David Youhas strides confidently to a Tai Kwon Do class at the Danville YMCA, back straight and head up.
It is difficult to match his pace as he ignores a downpour and marches through the parking lot to yet another workout.
Things were a little different just three years ago.
At almost 300 pounds, Youhas got winded walking to the mailbox.
“I’ve struggled with weight all of my life,” he said. “There came a moment when I realized I needed to change.”
Unfortunately, that moment was a painful divorce, an event that left him feeling alone for the first time in his life.
“In grade school, high school and college there is always something going on and you are always surrounded by activities and people,” he said. “Divorced with four children, I basically woke up to realizing that now there is isolation.”
But Youhas, 40, a longtime area DJ from Oakwood, didn’t let himself become isolated. Instead, he looked deeper within himself and started acting in his own self-interest for possibly the first time in years.
“This time things were different,” he said. “I had experienced a genuine change. I just started adding from there.”
As the weight came off the exercise became easier, and within three years of his separation and divorce, he had lost 100 pounds and was starting to feel good about himself again.
He learned his limitations were mostly self-imposed after a friend suggested he enter a 5-kilometer run. Youhas, still carrying the self-defeating baggage of being overweight all of his life, told the friend he couldn’t possibly reach such a distance.
Soon after, he decided to measure the distance of his regular running route and found he had already been logging up to 12 miles at a time.
Since then he has finished the Chicago marathon and entered other races. He runs, on average, six miles a day.
“It took me a lot longer than I had planned because I really cramped up,” he said of the marathon. “But I actually finished it.”
The physical change by Youhas, and the accompanying confidence, has led him to become involved in several social endeavors he would have never dreamed of following through on earlier in his life.
A good part of his change in thinking came after joining a divorce-support group in Champaign.
“A sense of control began to come back over my life,” he said. “I began to heal. It’s about taking control of what you can control. You’re not worth something to someone else unless you’re worth something to yourself. I found out I needed to create some new memories.”
In addition to the physical side of Youhas’s transformation, he has added membership to the local Toastmaster’s group (where members learn to build social interaction and public speaking skills), and he has become an avid reader who completed 70 books last year. He also goes to aerobic exercise classes and takes ballroom dancing lessons.
His newest venture into social transformation is the hopeful formation of a singles group, which is meeting for the first time at 6:30 p.m. May 31 at Gino’s inside the Danville Days Inn on North Gilbert Street.
Youhas said he feels there are other singles in the area who have gone through similar changes due to divorce, and he hopes that commonality can lead to successful relationships.
And he’s not necessarily talking about romantic relationships.
“I am doing this just to have a common place to be,” he said. “In my age group, most of their friends have married and some people feel odd going to the movies themselves. It’s just a way of being with others with similar circumstances. Most (divorced) singles don’t want to do the bar scene.”
The event, posted on the free Plenty of Fish Web site at http://forums.plentyoffish.com/datingPosts9890012.aspx , will use games, music and karaoke to bring singles together to simply mingle and meet.
Danville Chiropractic Health Clinic will have an employee on hand to provide free messages to those who register.
“This is a non-pressure event,” he said. “I thought that (massages) might help relax people. You won’t have to worry about being stuck with one person for the entire evening. As host, I want to keep them moving around. There are so many feelings and experiences that we never get to explore by limiting ourselves to date with a narrow view.”
If romance should bloom from the event, that would be a great outcome, he said.
“After I got separated I wasn’t really excited about getting into another relationship,” he said. “That will just naturally happen, I think. We’re just going to
be the catalyst for
communication.”
To Youhas, it’s just one more step in becoming an independent, improved human being.
“You’re either improving or you’re not,” he said. “You choose that and you can’t blame anybody else. Faith has gotten me through my darkest times, and it’s been a painful process at times.”