Nashville Church - Grace Place - Hermitage Tennessee

Fat Kid No More

By Rick Houston,  Joe Estep credits Faith, Family, and Friends for support during gastric bypass recovery.                                                       

Joe Estep walked off the stage with the crowd still roaring its approval, but wouldn’t let himself hear the cheers.   It’s quite possible that nobody else on the face of the earth loves music as much as Joe Estep, and the more the electric the better.  Estep played and wrote music for years, leading him to join a band in Nashville, TN.  The group entered an August 2003 battle of the bands and won. It should have been one of the biggest highlights of his career in the music industry.  And it was.  And, at the very same time, it wasn’t.
Estep had almost always struggled with his weight, and by the time he and his band mates took the stage that night in Nashville, he weighed nearly 400 pounds. To say that his weight caused crises of confidence in the talented Estep is huge understatement. He could play a bass guitar as well as any of his musical heroes, and as a trained sound engineer, Estep was a recording and mixing expert. If he would only let himself be one.
“It doesn’t take long to tell about my self confidence, because I really didn’t have any”, Estep said. “I grew up being a fat kid. I was always a shy person anyway, and hiding behind my weight seemed to be a way of life. I believe a sense of humor developed as a defense mechanism. When you’re the kid you have to fight or be funny. I chose to be funny”. Even before winning the band contest, Joe had decided to leave the group because he just couldn’t fathom being on stage. One failed diet became five, five became “at least two dozen”.  He prayed as earnestly as he ever had in life about what to do because he simply could not go on like this.  It wasn’t healthy emotionally, physically, or spiritually. Jenny, his (ex)wife had had a gastric bypass in January, 2003. Jenny did incredibly well with the surgery, and while she never forced it on her husband as an option, he saw deference in her. Maybe the surgery would work for him as well.  Or would it?  Estep had people suggest that he should have more faith; that he should stick to the diet plans that had never worked before. “There were a lot of people who said the surgery was for lazy people who wanted to take the easy way out,” Estep said.  If you get to know people who have been through it, you’ll know that the surgery is not an east way out. There’s a ton of work involved in it. Estep’s surgery took place in March, 2007, when he tipped the scales at 407.  In the months afterwards, he dropped to almost svelte 240. The aftermath of the surgery, he says was far easier than he could have imagined or hoped for. “ I really feel this is a process God wanted me to go through," Estep said.  "I’ve prayed about every step I’ve taken through it.  If I prayed about it and it did not feel right, I didn’t do it. My faith has helped me, and so has my support system.  I’ve got an incredible support system (which include(d) Jenny, mom Sandi, and sister Jennifer) and an incredible church family that’s been behind me 100 percent. So, no, I couldn’t have asked for anything to go better.”  That said, things can, and sometimes do go wrong with gastric bypass surgeries.  It’s not for everybody, and while Estep is obviously a proponent, he’s not going to shove the procedure down anyone's throat. Everyone has to make their own decision based on their own situation.  If you’re overweight and you’ve tried diets and nothing worked, maybe it’s something you should look at and then individually determine if it is right for you or not," Estep said.  “Study it and pray about it, and if it feels right for you, then yes, I would recommend it to anybody.  But if you don’t feel it’s right for you, if you feel uncomfortable with it, then no, I wouldn’t recommended it.” This is how much of a transformation there has been in Estep.  He agreed to take part in his church's Christmas play, complete with lines to speak and everything. The old Joe Estep would have been absolutely terrified to try something like that (remember the battle of the bands), but here was the new Joe, saying his lines with relative ease and even throwing in a few ad-libs here and there. When the play concluded, the cast and crew received a standing ovation.  And this time…this time, Joe Estep heard the applause.