Incredible Shrinking Couple
by Ashley Williams
ANDY SORRELLS
AGE 30
NOW!
220 LBS.
HEIGHT 6'3" SIZE 36
BEFORE
500 LBS.
SIZE 60
HIS TURNING POINT
"I started to see Maggie lose weight. Something about her just changed. She was happier. She wasn't worried about food, and so she had more time for me, for her family. And of course, I was like, 'Well, wait a second. I'll try that.'"
MAGGIE SORRELLS
AGE 34 NOW!
160 LBS.
HEIGHT 5'6" SIZE 8
BEFORE
440 LBS.
SIZE 34
HER TURNING POINT
"I didn't know I was 440 lbs., because I weighed myself on our household scale and it only went up to 300 lbs. Then one day I was in a hospital and I got on the scale and it said 440 lbs. and I started crying. That was a wake-up call."
Andy and Maggie Sorrells are used to people staring at them in restaurants. But whereas it was once the size of their bodies—he used to weigh 500 lbs., she topped out at 440 lbs.—that attracted attention, on a recent trip to a barbecue joint near their Franklin, Tenn., home, it's the size of their order that gets the waitress buzzing. "Ya'll gonna split this?" she asks, puzzled, after Andy orders just one large baked potato, a garden salad and a lunch platter of chicken tenders and ribs for him and Maggie to share. Says Andy, as the waitress walks off: "That always happens to us. It's almost like they're saying, 'Do you know what you're doing?'"
Indeed they do. During the past four years or so, the Sorrellses have lost a combined total of 560 lbs.—280 lbs. each—using the Weigh Down Workshop, a faith-based weight-loss program that encourages dieters to use prayer to help them eat only when they are hungry and to divide their meals in half. "It's really just moderation and portion control," says Maggie. Andy adds, "We had to learn to appreciate the taste of something without eating 20 at the same time."...
... And even though Maggie started dieting first—around Christmas 2002—Andy, who came onboard two months later, had already lost a whopping 75 lbs. by April of 2003. "It flew off him!" she says with a laugh. And Maggie? By contrast, that same month, she was down 60 lbs. "It was harder for me," she admits. "I definitely feel like I had to fight for it."
It didn't help that Maggie has given birth to two babies—Lily, 2, and Jacob, 5 months—in the past few years. Still, today she is only 20 lbs. away from her goal weight of 140 lbs. and says that her husband, who has maintained his weight at 220 lbs. since May 2004, remains "my biggest cheerleader." Andy says, "Even though I was ahead, we both had the same purpose: We wanted to lose weight."