Most of my family lives in central Indiana. We come from a hard working, family-oriented, small business community background, and I was raised in the farming town of Coatesville.
My most fond memories are of sitting in the back yard with my grandparents, parents, cousins, aunts and uncles. Weekends revolved around gardening, church and meals. Sunday started with breakfast, continued with church, pinnacled with lunch and slowly wound down until dinner. Food was omnipresent and the activity that brought us together was eating.
I was always the fat kid--last to be picked for any athletic event, but first to be picked when someone needed help, a joke, a song, or something that required cleverness. I was the only boy that spent most of his time helping with the dishes, talking with the women in the kitchen and avoiding the endless summertime basketball games in the back yard. Years later, I finally understand why: When you're the fat kid, you have to rely on intellect, humor and all sorts of other skills to mark your place in the world. While most little boys swimming and running around town with their shirts off, the fat kid is avoiding any running, wrestling and especially swimming in the pond, pool or any other activity that requires removing your shirt. Whoever invented "shirts and skins" basketball must've HATED fat kids!
While most boys were excelling in sports, I had some very small successes in baseball and loved to ride my bike around town. In addition to being a heavy kid, I was blessed with above average height. (I stand 6 ft 2 in as an adult.)
Baseball was fun once I learned that, if you can hit the ball really hard, you don't have to run fast around the bases. Riding bikes was always fun because I enjoyed the time with my friends, making them laugh and just hanging out. Also, in the late 70s, when I spent a lot of my time riding bikes, we were more interested in jumping our bikes over bricks, boards and other things. BMX racing had just emerged and we all wanted BMX bikes and to jump over cars! You didn't have to ride very fast or far to be cool on a bike in the 1970s.
As an adult, I am a successful professional, a great cook, amateur musician, good husband and proud to be a really good father to my eight-year-old daughter. However, along with that pleasant sounding package came some dangerous wrapping: a family history of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, asthma, hypothyroidism, and some food and environmental allergies. I used to joke that as a diabetic with food allergies "It's not easy being a fat guy with all these different kinds of food I'm not supposed to eat!" In some ways that was true but, honestly, I was eating what I wanted, what looked good, what sounded good or, in many cases, what was within reach.
As a diabetic, I was supposed to limit my carbohydrate intake. I did, but only to the extent that I'd eat one piece of cake instead of two. The dietary restrctions related to my food allergies were much easier to follow. If I ate fish, I would swell up, stop breathing and feel like I was going to die. Interstingly, my food allergies taught me a very important lesson that eventually became one of my rules to live by "Don't Eat Poison."
By the time I was 32 years old, I weighed 317 pounds, had out of control diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure. However, I owned a nice home, was able to pay my bills, I went to church every Sunday, spent a lot of time helping people with disabilities and my family loved me very much. I was living the American dream. However, I had this nagging feeling that I needed to accomplish as much as possible as soon as possible, because you never know how long you're going to live. In fact, I was quite sure that I would probably not live to see 50 years old. After all, I'd inherited a lot of bad genes and it wasn't my fault that I had been dealt this lousy combination of health problems.
This was my life until a few motivating events occurred.
