Fat Chance by Julie Haddon

caused me now to believe that
everyone
can throw off the extraneous things weighing her down. The writer of that verse didn’t approach the idea timidly. It’s not like he said, “You know, give it a little thought, and if it seems like a good idea to you, then maybe get rid of your weight.”
    Far from it. It’s more like, “Get the weight
gone
, girl. Get it gone!” Remember the great cloud of witnesses. And throw off what hinders and entangles you. Think about who’s gone before you, and choose now to lay down your weight.
    I originally wanted to be on
The Biggest Loser
because I thought it was going to be fun. I wanted to be the cute, peppy, happy-go-lucky girl who made everything cheery and everyone laugh. But I got there and realized that the joke was on me. You see yourself differently when you are forced to acknowledge your weight, and ultimately to lay it all down. I felt crippled in every way while I was on campus: At various points along the journey, it seemed I’d been stripped of every form of support—emotional, physical, spiritual and more. But it would take being broken in every possible way before I’d agree to get my weight gone.
    And so it is with that verse in Hebrews 12. The instructions found there only work when you stumble upon a crossroads and dare to take the riskier path. For me, that crossroads was the intersection of streets named Big Change and Big Forever. Would I embark on “big change” or would I settle for being “big forever”? Which path would I choose?
    My self-talk went something like this: “Decide today that you want this change badly enough to pursue the person you deserve to be, or say to yourself
right now
that you’re going to be content with being fat every day for the rest of your life.”
    I was thirty-five years old and facing a do-or-die situation.
Which path should I choose?
      
    Y ears ago when Mike and I were potty-training our son Noah, we noticed that Noah would always go crouch in the corner when he had to poop. We’d say, “Noah, we can see you hiding over there. Do you need to go potty?” To which he’d reply, “No!” just before producing poopy pants.
    He was old enough not to poop in his pants. He had been
trained
not to poop in his pants. And he
hated
the sensation of walking around in that awful poop-in-the-pants state. So why did he stick to his crouching routine? Because he wasn’t ready to make the effort to stop.
    Finally Mike and I decided that Noah would be banned from wearing his favorite Thomas the Train “big boy” underpants until he proved to us that he would go to the bathroom
in
the bathroom instead of hiding in the corner and lying his way through another poop. From there, things shifted.
    There’s a point in our lives when we are supposed to be babies. We’re supposed to be fragile and dependent and needy and weak. We’re
supposed
to poop in our pants. But then comes the point of awareness that it’s time to put aside childish things and live in the fullness and richness and “adultness” of who God has created us to be.
    At some point we must quit hiding, rise from our crouched position and decide in our hearts to grow up.
That
is the crossroads I was standing at. I had been hiding in a corner, trying to mask the stench of my obesity and its requisite weights. I knew that it stunk. Everyone
around
me knew that it stunk. But only I could make the decision to clean up the mess that I’d made. Maya Angelou says that, “When we know better, we do better.” 3 And although it took me more than three decades to get there, at last I would prove I knew better.
      
    T here is a third aspect to the verse in Hebrews 12 that inspires me every time I read it. “Let us run with perseverance,” it says, “the race marked out for us.” Now, you tell me: Is it even possible to run—let alone to run
with perseverance
—when you’re fat and unhappy and an emotional wreck? I dare you to say yes.
    At the end of our season on