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Terri Meadors’ Testimony

My name is Terri Meadors and I am an RN. What can I say to let others know of the hope out there? I want to tell everyone that I was a 300 pound mess. I lived my life through my children and I manipulated my family so that I not only lived vicariously through them but also told them how to do what I wanted them to do and when and for how long and the misery of it all never ended. I had my children jumping through hoops and my husband jumping over fences at my command. They, of course, would happily do this, not because they loved me but because they just found it easier than going up against me. At 300 pounds I acted as threatening as I looked. I was awful.

I ate my way up to 256 pounds, and remember thinking that I was still in control of this, and I could lose it any time I wanted. What a lie. And I really believed it. I would start over every Monday. I'd had so many “last suppers”...well you know how that goes. This is the last one. Well, that one was so good that I waited one more day and then one more and then of course it was too close to the weekend and so I would have to wait until next Monday and that was just fine with me. I also played the first of the year game. The one when you make it through Christmas and then you make that new year's resolution but you still have Christmas candy around and so that never worked. So after I convinced myself that I better wait until later, it was Valentine's day and I really wanted my candy then, so I would wait until Lent. Wonderful Lent. You know the time of year where you sacrifice or give up something very dear to you for the sake of Christ and His ultimate sacrifice? It always seemed to work for forty days but it had nothing to do with Christ; it was about me losing a few pounds and looking better on Easter Sunday, just in time for me to forget all the sacrifice and dive into the Easter candy and meals.

Okay, enough was enough, well…until my birthday. The summer was so unbearable with all the heat and my husband seemed to be going out to play tennis more and more, and after years of doing what I wanted to do, that was just fine. That gave me more time to eat. More time to spend with the real love of my life. My kids I could keep busy watching TV or playing in their rooms and I had the house to myself. I can remember the excited feeling I had anticipating the time I would have to eat and what I was going to eat. It felt exciting and dangerous at the same time. I wanted to see how sneaky I was. I didn't get caught. It was like a game I made up for myself, but that was a really stupid game when I think about it now. I remember feeling in control. I wasn't and the laugh was on me.

Summer turned into Halloween and Halloween led into Thanksgiving and then Christmas turned into another end of another year and another thirty pounds. And all the time, while becoming expert in my game, and never being caught, I never realized I was caught the moment I went from a fourteen to a sixteen and especially when I went from a twenty-four to a twenty-eight and finally to a thirty. People did try to tell me they caught me by their sweet remarks of "You are such a pretty girl, if you just lost a little weight." What was a little weight when you're 300 pounds? I thought, well okay, let me try the next weight loss program. So after Weight Watchers and diet shots, being hypnotized, and having my teeth wired together, I had five liposuctions and then tried the Atkins and the Scarsdale diet and went to two different hospitals and tried their liquid weight loss programs. I was having my husband pay through the nose. He was paying for each program and then paying for the food that I went back to and then paid for the next one. I finally went to Phen Phen, but that was not the first time that I did pills. I had done pills for weight loss since sixteen. But Phen Phen was better. I lost eighty pounds on that program and I was sick most of the time. If I needed to feel normal for some reason, I would not take the pills until I knew I would be safe at home and so I was barely myself for most of that time. I cried a lot and I felt like I was on drugs. Well, I was ...duh! I was so proud of myself that when I went into the hospital to have my hysterectomy I also had my tummy tucked and my thighs reduced. I looked like a rag doll. All the suture sites look just like I was sewn up by a doll maker and they are still there today to remind me of my disobedience.

Well I was so sure I was back in control now that I gave myself rewards and more rewards, after all I had lost eighty pounds. I never dreamed I could ever gain it back. It was no dream; it was a nightmare, because I gained all eighty pounds back and then twenty more on top of that.

I lost eighty to gain 100. And if you are wondering where my family was in all this, they were around suffering through the pain, too. My daughters had to go to school and take whatever remarks about their mom that were thrown out at them and my husband, being the 150 pounder he has always been, suffered through it too. I never gave him anything he wanted. He could not be proud of his 300 pound wife in her size thirty double breasted suit that she had to convert to single breasted with her best heels on that turned over at the sides because of her weight. And I was happy to ignore my family while I carried on my love affair with food. I remember going to McDonalds on several occasions and ordering two sandwiches and two orders of fries and two drinks so they would not think this was for one person, and that was my second lunch and that might have been two hours before dinner, and if I didn't get to eat what I wanted I would just wait and sneak out and get what I really wanted later. I would go from store to store everyday and buy Peanut M&Ms so that the clerks would not see me coming in everyday for the same thing. I was delusional to say the least. I know the moment it started to hit home. It was the moment my children and I went to visit my husband one day before the office was closing. My daughter went in and weighed...

She came in crying to me and said she was 154 pounds. I calmly said not to worry about it and I told her we would do something together. I mentioned Weight Watchers and she screamed out she was not going to do that and I could see the desperation in her face but I didn't understand why. I didn't understand that she had seen me go through that time after time and she probably saw the hopelessness of that path. I remember seeing an article on the front page of the newspaper a year before. It was an article about Weigh Down and I went to the phone book the next morning and sure enough there was a Weigh Down office in Nashville. I called and there just happened to be a church beginning a class that very Sunday night. Well, I was excited about that but since it was more for my daughter I proceeded to eat as I always did. Closer to Sunday, I began to eat more and didn't really care if they weighed me, because the following week I would have lost more, since I was not eating as much. I had it all worked out until the night I walked into that class. I don't know what happened but I knew I was supposed to be here as well as my daughter.

At the orientation, I really cannot say what I felt. I felt hope for the first time and then I felt fear for the first time also, because I had done everything else and now I was going to try God. What if I was unsuccessful? That would mean God was...was not there with me. That scared me more than I wanted to admit. Over the course of the twelve weeks I lost twenty-three pounds and continued to go. Why go back? Because I learned more about God in that twelve weeks then I had in forty something years of my life.

My daughter and I started to talk about God on the way to class and on the way home. Our lives started to change. We regained a love. Now that implies we once had a love but that is not what we had. We began to have love for one another. I was reading my Bible. I didn't even own one before this program - not ever in my life had I owned one or read one. I would stay up to two and three o'clock in the morning and be excited and mad over what I didn't know. My husband was happy with me. He never said anything about the weight loss because he had seen me go on so many other programs and they lasted for a while too. After showing him how I looked in the previous season's clothes and how I could no longer wear any of them, he still never said anything but “That’s good, dear.” This went on until the first ninety pounds had come off and I was so excited, then he got excited. I could tell that he reached for me more. He liked the clothes I was purchasing and the fact that I didn't have to shop at the fourteen plus stores any more. I actually had on heels that did not turn over at the sides and I had a swimsuit and despite the scars and extra skin I still wore it and he acted as if he didn't notice any of the imperfections at all. Well, at 130 pounds lost, he started saying I was beautiful and so sweet..."Sweet"...I was sweet now! My whole life had changed. I was happy all the time. There were no bitter words between us. If anything there were apologies for not getting something right and not doing something better for him.

Who was this? Who was I? I was a new creation. People who had not seen me over the years did not recognize me, not only because of the weight loss but because I was happy and not moody; I looked as different as I felt. My own aunts and uncles didn't know it was me when they would see me at family functions and the marriage I committed to twenty years prior was now a real marriage. What you saw out in public was the same person behind the closed doors and I could not say that before Weigh Down. My daughter lost thirty pounds and we all started eating the Weigh Down way, which is just God's way.......and now I know who God is and I have a personal relationship with Him that I only talked about having before Weigh Down. When I had lost 150 pounds my father noticed!! Who knew all this could come out of a weight loss program. My stepdaughter in Texas eats this way now and doesn't have the nervous stomach she used to. She doesn't have to take medication for it any more and she is teaching her daughter to eat this way. My cousin started the program and has lost fifty pounds and has come off her blood pressure medication. Our lives have all changed because of a weight loss program that not only shows you how to lose the excess weight but the excess baggage we have been carrying around with us all these years. Not only have I lost 150 pounds but I have lost pride, arrogance, manipulation of others' lives, the feeling that I have to be in control over everything and everyone, greed, lust, over-spending, and praise of man. The list could go on and on. Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you about my friend that joined Weigh Down after I lost my first 100 pounds. She had to wait and see and then she was convinced and she has lost eighty-five pounds and takes nothing for depression now and knows how to get out of it before it ever gets a foothold; and she is reading her Bible and telling me how God is speaking to her through different verses. Who knew my life would change or the lives of my family or my friends? This is the hope no other program could give me; life after the death I was living. Terri Meadors - over 150 pounds lost and still counting.

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