and a half and didn’t breathe,” she said.

  “Well, when were you going to poke me?” I said, squinting to bring her into focus. “Two minutes? Five minutes? When I turned blue?”

  She started shaking her head and tried to speak but I cut her off.

  “I mean, is there a point where you finally say, ‘Well, I wonder if he’s going to keep breathing’?”

  I have a friend who’s a big person who sleeps with an apnea machine. It blows a constant stream of air through a hose and into a mask worn over the face. It’s called a Continuous Positive Airway Pressure (CPAP) machine. My buddy recently told me he had an appointment with a clinic to undergo another sleep test as a checkup. I told him the story about Donna counting how long I went without breathing without nudging me awake.

  “Yeah, she was counting, all right,” he sai
d. “She was counting $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 in life insurance money.”

  Those years were difficult. I sometimes awoke gasping for air. Though I never underwent testing for apnea I did try a CPAP machine. A friend got a new machine and let me borrow his old one. This move isn’t exactly approved by the American Medical Association, so don’t try it at home. I never could get the thing to help me because I would wake up, mouth wide open and as dry as a cotton boll in a drought. Even asleep my biggest problem was opening my mouth.

  I should’ve picked up on the fact that I wasn’t breathing in my sleep long before Donna had fun with her little counting game. According to the materials I read, I had all the tell-tale signs of apnea:

  Fatigue? Yep, I could check that one on the list.

  Significant daytime drowsiness? Check.

  Snoring? Double check.

  My body has a snoring threshold at 220 pounds. When I reached that weight, I apparently had grown enough fat inside my nasal passages that they began flapping whenever I conked out. The heavier I got, the bigger they got, and the more they flapped. When I topped 300 pounds, those suckers flapped so hard they sounded like a moose call. It got to the point where I began waking myself with my own snoring. I tried everything to quit snoring, but the moose kept moaning.

  I sometimes roomed with Mark Lowry when I accompanied him on some of his tours. He’d sleep on one bed and I’d sleep on the other. One night, my snoring woke him.

  “Scott! Scott!”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re snoring. Uh-uh. Ain’t happening. It’s worth getting you a whole ‘nother room.” Now he sounded like my wife. From then on, he paid for another room.

  At other times, I’ve had road managers travel with me on my own tours. One guy, Billy (not Billy Lord), roomed with me. After we ate supper and returned to the hotel room, I conked out on my bed. I woke up at about 3 a.m. and looked over only to see a mattress with no sheets. Nothing was on his Billy’s bed. No covers. No pillows. No Billy. Where did he go?

  It wasn’t the Rapture because I knew I was more spiritual than that dude. I got up and looked around the room and then stumbled to the bathroom. I opened the door and looked down. There he was, curled up on a makeshift pallet in the tub.

  He looked up, one eye closed. “Man, you snore!”

  I’m cheap but I’m also compassionate. I started paying for an extra room so my staff could be rested enough to help me.

  I’ve seen people snoring on airplanes and thought, “Oh, Lord, please don’t ever let that be me.” I like to book an aisle seat to enjoy the extra room. When I was big, I went to sleep fast but awoke with bruises. I rubbed and looked up in time to see Flight Attendant Barbie smile and wave “Buh-bye” after cramming the beverage cart into the half of my body that stuck out in the aisle. One day I worked up the gumption to ask my road manager if I snored on the plane. To my relief, he said I didn’t. When I slept sitting up, I was quiet.

  In my fat days, I sometimes hassled for breath as my gut compressed my diaphragm like a concrete block on a balloon. I struggled with simple chores like walking to the mailbox (all joking aside, I had a hard time with this), taking out the trash, or climbing steps.

  Now that I’ve lost weight, I literally breathe easier and don’t snore at all. I’ve abandoned the guest bedroom and reclaimed my spot next to my wife on the right side of our bed. I no longer keep her awake with my snoring or body heat—or with the temptation to play her little counting game when my chest doesn’t move.

  Sanctuary

  My rumble through the airport detailed in Chapter One embarrassed me, as did the episodes in which I broke the toilet seat and two different beds and needed an ambulance for a doctor’s visit.

  Those moments turned my face red, for sure, but personal humiliation is different. It carries a different weight. As I describe some of these instances, please understand I’m being transparent not to demonstrate how pathetic I was or to elicit sympathy. No one had to tell me I was pathetic, and I didn’t deserve sympathy because I brought my grief on myself.

  Instead, I share these personal humiliations to detail the many reasons I almost didn’t have a choice but to do something about my weight. Plus, I pray my honesty comforts others in similar situations and lets them know the depths from which anyone is capable of emerging.

  I realized how nasty obese I had grown when I could no longer wear shoes with laces. I literally could not reach over to tie shoes. When I tried, I’d lose my breath or have to catch myself before falling over. I switched to slip-on shoes.

  Other sickening side effects surfaced in the bathroom.

  I can’t tell you how important my daily toilet time is to me. Maybe that sounds weird, but my bathroom is a bit of a sanctuary. The bathroom is where I read a great deal. It’s where I think. I come up with funny stories. It’s my personal retreat. At one point, I even had a television in the bathroom so I could camp out as long as I liked. When you don’t get married until your mid-30s, you become a bit set in your ways and guard your space. My space happens to flush with blue water.

  Imagine, then, the sobering reality that my butt had grown so large I had to buy the largest toilet seat I could find. I couldn’t even use the guest bathroom toilet anymore because it was the old-fashioned, smaller kind and my butt wouldn’t fit on it. I felt like was sitting on a thimble.

  The shower presented another hazard. When a remodeling project on our main bathroom bogged down, I had to use the guest bathroom’s tiny modular shower. It was about four feet square. I didn’t step in and get stuck, but I came close. It was great for cleaning though. I just lathered up real good and turned around a few times to take care of all four walls at once. Scrubbing bubbles, scrubbing bubbles, hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!

  Even more fallout emerged in the bedroom.

  In my ever-fluctuating battle, I had lost a good bit of weight before I met Donna. I started gaining after we married in December 1998. Over time, my weight gain affected even the physical part of our marriage. Donna told me while we were dating (and I was smaller) that if she had met me when I was as big as my video character Big Judd Brown she never would have dated me. I don’t blame her. I would feel the same way about her. I don’t mean to be ungodly, but I like somebody who looks decent. Perhaps that’s shallow and hypocritical, but I’m being bone honest.

  As I got bigger—250 pounds, then 260, then 270 and the scales groaned ever higher—our sex life suffered. What was appealing about me? Sex is physical and involves physical attraction. It wasn’t exactly a romance-novel moment when I looked over, wiggled my eyebrows, and asked, “Hey, baby, wanna have some fun?” My form of birth control was getting undressed with the lights on.

  Then again, dressing myself was like enduring an obstacle course.

  I hated buying clothes. I shopped at Wal-Mart most of the time and purchased big jeans and big shirts and left them untucked long before it was stylish. I didn’t want to be the guy who tucked in his shirt but had his gut hanging over his beltline for all to see.

  We all have different body types. Some people have fat legs, some have big guts, rear ends, or chests. I had a huge gut with normal legs. My waist was so large that I had to have extra-large pants, which meant the pants legs dwarfed my skinny legs. I looked dumpy. I had a picture in mind of what I was supposed to look like as I got dressed, and then I’d look in the mirror and think, “Oh, I don’t look anything like I thought. Awful. Just awful.”

  I don’t know why I had that thought process. Maybe it’s because I was thin before I got fat, but the mirror doesn’t lie.

  Neither does my wife.

  I would dress in one of my big, drape-like shirts, turn to Donna and ask, “Honey, does this make me look fat?” Yes, even men use that line. Donna would roll her eyes at me.

  “No, that shirt doesn’t make you look fat. Your face makes you look fat. Your gut makes you look fat. Your fat makes you look fat. Are you kidding me?”

  Actually, she never said that, but her look di
d.

  I guess the proper question would have been, “Does this make me look less fat than I really am?” I tried to use clothes to minimize my body and hide from my true appearance. I don’t think it ever worked.

  Black clothing is supposed to be slimming. I wore black clothes all the time. One of my friends looked at me and shook his head. “You need something darker.”

  I knew I was in trouble then. Goth isn’t in when you’re middle-aged.

  Yet another frustration occurred before Jerry Falwell’s funeral. I had to purchase a suit at Casual Male XL, where professional athletes shop. I needed a size 52 suit. That’s 12 sizes larger than my college suit from Hong Kong.

  All of these little moments coalesced into an unmistakable and constant urge to change. Yet none had the impact as one fitful and faith-filled shortcoming that rocked me to my core. I finally had to hold up a mirror not to ask what I saw….

  But what God saw.

  Before and After

  Anytime I see an advertisement for the latest diet or exercise fad, I never trust the Before-and-After photos. I’m convinced some of them show two different people. Here’s Tubby before. Here’s Thomas afterward. Perhaps Tubby and Thomas are brothers separated at birth, but they ain’t the same dude.

  In other ads, a grainy candid photo shows a big lady at a family reunion, mouth full of egg salad and wearing something that looks like either a maternity blouse or a hot air balloon. In the next photo, somebody who doesn’t come close to resembling Reunion Girl postures in spandex shorts and a sports bra, abs ripped. And she did it in six weeks.

  Other examples include photos clearly of the same man, but in the Before photo he’s a little meaty and in the After photo he’s sucking his gut in so far his navel touches his spine. I have a rule of thumb: Don’t trust the photo if you can see someone’s entire bottom rib.