NEWS FEATURE: Christian diets may be mixed blessing

c. 1998 Religion News Service UNDATED _ “Pray Your Weight Away,” Presbyterian minister Charles Shedd urged readers in the 1957 diet book that launched today’s multimillion-dollar Christian weight-loss industry. Now, a Purdue University study confirms what diet gurus have long preached: “Firm believers do not have firm bodies.” Indeed, Christians who are most active in […]

c. 1998 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ “Pray Your Weight Away,” Presbyterian minister Charles Shedd urged readers in the 1957 diet book that launched today’s multimillion-dollar Christian weight-loss industry. Now, a Purdue University study confirms what diet gurus have long preached: “Firm believers do not have firm bodies.”

Indeed, Christians who are most active in practicing their religion are more likely to be overweight, with Southern Baptists being the heaviest.


Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell is not surprised.

“I fit the mold,” said Falwell, who recently began a doctor-ordered low-fat and low-sugar diet that excludes his beloved banana pudding. “The Seventh-day Adventists probably live longer, but we have more fun,”he added wryly.

Ministers have long ignored the flesh while feeding the spirit, said R. Marie Griffith, author of “God’s Daughters: Evangelical Women and the Power of Submission.” Many preachers find food frivolous, she said, compared to the lure of drugs, alcohol and premarital sex. Few clerics preach about living in a world of caloric temptation. And few know how to address the quiet desperation of portly parishioners.

It’s no wonder that Christian diet books like “More of Jesus, Less of Me” and church-based exercise programs like “Faithfully Fit” are filling the void, combining evangelical theology and psychology. Supporters sing praises in testimonials about changed hearts and waistlines.

But critics say such diets are a mixed blessing that can bring more angst than relief. Some programs, they contend, offer questionable advice about nutrition and exercise and erroneously equate losing weight with gaining God’s love. And despite lip service paid to loving your body, they say, these diets reinforce the cultural ideal of rail-thin beauty.

“It may sound like God loves a size 6 woman more than a size 16,” Griffith said.

It was the early 19th century health reform movement that led to the current preoccupation with diet, said Griffith, who is writing a book about Christianity and the body in American culture. Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham of Graham Cracker fame left the ministry to preach on diet and vegetarianism.

At the time, said Griffith, “American food habits were atrocious. People wolfed down their food and were very heavy.” Reformers, she said, preached that “God had given you this body, the temple of the Holy Spirit, and one need not be gluttonous. Notions of diet were connected to temperance. Don’t overstimulate the body. Overeating is sinful.”


During the first half of the 20th century, she said, “dieting became much more of a secular pursuit” as dietitians weighed in with prescriptions for health. Only in 1957 did religion re-emerge with Presbyterian minister Charles Shedd, who lost more than 100 pounds and preached of gluttony as sin.

“The God who made me never meant me to be 300 pounds,” said Shedd, now 82, who advised readers to do karate kicks while reciting the third chapter of Proverbs. (“Trust in the Lord with all your heart … ”) The difference between Christian and non-Christian diets, he said, is not food but faith. “Believing that your body belongs to God gives you more discipline.”

Many of the newer generation diet books, said Griffith, are more therapeutic. “We aren’t going to talk about sin because we don’t want people to feel bad about themselves,” she said. “Don’t get caught up in guilt. It’s much more about healing.”

Carol Showalter, a pastor’s wife, weighed in two decades after Shedd with “3D: Diet, Discipline and Discipleship.” Still popular, the program focuses on change on the inside, said Showalter, whose daily devotions do not mention the words “diet” or “weight.”

“We never pushed the whole weight issue,” said Showalter, who said half a million people have attended 3D groups. “Our emphasis was on wholeness and accepting the traumas, hurts and anxieties that get mixed up in the eating process. If there’s a theology, it’s the love of God for who I am.”

A more recent entry, The Weigh-Down Workshop, has grown to more than 17,000 classes, according to the company, with more than a quarter million participants. And founder Gwen Shamblin’s book, “The Weigh Down Diet” sold 200,000 copies in the first two months of release.


Conventional diets fail, said Shamblin, a registered dietitian with a master’s degree in food and nutrition, because they don’t get to the root of the problem: confusing hunger for God with hunger for food. “When you give your heart to God,’ she said, “the body will follow.”

Critics, however, question the theology and psychology behind some best-selling tracts, and maintain that even while programs stress the importance of self-acceptance, the underlying messages reinforce standard notions of beauty.

“We still have a fixation with the size and shape of women’s bodies,” said theologian Mary Louise Bringle, author of “The God of Thinness.” “Even those who are saying the purpose (of losing weight) is to get our souls right with God, are saying we need to get our bodies in socially acceptable shape. Sneaking in the back door are the cultural icons of the size six body.”

Griffith believes that some Christian authors resort to “theological contortions.”

“It’s ridiculous to suggest, as one author does, that Jesus died on the Cross so we would not have to be the victims of compulsive eating,” she said. Suggestions that God prefers followers to be an ideal weight draw fiercer criticism. “I don’t think God gives a flip either way,” said Falwell. And he takes issue with an overemphasis on obesity as sin. “I know obesity to an extreme is a bad thing and gluttony is a bad thing. But I don’t know many gluttons.”

Critics within and outside the industry say they worry that some programs neglect total health. Shamblin for example, said it’s fine to eat foods high in fat and sugar as long as people stop eating when they hear God-given cues that their bodies are full.

“I put butter, salt and pepper on my grits _ Yum,” she tells viewers of her videotapes. She boasts of eating sweets and shunning vitamins. The only exercise her program requires is “getting down on your knees to pray.” And some Weigh-Down Workshop participants testify that God tightens the faithful’s stomachs without any exercise at all.


Shamblin downplays the role of genetics in weight loss, informing readers that their problems are not “physiological, psychological, congenital or inherited.”

Falwell disagrees. “Some people are genetically overweight and there’s not a blooming thing they can do about it.”

Even in more serious cases of anorexia, depression and self-mutilation, Shamblin recommends turning to God, repenting and asking for help rather than running to doctors and taking medication, a suggestion that strikes Bringle as dangerous.

“No matter how much you believe in the power of prayer,” she said, “you also might need a glucose IV.”

Bringle also worries about programs encouraging dieters to equate weight loss with God’s love.

People who have trouble with the program, she said, think “God hates me because I’m fat.”

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The Purdue Study generally showed that active religious practice is associated with higher levels of well-being whether a person is overweight or underweight, due in part to supportive congregations. Still, for many, weight remains a source of anguish that Griffith believes should not be minimized.


Testimonies of weight loss, she says, are often “stories of serious despair, alienation and perhaps of grace as well … that ought not be trivialized.”

Falwell believes that if pastors preached about obesity, overweight parishioners would feel rejected. But Griffith would like to see sermons and programs that “give people a broader sense of how to think about their food practices … I don’t think pastors should get up there and say, `We’ve got a lot of flabby Christians.’ I think they should criticize (thinness) as a cultural ideal. We’re all imprisoned by these ideas and that deserves theological discussion.”

DEA END LIEBLICH

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