Duffey 101

Once upon a time I was 18 years old and I ran 7 miles almost every single day because I thought things like that were fun. I ate all the foods I wanted to eat, whenever I wanted to eat them. In fact, I pretty much ate ALL OF THE FOODS, ALL OF THE TIME with NONE OF THE CONSEQUENCES... it was wonderful. I looked like this...

Once upon a time Joe played football at Briarwood Christian School so he basically NEEDED to eat ALL OF THE FOODS, ALL OF THE TIME because he was burning ALL OF THE CALORIES. He looked like this...

And like this...

You can be upset about the overkill with highschool pictures later Joe. It's not my fault you're so cute.

And then Joe graduated and stopped playing football. And he happened to work at the most fantastic dispensary of delicious fried chicken on the entire planet (ChickFilA, duh) for about 11 years. Somewhere in there Joe and I started dating, and we looked like this...

Not long after that we got married, and we looked like this...

And we had a baby girl, and then a year later a baby boy, and our family looks like this...

She's 3 1/2 , He's 2 1/2 , we're .. older than that

It looks really nice in the pictures. But the pictures don't show the years of struggle we had in between those last two pictures. They show a really hard working man and mama who stays at home with two toddlers, but they don't show all those times there was too much month at the end of the money. They don't show just how tired I was and how we did enough to survive, but not enough to thrive. They don't show all the bad eating habits we got into - how I often wouldn't end up eating an actual meal until the end of the day because I was too busy focusing on the kids food actually getting into their mouths or how Joe would work from early in the morning, skip breakfast and often lunch too and basically just binge on dinner and snacks in the evening. There's a lot of missing information between those pictures.

And then there's this picture...

This is a picture from this August when Joe and I packed up a couple suitcases and drove from Birmingham, AL to Dallas, TX and brought my friend Beth with us all because of an energy drink. Ok, so it wasn't just because of the drink, but it is the thing that started everything. Let me explain...

Some friends of ours invited us to a meeting where we sampled Spark (the aforementioned road trip inspiring energy drink) and listened to a group of people tell us how Spark and AdvoCare had radically changed their lives. After four years of thinking the best there was for our family was just surviving, I heard hope for more than that. I heard people talk about how they went from having a house in foreclosure and being too tired to keep up with their son they made one decision and soon found themselves out of the red and feeling better than they had in years.
While I was listening I realized how late it was and how alert I was. Most nights for the last four years I could hardly wait to get to bed or curl up on the couch as soon as the kids were in bed and here we were almost an hour past their bedtime and I was wide awake. On the ride home, I was so pumped up that I sang the entirety of the Frozen soundtrack with my daughter. ALL OF IT. BY CHOICE.

The next morning I was genuinely disappointed that I didn't have another one of those ridiculous Spark drinks. I reluctantly hopped back into my routine of about 5-6 Cokes throughout the day to stay functioning. It was miserable.
Joe and I talked and made the decision to do whatever it took to get those products and that hope into our lives. We ordered our distributor kit and from the moment I had Spark in my house I stopped drinking all that Coke  -- and in 19 days I lost 9 pounds. NINE POUNDS, PEOPLE! With results like that from just one product, how could we not pack up the car and drive to Texas to be around these wonderful people, and learn everything we could about making some more life changing decisions?

We used to see survival and need. Now we have the chance for dreams fulfilled. We saw ourselves becoming people we didn't really recognize. Now we see a path to the us we knew before life happened and even better versions of those people. We used to see a lot of people stuck in their own version of our situation. Now we see people we get to share this hope with.

And this is what we look like...

At least, for now.