For nearly his entire life, David Stewart had a relationship with food he never even thought about, much less understood.

So when he looks back, it’s not surprising that there were no moments of clarity that pushed him to change his life. Instead, it was a culmination of things that mounted over time.

There were the expanding waistlines on his pants, which went from 40 inches to 42 inches to 44 inches.

There were the old pictures he’d look at, the ones that made him reminisce about the trimmer man he used to be.

And then there was being diagnosed with hypertension and Type 2 diabetes.

By then, he knew he needed to lose weight.

“You don’t really perceive it,” he says now. “I mean, it’s not like you become overweight overnight.”

It’s now after Christmas, and the new year is right around the corner. It’s a time when people make resolutions and vow to change their ways.

One of the most common resolutions is a promise to lose weight; it also tends to be one of the most broken, if gym membership research is any indication.

For Stewart, though, a gym wasn’t the answer. Through friends, he heard about a program at Lutheran Health Network’s Weight Management Center, and soon enough, the now-50-year-old was on the phone, asking how to enroll.

When he entered the program in November 2010, he weighed 303 pounds. Within a year, he’d lost more than a third of his body weight.

And what the program addressed most, what helped him the most, was something he never expected: the psychology behind his eating habits.

“It probably saved my life,” Stewart said of the program.