Tyesha left this story on the BGG2WL FB Page… and I’m crushed. Absolutely… completely… crushed:
In 2009, David Smith sat down with Matt Lauer on “Today” and revealed a dramatic 400-pound weight loss.
But over the past three years, Smith has regained over 300 of those pounds. In an exclusive interview with “Today” in the video above, he opens up about his weight loss — and the tumultuous time he’s had since.
“All my life I was this monster in my head and all of a sudden to be this good looking guy, it blew my mind away, I didn’t know how to deal with it,” he says in the video above.
Previously featured on a TLC documentary called “650-Pound Virgin”, Smith, of Phoenix, initially worked with trainer Chris Powell to drop over 400 pounds over 26 months without surgery.
Despite forging a close personal friendship with Powell, becoming a personal trainer, finding a new girlfriend and living in his new body, Smith felt like “a terrible mess” on the inside, and eventually turned to alcohol and drugs to cope, “Today” reports.
When those outlets didn’t help, he turned once again to food. “A lot of people were counting on me to be inspiring, and I didn’t want to let anybody down. But I just felt so bad, I didn’t know how to cope,” he says.
Smith began overeating after being sexually molested as a child, the Daily News reported, and struggled even more after the death of his mother when he was just 17.
But now, something has changed. Fearful that his time is running out, Smith says he is determined to lose the weight once and for all. He’s back in the gym, thanks to unconditional support from his girlfriend. “If your foundation isn’t built up, you’re just going to crumble down,” he says. “Unfortunately, I fell down, but I know I can climb back up.”
The video of his segment is heartbreaking. It speaks, a lot, to the issues I’ve battled as a means of achieving what I’ve achieved, which was why it was so important to nip the little stuff that I’ve been battling in the bud immediately. When you’ve lived with emotional eating as a habit, and you’re faced with a new “kind” of problem, it can be soooooo easy to try to slip back into that. Those old habits die hard, and if you get to a point where you’re 650lbs, 330lbs, wherever you are… you can rest assured that you will be fighting an uphill battle trying to make sure you don’t backslide.
But every battle is winnable. Every single one… with the right support, and sometimes, that support system should include a therapist.
He says a lot that resonated with me… even to the point where I teared up listening to him talk about how he couldn’t cope. So many people mocked my choice to become celibate while I lost the bulk of my weight, but truthfully, I gave up alcohol, smoking, emotional eating and sex all at the same time. I left myself with, literally, me and my emotions. If you are overweight because you cope through food, then chances are high that you’ll swap out one unhealthy coping mechanism for another. I had to face my demons, otherwise I question whether I’d be alive today.
…and that’s a really sobering thought.
Successful weight loss is this culmination of things – yes, it’s environment, money, access and education, but it is also so very much emotional, habitual and so very personal. My ability to know how to save money buying healthy food is very much as important as my ability to remember that I do not, under any circumstances, cope through food. A thousand ways to de-stress and relieve anxiety, and none of them better involve food.
I just, I don’t know… I think I need to come back to this one. What do you think?