My story

I never struggled with obesity as a teenager or an adult… I embraced it. I lived my entire life being extremely overweight. That was the way it was. Sure, I would sometimes have a fleeing thought that I could possibly try and lose weight; however, I never actually tried to change. When I graduated high school, I weighed over 350 pounds and I played it up. I was the "big" guy, at least on the outside. On the inside, it was a different story. At my "biggest" – some 10 years after high school, I weighed over 450 pounds. At that weight, I did not live life, I watched it. I sat on the side line watching friends do things that I dismissed as activities I was not into doing. I wasn't interested if it was more physical then pitching horseshoes at a BBQ due to the 250+ plus extra pounds I was carrying. I couldn't ride the rides at amusement parks. I couldn't sit in an airline seat. I couldn't plan a life past maybe 40.

Time was still on my side since I hadn't reached the age of 30 yet. By the grace of God, with the exception of high blood pressure that I left untreated, I never suffered any ill effects from my obesity. I lived my life, did what I wanted to do, and never gave any thought that there could be anything else out there for me. Obviously, this wasn't working. Not only did I feel that my physical body was shameful, my entire life that I had tried so hard to build was starting to collapse around me.

Although I had "surrendered" my life to Christ as a teenager, it wasn't until I was 29 years old -with my life collapsing around me, that I realized I never really gave God the "keys" to my life. Imagine being given a new car, and never given the keys to drive that car. That's what I was doing to Christ because there were aspects of my life that I just never wanted to let Him have. After all, I thought I was getting by pretty good. That is, until I came to the realization that I was driving my life straight into disaster, and I needed change. This was a change that I had tried to accomplish on my own but just could not do alone.

In despair one night, I cried out to God and asked Him to "change me". God heard me and that very night He began to work in my life. Once I gave God complete control, not only did He work to change the things in my life I had acknowledged needed to be changed, He began to address complete other areas of my life that needed to be improved before I even recognized these as issues.

So God picked up the ball and started running with it. Like a whirlwind, I immediately began to change. Not just the things that I realized were wrong with my life, but even things that I had yet to acknowledge where problems. With Christ at the controls, I found a new life. From the outside my world still looked as if it was crumbling but I had a peace that only can come from Jesus. I found my new self in a gym one day, and realized after exercising for about 30 minutes that "hey this isn't really that bad". Soon after I started changing my eating habits, and even quit cold turkey a fifteen plus year tobacco habit, without my wife even realizing that I had quit. Everything had changed! Today, I have lost almost 200 pounds, I am healthy, and I am physically enjoying living life.

After spending more than a year inside a gym almost daily, I decided to get off the elliptical machine that had practically been named after me, and try running for a little extra kick to my work out. I ran for a minute then walked a little before running again. Not a whole lot of success came from my first attempts at running, but like exercise in general I realized that it wasn't that bad and I found new goals. My first goal was to run a mile without stopping to walk. I remember well hitting this first goal with such joy that my arms went straight up in the air and a celebration shout came out of my mouth. The gym trainer, already a strong supporter of my physical transformation, quickly encouraged me to establish bigger and more challenging goals. In November of 2010, I registered for my first organized running event and successfully completed the San Antonio Rock 'n' Roll Half-Marathon.

Running has become a favorite past time to me. It has grown into so much more then counting minutes on a treadmill. It has become an escape, a time of personal reflection, an opportunity to get a way and have some alone time with God. I treasure this time so much these days that immediately after my second daughter was born, I went out and ran 3.1 miles (that is a 5k). Distance running to me has opened a whole new world of endurance events. I want to complete a full a marathon. I want to run 100K (62 miles). I want to finish an Iron Man… all for the glory of God. On the days that I just don't feel like going out and hitting the streets, I lace up my shoes and say "God I'm doing this for you!"