I am 31 years old and a Parts Consultant for a large national trucking company. I discovered rich and flavorful foods at a young age and for that I have been overweight for most of my young life. Growing up as a young boy I was thin but when I got to the age to start playing sports competitively I was still a little on the thin size but the boys I was playing with were growing. And I wanted nothing to do with eating because when I got home from school I just wanted to play and be with my friends. My grandfather god rest his soul sat me down one day on the couch and said Chris if you don’t gain any weight you are not going to be able to play golf, baseball, football, soccer, etc if you don’t gain any weight because you’ll be to small. So my weight gain woes started. After that talk I wanted to do what every young boy wants to do and please his loving grandpa. I found a new path and started my eating journey to the new person that I was going to become. Which has lead me through a lot of trials and tribulations in life to make me the person I am today. Saying that, the person I am today is not happy where my weight in the past has been and where it WAS going into the future. After I started gaining my weight it didn’t matter what I was eating I just couldn’t stop myself and the people that were encouraging me to eat was now telling me to stop because it wasn’t good for me and I was now hurting myself. I recall as a young boy I had gotten so involved into my new found friend that my mother waited till I went to school one day and went to the extent of putting a lock and key on the pantry door. And to my much surprise I came home to find this and was devastated. That was the last straw with my mother and she had enough. And this was about the time for her, that she wanted a new life for me. The battle begins with the weight loss giant to which my mother couldn’t see her baby boy fall victim to. I, just like my wife had tried a lot of weight loss schemes along with doing minimum exercise with the sports I was playing. I was getting older and my weight was still growing and came this miracle drug on the television that was sweeping the nation and my mother did everything she could to make sure I could have that. Along came the great Phen Phen and the end of my high school years and starting college. I started off college with this new found look on life for many different reasons. I was attending a place of higher learning and was coming home every weekend because I was attending a facility similar to jenny craig trying to achieve my weight loss goals. I started off very well and was losing weight and my mother was ecstatic about my new look that I was starting to come into and then it hit. This article from the FDA says it all about this miracle and it‘s effects.

In the several year period leading up to July, 1997 the diet industry was in the throws of a revolutionary drug treatment thought to be capable of overcoming the limitations imposed by individual will power. The so called "miracle" treatment consisted of a combination of two drugs, dubbed "Fen-Phen" or "Phen-Fen". Separately, the weight loss results were not dramatic, but together the two drugs produced what was considered to be remarkable results. One study in 1992 claimed that 121 obese patients being treated with fen-phen lost an average of 30 pounds apiece. It has been estimated that in 1996 six million Americans took fen-phen to treat weight problems, and that in the same year approximately 18 million prescriptions for fen-phen were written. It all came crashing down when, on July 8, 1997, the FDA, in conjunction with the release of a manuscript of a Mayo Clinic study, issued a warning relating to evidence of heart valve problems associated with the usage of Redux and Pondimin. In August, 1997 the study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. The FDA warning, followed by the reporting of the study in the New England Journal of Medicine, led to the September, 1997 withdrawal of Pondimin and Redux from the market place. While there were many reports of serious complications, such as primary pulmonary hypertension, from the drug combination prior to the Mayo Clinic study, the publicity surrounding the publication of the study and the FDA action in calling for a voluntary recall quickly produced evidence of much more widespread occurrence of these and other serious complications. The revelation of this medical crisis for potential victims has spawned a multitude of legal cases by those seeking to protect their health and preserve their legal recourse for injuries.

After the fall of the miracle cure I was back on my own again and down several pounds and feeling good about life. I soon was out of school and back

Since this downfall I have been back on my rocky road journey trying everything under the sun. Until I just came to a point and I had had enough and just said to myself If people do not like me for who I am then so be it. Shortly after finishing college I had met the Love of my Life and have been with her ever since. I have followed her through all of her trials and tribulations in life watched this beautiful person graduate from her biggest accomplishment to date becoming a certified Registered Nurse. Soon after her graduation we found the bliss of marriage and have been together every single day since. I see this person as the most beautiful woman I have ever met and although I relay that to her on a daily basis I know she is struggling inside and I want to fix that pain. And in the past I have brought home all of this comfort food for her and I try to fix those sorrows. But I have just realized something. For all of the happiness I thought I was bringing I was killing the most beautiful person that I Love so much, my beautiful wife Melissa. I know that we are no different than any of the other people looking for this to help them better themselves, but I am hopeful that this page will spread like wildfire and everyone will want to come to our page. And even if we inspire one person to become healthy. We are succeeding in helping ourselves and others to become healthy. Together if we were to get the opportunity to have a personal trainer for a year would be the lift I think that we would need together to accomplish our weight loss goal. I have came to grasp that in order to be here for my wife and hopefully someday become a father and be here for both of them. That, is is going to take a big commitment from me to make these goals come true. I have to be the first to admit that me and my wife have sat around a lot and thought to ourselves, what we would do if we lost all the weight and how we would treat people. We both know that we have been very lazy in the past. We also have said that when we do obtain our goals together that we would like to open a gym for obese people that they can come to and feel good about all of the people around them. In closing I just want to say that I want this so bad for my wife and myself that I can taste it and I know with all of the hard work that I am putting I hope it brings me and my wives bond together stronger together as a team. And for us to accomplish all of our goals we have put together as a team. Thanks to the BIGGEST LOSER and to my LOVING WIFE I KNOW IT’S A LONG ROAD BUT WE WILL MAKE IT!!!!!