LuAnn Morton.

LuAnn Morton seems like a lucky woman. She's tall and slender, showing little evidence of the struggle she went through to become and stay that way. But, looking back over her 50-plus years, LuAnn pegs her lifelong problems with weight loss and drug abuse to the fourth grade. That's when her mother decided she'd help her overweight daughter slim down by getting some prescription diet pills from their family physician.

In some ways the prescribed "uppers" worked. The stimulant, amphetamine, suppressed LuAnn's appetite and made her body and mind go a little further, faster. She lost weight and, unwittingly, lost some of her will as well.

During those early chubby-kid days, neither LuAnn nor the adults in her life suspected that she'd get hooked on those diet pills even though they contained amphetamine--a drug known on the street as "speed."

"I grew up on speed," LuAnn says. "I took them when I got up, before and after breakfast, before and after lunch, before and after dinner. Many times I wouldn't sleep. I'd stay up all night and draw pictures, and then go to school the next day."

When she graduated from high school and left her small, northeastern Colorado home, she swapped the diet-pill prescription for something much stronger--and even more dangerous.

Though illegal, methamphetamine (meth) jump-started her mood and helped her drop pounds. Meth's long-lasting high also helped her forget the abuse she suffered as a child at the hands of her mentally ill father and two male relatives. "The meth allowed me to be detached enough to do the things I needed to do without feeling anything--or so I thought," says LuAnn. She eventually began dealing drugs, too.

By then God had been long banished from her heart. At age 12 the once churchgoing girl felt more than enough hurt, anger, bitterness, and revenge to kick God completely out of her life. Her mind couldn't comprehend how a so-called "loving God" could coexist with or even care about her, given her tumultuous past and risky sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll lifestyle.

Even in the midst of her self-induced haze, she managed to get an education and a good job. But then everything changed one summer day in 1988. That's when she came face-to-face with Jesus.

Her conversion took place when she became cautiously curious about the God she once knew. After expressing her interest to a coworker, she was invited to a new believers' class at a nearby church.

Within a few sessions, she realized--to her surprise--that what she needed to do to start her life on a less self-destructive track was to get right with God and move out of the dangerous world in which she'd lived for so long. "I was tired," she remembers, "tired of running, tired of looking over my shoulder, tired of seeing people die, tired of seeing people to whom I was dealing drugs starve their kids. I learned that Jesus required that I lay down my past and learn to walk in Him."

She's done just that for nearly 20 years now, living drug-free and sober. However, without the steady intake of appetite suppressants, the weight slowly but surely returned. In 2000 doctors diagnosed her with diabetes, and in 2004 she underwent gastric bypass surgery as a medical intervention to control her obesity and associated chronic diseases.

LuAnn shed 100 pounds in the year after the surgery and has stuck with the recommended food perimeters. "Now sugar is the enemy," she laughs while explaining how some bypass patients suffer violent illness if they are exposed to it.

Today, watching what she eats and trying to exercise regularly has finally placed her on a healthy path. However, her healing is far more than external. She says she feels better than she ever has on the inside, too. Jesus is hard at work making changes there as well.

LuAnn says that many Bible verses remind her of God's miraculous turnaround power. She cherishes one more than the others for reminding her of a failed suicide attempt in the worst of her wanderings: "The Lord brings death and makes alive; he brings down to the grave and raises up" (1 Samuel 2:6). LuAnn Morton knows that no matter where she walked in those dark days, God was right beside her, patiently waiting to make her alive once more.

Pam Mellskog writes on health topics in Boulder; Colorado.