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Can You Pray Your Pounds Away?

The Bible is not generally thought of as a recipe book, but food is definitely important in the Scriptures. And diet advice was dispensed from the beginning, when Adam and Eve were commanded to subsist on plant foods alone (Genesis 1:29). However, God didn’t get seriously involved with weight loss until fairly recently, when Bible-based diet books started becoming best sellers. Do they work better than South Beach, the Zone or plain old calorie counting? Here’s the skinny from dieters and experts.

Rona Cherry

The Bible is not generally thought of as a recipe book, but food is definitely important in the Scriptures. And diet advice was dispensed from the beginning, when Adam and Eve were commanded to subsist on plant foods alone (Genesis 1:29). However, God didn’t get seriously involved with weight loss until fairly recently, when Bible-based diet books started becoming best sellers. Do they work better than South Beach, the Zone or plain old calorie counting? Here’s the skinny from dieters and experts.

Jill Remley, a 283-pound mother of two teenage boys, was beginning to think she’d never lose weight. “I had tried Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Richard Simmons, throwing up, lots of laxatives, you name it,” says this 33-year-old from Centerburg, Ohio. “Nothing seemed to work for long.”

Remley, who suffers from multiple sclerosis (MS), had been overweight all her life. She also took multiple medications for her disease—at one point, she was up to 50 pills a day. Wheelchair-bound and on disability, she felt hopeless. But three and a half years ago, she noticed that people in her nondenominational church who were following a Christian-based diet program called the Weigh Down Workshop were losing weight. She attended a seminar and was struck by the fact that “they seemed so happy and skinny.”

She enrolled right away. With God, Scripture and prayer, Remley started to lose weight without diet pills, without counting calories, without abstaining from carbs. Today, Remley weighs 143 pounds, she’s no longer in a wheelchair, is off disability, takes no pills and gets only one daily injection to help keep her MS in remission. “I know now that I needed to take the focus off myself, off food and turn to God,” she says.

Millions of overweight Americans like Remley are turning to faith-based books and programs for weight-loss help. And there is an abundance of such godly guidance, including one that’s basically vegan and a couple with hefty vegetarian components. Hoping to combine the success of The South Beach Diet with the Christian self-help message of Rick Warren’s best-selling The Purpose Driven Life, bookstore shelves bulge with titles that theologize about food and fat.

Among the most popular are The Weigh Down Diet, The Maker’s Diet, The Hallelujah Diet (almost vegan except that it uses honey), Body by God, The Prayer Diet and What Would Jesus Eat? (See p. 83 for details about some top sellers.) Clearly, diet vendors have hit upon a theme that’s both lucrative and speaks to many people. “Most Americans cite spirituality as an important component of their daily lives,” says Keecha Harris, DrPH, RD, a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association. “With the current rise in obesity it’s no surprise that the public would seek faith-based approaches to weight loss.”

And these programs serve a ready constituency. A 1998 study of 3,500 adults by Purdue University sociologist Kenneth Ferraro, PhD, found that religious Americans are more likely to be overweight than their nonreligious peers. “Food is such a big part of church life,” writes New Life Church senior pastor Ted Haggard in his book, The Jerusalem Diet. “Potluck dinners, pizza parties, Sunday suppers, and those famous holiday banquets . . . We love to eat, and I love that . . . But for some of us, all this food becomes a problem.” in the beginning The modern faith-based diet industry began in 1957 when Presbyterian minister Charlie Shedd published Pray Your Weight Away.

But it wasn’t until the 1970s that Christian diet literature began to boom. Shedd wrote another book, The Fat is in Your Head; it stayed on the national religious best seller list for 23 months. In 1972, Carol Showalter, a Presbyterian pastor’s wife, formed 3D: Diet, Discipline, Discipleship— the first Christian counterpart to national weight-watching programs. It taught that Christians meeting in small groups could lose weight if they led disciplined lives: disciplined eating, but also disciplined prayer. More faith-based programs followed.

The largest was started in 1986 by Gwen Shamblin, a Tennessee nutritionist and fundamentalist. She created the Weigh Down Workshop in which participants like Jill Remley are taught that they can eat anything they want, but that they should only think about food when their stomachs growl. “Start thinking about God and read Scripture when you start lusting after food,” Shamblin says. And exercise? “The only exercise we insist on is getting down on your knees to pray,” she says.

More than 1 million people in 70 countries have signed up for the workshop. faith-based defined Faith-based weight-loss programs generally fall into two camps. First are programs such as Weigh Down, which avoids strict rules and emphasizes transferring a relationship with food to a relationship with God. Others are more regimented. North Carolina minister George H. Malkmus’s The Hallelujah Diet advocates eating a mostly raw vegan diet, like Adam and Eve did in the Garden of Eden. Florida chiropractor Ben Lerner’s Body by God program relies on 40-day plans.

“The basic idea is to get 1 percent better for God each day,” Lerner says. If purveyors of Christian diet programs do not speak in a unified voice, that’s partly because they are competing for the same market and “invariably characterize their own message as unique truth,” says Marie Griffith, associate professor of religion at Princeton University and author of Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity. “What most have enthusiastically supported, however, is the conviction that thinness is, or should be, the visible marker of godliness.” are they different? Do spiritually oriented, biblically based weight-loss programs offer something that secular programs do not?

Most of the plans are semivegetarian and fairly simple. Other than that, not really. “Everyone is looking for something different, but basic nutritional facts are all the same,” says Dan Hamner, MD, a New York sports and rehabilitative medicine expert. Indeed, claims that religion can affect health and weight rankle those who see spinning the $40 billion diet industry to a faith-based audience as just a way to use God as a gimmick.

Says Elisabetta Politi, nutrition manager at Duke University’s Diet and Fitness Center, “You lose weight when you lower your caloric intake and increase exercise. Period.” Nevertheless, Stephen Barrett, MD, a retired psychiatrist who runs quackwatch.org, believes that many religious people trust promoters of health-related scams who appear to share their religious convictions. “What sells is their ability to influence their audience,” Barrett says. “To those in pain, promoters promise relief. To the incurable, they offer hope and healing.

Many people then accept what they say without making any effort to see if the ideas are supported by facts.” but does it work? The big question is whether basic diet programs reinforced by faith work any better than basic secular ones. Unfortunately, little empirical research has been conducted. “Christian leaders have regularly contended that their plans assist dieters in achieving their goals to a far greater extent than non-Christian programs,” says Griffith. “But no one knows.”

Don’t say that to Bettye Love, a 54-year-old mother of five, who found herself out of a job as a hotel catering director after Hurricane Charley hit Florida in 2004. She weighed 263 pounds, was suffering from lupus and arthritis, plus recovering from a painful divorce. Then she landed a job as a part-time personal assistant to Body by God’s Lerner and his wife, Sheri.

Love, who calls herself “a junk-food queen,” says at first she wasn’t impressed. “I had already tried every diet there was—NutriSystem, Atkins, HerbaLife and others—so I thought ‘just another diet book.’” But Love soon decided she was wrong. “Being a Christian, I knew my body was by God,” she says. “But Lerner’s book made me realize my body is a temple, and the Creator wants me to have the best.” Today, she has lost 88 pounds and dropped from a size 22 to a size 14—though she won’t be satisfied until she’s two sizes smaller still. “But I’m more excited about how great I feel,” she says.

Inspired by her success, her local nondenominational church now offers a 40-day “extreme makeover” Body by God program to congregants. One reason faith-based dieting has become so popular may simply be that local church gatherings provide a communal and supportive environment. Members share experiences and talk about the pounds they have lost, all the time praising God. Indeed, even Politi acknowledges that church-based programs provide a social environment that keeps people “internally motivated” to drop pounds and maintain weight loss.

“Accountability—having someone to report to—is associated with being successful at weight management, and churches provide a great opportunity for that,” she says. But isn’t there accountability in secular programs such as Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and Richard Simmons? “When you don’t succeed on one of the commercial programs, it’s one thing,” says Griffith. “The less benign side of these Christian weight-loss programs is that if someone of faith fails on the diet, you’re not just letting yourself down, you’re failing God too. It can seem like a measure of how good a Christian you are.”

Nevertheless, some people insist there is a positive side to the faith and diet connection. “Prayer, faith, love put us into a relaxed state. When you relax, you absorb nutrients better, you have better blood flow to your gut and churn out more digestive enzymes,” claims Marc David, author of The Slow Down Diet: Eating for Pleasure, Energy & Weight Loss. “If you invite the sacred into your personal world, you will find it inhabiting your metabolic world.” In the end, says weight loss expert Suzy Prudden, president of Positive Changes Hypnosis in Los Angeles, it doesn’t really matter whether you choose a commercial or devotional program. “All eating habits and patterns start in the mind,” she says. “If faith-based people believe that they are working with God, then that’s what they believe, and that’s great.

Bottom line: You’ve got to eat right, exercise and find the healthiest path for you.” Amen!

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