What It Means to Lose 25 Pounds When You Weigh 460
It may not sound like much, but go pick up 25 pounds at the gym, and imagine carrying that around all day
My family doesn’t have a lot of Christmas traditions. We open presents on whatever day everybody can get together. Mama has always had an artificial tree. The ornaments are whatever’s on sale at Kmart. But we always had my sister Brenda’s peanut butter logs.
Nobody remembers exactly when she started making them, or where the recipe came from. We’ve had them at Christmas for as long as I can remember. Every year Brenda and Mama would coat them together, getting chocolate all over their hands and the stove. They’d pack the logs in cookie tins. We’d get them out after the big Christmas meal. If you wanted to take some home, you had to hide them. Otherwise, they’d be gone by dark.
But then, on Christmas Eve 2014, Brenda died from a leg infection caused by her excess weight. She was older than me, but I was even bigger than her. On New Year’s Eve that year, I weighed in at 460 pounds. I had always known I had to lose weight and get in shape or I wouldn’t live much longer. But Brenda’s death set that feeling in stone. I went to her funeral and saw my future.
