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healed, but those emotional scars and mental scars affect
     me more now, eventen years later, than any of those other scars ever did,” she says. “Just like the
     physical scars will never go away, I will always have them.”
    In Amy’s work as a weight-loss consultant, her past serves as a guidebook in her sessions
     with obese clients.
    “There’s a purpose for everybody. I feel like all that stuff that I had to go through
     had a purpose. I coach and counsel people now and I help them get healthy. When you’re
     living an unhealthy life, there’s nobody who can tell you there’s a better side, unless
     there’s somebody who’s actually been to the other side to show you there’s a way out.
     When there’s a client sitting in front of me who’s four hundred pounds, there’s an
     underlying reason why. I understand it. I’ve been there,” she says. “Not only do I
     have the certificates and the credentials and the book smarts, but I have some clout
     to back it up, because I lived it and I breathed it and I dreamed it. I think it gives
     me credibility with people because they think, She understands what I’m going through.”
    For Amy, the quickest and most effective way to help people is to get to the heart
     of the matter. She feels like she’s earned the right to be frank.
    “I ask them, ‘Why are you fat?’ I use the F-word all the time, because I’ve been there.
     Until you acknowledge why you are overweight, and why you use food as an addiction,
     and why you use food to cope, you will never, ever, ever be cured,” she says, “and
     I tell people that. ‘Why are you at three hundred pounds? What’s going on in your
     life?’ It’s abuse, it’s a bad marriage, it’s a bad job, it’s bad kids—there’s a thousand
     and one reasons why people are three, four, five hundred pounds. It’s not because
     they want to be fat and gluttonous, it’s because there’s something super, super messed
     up in their lives that is causing them to use food as a coping mechanism, just like
     a crackhead, or a drug addict, or an alcoholic would.”
    There is a sense of relief for Amy in knowing that there was a reason for the brutal
     challenges she faced in her life. From her own darkness, she can now shed light on
     a solution for someone else.
    “I can’t tell you how many people I’ve had say to me, ‘I need you to save my wife’s
     life.’ Or there’s a mom standing there with her four-hundred-pound son and she says,
     ‘I need you to save my son’s life.’ That’s a lot to ask of somebody. I’m not God,
     but those opportunities have been presented to me every day for the last two-plus
     years, and I view every one of those opportunities as a gift, because that’s why I’m
     here. I can’t promise you that I’m going to save your life, but I can give you every
     tool that I’ve ever had to try to help you,” she says, “and that is what I’ll be doing
     until the day I die.”
    Amy wants to spread her message of getting healthy both on the inside and out. She’s
     clearly worked hard, and painstakingly, for overall strength in her own life. She
     wants others to see in her journey the power inherent in taking that first step toward
     change.
    “I think I finally found my purpose. My purpose is to be a motivational speaker and
     a life coach. And my life is fucked up,” she says with a laugh, “but I think I’ve
     been through enough to be able to understand people’s fucked-up lives. To be able
     to motivate and inspire people. I had to go through all of that in order to be able
     to do what I do. People can think, She went through all of that? Then I know that I can do it. I would go through it all over again if that meant that I could save a person’s life
     from domestic violence or obesity. I am now supposed to coach and counsel and mentor
     people to finally live the life that they’re supposed to.”
    The relief Amy feels about finding her purpose in life