I was born in Loma Linda, California in 1951. It didn't take me long to find out that I liked to eat. As you can see in the 1954 photo, before my third birthday I was already developing a bit of a stomach. It wasn’t much yet but it was going to have a future with me, as it turned out. My father, who is next to me in the picture, turned 27 that year, and he was fairly thin. A few years later he also would have some problems with weight gain, but he was in pretty good shape in 1954.

I turned 6 in 1957. It was the year that I started first grade, and as the picture shows, I had already developed a noticeable stomach bulge. I can still remember one day, around this time, when I ate several plates of spaghetti, while the adults kept commenting on how they couldn’t believe that I could ever get that much food into my little body, they were laughing and that inspired me to keep on going. Still, they hadn’t seen anything yet. A few years later I won a contest at summer camp when several of us boys tried to see who could eat the largest number of the little 1-serving boxes. I was up in the teens somewhere when we finished.

While this picture is not the clearest, it is about the only one I have left of me in my early teens. I was about 13 in the picture, and I had kept my stomach bulge well nurtured and it was alive and well at this time. I loved to go to "31 Flavors," the ice cream store that nearly everyone calls Baskin-Robins now. My favorite ice cream would change from time to time, but the two flavors that I remember best were licorice and peanut butter. One time my grade school class had an outing and we stopped at "31 Flavors" for a cone. I finished mine and asked for a second one. The school chaperone said she was not going to pay for everyone to have 2 cones. I said that was no problem, I would pay for it. That is when she put her foot down and said, "No." However, you can see that the stage was set for a definite food problem in my life.

I should note that I was a very active boy. I loved to play baseball and was out running around all the time. I played the game very well, learning to hit both left-handed and right-handed, which I do even still today. It is very fortunate for me that I was athletically inclined. If I had not been, my eating would have caused my weight to run wild. As it was, I ended up being on the heavy side all the time, but I could still participate in all the sporting activities that I wanted to. I was never a fast runner carrying that weight, but I could compensate by getting a quicker than average start on things. I could change direction while running well, and my hand-eye coordination was pretty good. For example, in eighth grade my teacher taught the class to play ping-pong. It made a great recess activity in Barstow, where 70 miles-an-hour gusts of wind were common, along with biting cold temperatures during the winter, which made out door activities very unpleasant. He told us that if any of us could beat him in a game, the whole class would have the rest of the day off to do nothing but play ping-pong. I was the one student who beat him, and I never lost to him again after that day. But I was still overweight.

The fall of 1966 saw me head off to a boarding school, called Milo Academy, for ninth grade. I weight 175 pounds and stood 5 feet 11 inches tall. I had done some growing recently, which had used up some of my fat, but I still was "chunky."

The school was very good for me. It took me out of my home, where Dad’s alcoholism was becoming a very serious issue for me. It was not a healthy environment any longer at home, and I think one of the best things to happen to me during my childhood was to get away from his drinking.

Although the following is not directly related to my weight problem, I would be very surprised if it were not indirectly related. As I went through the first 6 grades of school, I was completely convinced that I was stupid. My aptitude tests, the real meaning of which was a complete mystery to me, kept coming back with exceptional scores. My Dad would tell me that I should be at the top of my class, not the bottom of it, but it was like telling a man with a blindfold on that he should be able to see better than most others.

The low point of this fiasco of my grade school years was when I failed the 6th grade. To this day it is something that I look back on with shame. Watching all my friends go on to the next grade, while I had to do it over was something that I had no emotional defense against. It crushed me. I still have that report card in my possession, and there are several subjects that I got straight F’s in, right across all 4 of the grading periods. How could that happen?

In the 7th grade, Dad suddenly (after some very strongly motivational experiences at work) quit drinking for a whole year. We moved to Barstow at the same time, and I attended a very small school, with an excellent teacher. The result was 5 A’s on my very first report card. That was five of something that I had never had before in my whole life, not even one of them. I cannot express what that meant to me. To this day, it is one of the things that I look back on with tremendous pride, even though I did have even better report cards later on.

My father’s sobriety (and therefore my academic prowess), only lasted one year. One day I came home from school to find him home from work and drunk. He wept in front of me, something he very seldom did, even dead drunk, and asked my forgiveness for his being so weak, and then hell was in session again, at least until I could escape to Milo. The only two things that kept me sane through all those alcohol twisted years were these: 1) Mom, whose love was always constant, even though she was all too often completely overwhelmed with Dad’s problems; 2) And, perhaps surprisingly, Dad, who was a very moral, kind, and loving man at heart. His drinking warped his personality unmercifully, and he could be verbally cruel oh so often, but there was something deep inside him that stopped him from beating me, or doing anything else physically abusive to me. So, I had a front row seat on the horror show that my Dad and Mom were living with each other every day, but I was relatively safe, at least physically.

Now I know why my grades were failing in the early years. And just maybe, I know why eating became so important to me as well.

At high school, I learned how to play basketball. I had fooled around trying to throw a ball through a rim before, but I did not know how to play the game, or what the rules were. I learned the game. Milo is located in southern Oregon, and it rains from November until March. As much as possible sports are done indoors, for those months, and basketball was the big sport for me. I was at the gym whenever I had some free time, and the gym was open. It just so happens that basketball is a great method of getting exercise as well, and even though that is not why I played, I did gather in the benefits from it anyway. As the years went by, I got into pretty good shape and I no longer had a weight problem, at least as long as I stayed there.

I also learned the joys of math, and for the first time in my life, I actually applied my mind to learning. It was a golden time in my life. I also had a job for the very first time, where I worked as a janitor, cleaning up the administration building. I learned how to run a buffer, to strip and wax floors, and other things that I had never thought about doing before. It was fun!

By the time I graduated in 1970, I had been a member of the school basketball team for two years, and started at center for part of my senior year. I had been a member of the school choir for 3 years and the special "Choraleer" singing group for two years. My guitar playing had gotten pretty good and helped me fit in well with the other students. (It did cause some problems with the faculty because they did not like the type of music I was playing.) My weight had fallen for a time to about 155 pounds in the middle of the year when basketball was at its peak intensity, but when I graduated it was about the same as when I first arrived at Milo: 175 pounds. The only difference was that I was 4 inches taller, which made 175 look very thin by comparison.

The school was located in the middle of nowhere. It was 17 miles to the nearest town, and so temptation to run and buy junk food was kept to a minimum. I ate my meals at the cafeteria, and it only served vegetarian food items, and desserts were reasonably sized. It was fairly easy to eat in a healthy manner. My room was up a couple of flights of stairs and I went up and down them many times a day. I could easily go months without ever getting inside a car, we walked everywhere we needed to go. So, it was not surprising that I left Milo in good shape, thin and looking healthy.

So what happened? I got married, started working for a living, in a world where you could buy a Sara Lee’s Pie for 25 cents and eat the whole thing! I ate tostados, heaped up with cheese, and peanut butter spread thick on my sandwiches. I hit Jack-In-Box on the way to the drive in movies, and had all the ice cream that I wanted. The results are shown in the picture. In just two years, I had had a new son, who will be turning 30 in January 2002, and I put on 40 pounds. I don’t remember the circumstances of the picture, or why I am covered in so much dirt, but I included the picture here because it shows the terrible change that came over me, in such a short time after I graduated from high school. The safety net had been removed, and I was drowning in the real world of fattening foods, while trying to deal with a marriage that was always on the verge of collapse.

In 1973 my son Glenn turned one, two days later Dad died in a horrible accident, six months later Grandma Coon Died, and a month after that my Grandpa Coon died. A month after that, I enlisted in the US Navy. As you can tell from the picture, I lost all of the weight I had gained. When I signed the papers to enter the Navy, I still had a few months before I actually was going to go in. So, during the summer of 1973 I went on a diet and dropped 20 pounds from 210 down to 190. I was highly motivated to avoid the abuse that I was sure would come to me if I showed up fat to boot camp. During boot camp, I lost another 20 pounds and I graduated from basic training at the same weight that I had graduated from high school: 175 pounds.

Thanks to the active lifestyle in the Navy, I was able to keep my weight down to a healthy level for quite a while. My ex-wife left me six months after I entered the Navy, and about 3 months after I filed for divorce, I met my soul mate for life: Dotti. In this picture taken in early 1975, you can see that my weight was not out of hand. And of course my lovely Dotti was looking really good! For several years, I was far too active to gain a lot of weight.

In 1977 I started taking Karate on Midway Island, and then when I transferred to Naval Air Station LeMoore in California, I went to another instructor and started in again. (See Karate Photo 1, Karate Photo 2, Karate Photo 3) I was still in my twenties and my weight problems seemed to be far in the past, without a single cloud apparent on the horizon.

I got out of the Navy, for what ended up being 2 years, and spent one of those years working for Technicare, maintaining CAT scanners, in El Paso, Texas. In the picture, it shows me about to turn thirty, leaning on my company car, a new Olds Omega. Right above my head, not visible in the picture, is a basketball hoop, and I used to use it regularly for exercise. At this point in my life, excess weight still had not returned to dominate my life. As it turned out, even though I loved the job, we hated El Paso, and soon we moved away, and I ended up reenlisting in the Navy.

By 1984, the Navy had tightened its weight standards, and I started to feel the pinch. They wanted me to weigh less than 190, and I was tending to stay between 190 and 200. I played a lot of racquetball at that time, but I was eating more too. My weight would start to creep up and then I would fight it back down. I was always on the verge of being classified as being "obese” by the Navy. On occasion I was, and then I was forced onto the "fat boy” program where I had to go out and do mandatory exercise. I would get my weight back down to get off the program and then it would creep back up again. In this picture, which has always been one of my favorites of Dotti and I together, it is not easy to see that I am struggling with my weight. But the day was coming when it would be easy to see!

In 1986, I transferred to the USS John F. Kennedy. In this picture I am two months into a 7-month Mediterranean cruise, where I dropped my weight all the way back down to 175 again. I had not gone that far yet in this picture, but you can see that I am thinner than I was in 1984. I was depressed, being away from Dotti and the kids, and I was not eating well at all. I was going up and down dozens of ladders everyday, and getting a great deal of exercise. The weight just fell off. But it scared Dotti when I got back home, because it was not a healthy weight loss, and I looked like a skeleton. It was not long after returning to the States that I had my weight back up to 190.

In 1988 I got out of the Navy for good, after 13 years of service. My weight was starting to creep up just a bit, and my belly was expanding slightly here in this picture with LeRoy and Glenn, my two sons, taken during our move to Massachusetts, at a stop over at a Maryland rest area. Things were about to get worse for my weight, because I was no longer bound by the Navy weight standards. The civilian company I was going to work for did not have a "fat boy” program, and now I was on my own to choose what my weight would be.

In 1990, I transferred over to the Training Department in my company, and I was scheduled to teach two, 2-week classes in August. One was to be in Corvallis, Oregon, and the other was in Pocatello, Idaho. I drove across the country from Massachusetts, and taught the classes and drove back. This picture was taken during the first of the two classes, when I dropped in to see my mom for the weekend. Once again, being separated from my family, I was not eating well at all, and dropped weight rapidly. The picture shows me wearing 36-inch waist pants, the last time that I was able to wear them until I completed my weight loss journey in 2001.

On the drive home, I suffered a stress induced medical event, that may have been a small stroke, as a result of all the smoking I had been doing while driving, the coffee I had been downing, and the overall stressful nature of my life for the past 8 months. (I had changed jobs, Dotti had 3 surgical procedures, Mom had been diagnosed and treated for cancer and I had not had a healthy trip at all.)

As a result of the medical scare I quit smoking in October of 1990. By December this picture shows that I had really packed on the weight. By January 1991 I had jumped up to 226 pounds. Once the smoking crutch was taken from me, I finally could see what an eating problem I had been covering up all those years by smoking. Now I had to face the new challenge but I just didn’t know how to do it.

You can track the way my weight went over the next 5 years by looking at my 5-year weight chart. (Click Here)

In 1992 I went on a diet, and I dropped my weight all the way down to 192 pounds at one point, but it was like a ball bouncing. My weight came down fast, hit bottom and then went right back up again. This picture was taken in the Notre Dame Basilica in Montreal, Canada, and I weighed in the 190s. (Unfortunately the camera caught LeRoy with a silly look on his face but it was the only picture I could find of me at that time. Sorry LeRoy!) You can see that I am much thinner than I was in the December 1990 picture. I remember telling people at that point that I finally felt like I had finished smoking, because I had gotten my weight back down. But I still did not understand. I thought "a diet” was the answer, and "a diet” is never the answer!

In November 1993, I celebrated 2 and a half years of being smoke free. Dotti bought a large banner that said, "Congratulations” and she made me a cake, which I am holding in the picture. It is easy to see from my belly, my face and my legs that I am once again pushing 230 pounds. The diet was a complete failure!

In the summer of 1995 we moved back to the Pacific Northwest. This picture, showing me at about 235 pounds, was taken in Salt Lake City, Utah as we made a stop at the Mormon Temple on our way through. I was completely at a loss as to what to do to lose weight. I went through another cycle or two of dieting but each time I rebounded back up to about 240 pounds.

This cycle continued until Dotti’s First Annual Conference. I gave a talk at the conference about how to use your willpower to drive the tools in order to quit smoking and to lose weight. I wasn’t struck with the irony of the fact that I was so overweight, and telling others how to lose weight, until I looked at the pictures after the conference. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks.