Christian faith-based weight loss programs aim to answer a common prayer

Jesus was thin.

But he seldom fixated on grapefruits and may never have ingested excessive amounts of cabbage soup. He spent very little time reading the works of Pritikin, Atkins, or Jenny Craig.

Christianity's Son of God was, by most accounts, one of those people who could eat anything and defy the growth of a watermelon belly and a flapping chin.

Nearly two centuries since he roamed the earth in that slender body, Jesus has become a popular model for weight management programs.

What he apparently knew that the rest of us don't know, among several other things, is that no amount of peanut-butter cups will ever fill the spiritual void sucking away like a vacuum at our inner peace.

"We're hungry for God," said Joann Bateman, who subscribes to a faith-based weight-loss program at Green Valley Christian Center. "And we've been trying to fill ourselves with food. That's illogical."

Across the U.S. and here in Las Vegas, the body-conscious are filing into church meeting rooms for diet programs that have at their core this message: Replace the love of food with the love of God -- and when the spirit is healthy, the body will follow.

The Weight For Jesus program teaches Christians to "work through their mental diet in a biblical matter." The Hallelujah Diet recommends eating fruits and vegetables "like those found in the Garden of Eden." The Prism diet plan offers a selection of biblical verses to help ward off temptation.

And the Weigh Down Workshop offers this philosophy: "God can transform your desire for a pan of brownies to that of hungering and thirsting after righteousness."

It's no wonder that Christians are flexing their fitness philosophy muscles. More than half of Americans today are overweight and the diet business has become a $33 billion-a-year industry. Simultaneously, spirituality is being made into a commodity on every corner -- from WWJD ("What Would Jesus Do?") bracelets on sale at Wal-Mart to best-selling Dalai Lama books on back order at Borders Books and Music.

To an industry tired by the technicality of miniature food scales and body-fat measurements, spirituality brings the freedom of the intangible.

"I prefer the faith-based program because it helps me to work on me, and on my relationship with God, rather than just the food," said Tina Hurd, a member of the Weigh Down Workshop at Green Valley Christian Center who has tried a smorgasbord of other diets -- Nutri-System, Opti-Fast, the grapefruit diet, and the cabbage soup diet, among others.

Weigh Down's Way

On NBC's "Today" show last week diet guru Dr. Robert Atkins told Katie Couric and pound-counters everywhere that the key to losing weight was in limiting one's carbohydrate intake.

That same morning Weigh Down founder Gwen Shamblin was in a Nashville, Tenn., studio making videos in which she says things such as, "God loves cheeseburgers."

A key principle in Weigh Down is that all food is good because God created it. The idea is to eat what you want but eat in moderation ("The Bible says 'Everything in moderation,' " says Karen Cook, a Weigh Down follower at Central Christian Church in Las Vegas) and replace binge eating with prayer.

"We're working on changing our relationship with God. We're not changing the food. In the Bible, they would eat roasted grain and honey -- that's a Twinkie," Bateman said. "I can relate to Twinkies."

Shamblin teaches in her video that overweight people are slaves to food just as the Israelites were enslaved in Egypt. The journey toward a thinner body, through a better relationship with God, is the Exodus -- the journey to the Promised Land.

"It really is about being free from the pull of food in our lives," Bateman said.

Shamblin, a perky size 4, said that the convergence of God and food was a long time coming.

"What has never been addressed in the medical community is the spiritual side of people," Shamblin said on the telephone from Nashville. "For too long the medical community has been focusing only on the science. But the fat farms and diet research centers have not been able to produce what God has been able to produce through Weigh Down."

The workshop, which costs $103 for 12 weeks, includes watching videos, group discussion and workbook exercises.

Since 1992 the Weigh Down program has grown from a single group meeting in a Memphis, Tenn., strip mall office to a program that claims participants in more than 30,000 churches worldwide. The company now employs 100 employees and Shamblin is about to release a new book, a series of home videos, and ultimately, videos in "every foreign language."

Additionally, the Weigh Down enterprise hawks souvenirs via the Internet -- everything from Weigh Down sweatshirts for adults (two sizes available: large and extra large) to Weigh Down yo-yos and frisbees for kids.

Testimonials pepper Weigh Down's website:

"There is no reason why anyone could not benefit from Weigh Down, which is less a 'diet' than the Gospel applied to eating," gushes Dr. Daniel Sather, an internist in Minnesota who lost 54 pounds using the faith-based program.

"It is the only diet I recommend to my patients now," adds Dr. Yvonne Sims, a Tennessee gynecologist who lost 20 pounds using Weigh Down.

Shamblin, a 45-year-old registered dietician, is at once modest about her role in the Weigh Down phenomenon ("God is using me") and bold in her assessment of the program's impact on American religious culture. In fact, she credits the nondenominational weight loss program with helping to dismantle the Christian denominational system.

"There has been a breaking down of the walls between denominations in the country -- people are moving toward the nondenominational -- and I feel like Weigh Down has had something to do with that," she said.

And while the program is marketed on the idea of weight loss, it also serves as an evangelical tool: Some are lured by the promise of thinness and find a renewed interest in Christianity.

"When I tell people that God loves brownies, they are so excited and they ask Him back into their kitchens and into their lives," Shamblin said.

"It helps intensify your spiritual relationship with God," Hurd said. "That's one of the best things about it."

Bible Baggage

But if God made a diet plan, humans differ on what it might be. While Weigh Down is enjoying success based on an eat-your-brownies pitch, other Christians believe the Bible dictates stricter dietary guidelines.

The Hallelujah Diet, which was started by a vitamin-selling organization called Hallelujah Acres several years ago, says that God meant us to be vegetarians. However, even its founders fall into a biblical conundrum:

If we're supposed to be vegetarians, why did Jesus eat fish?

On the Hallelujah Acres website, several pages of text are devoted to discussing the eat-meat quandary:

"I have had great difficulty in understanding why God would teach one thing in one place -- originally telling man he was to be a raw vegetarian as He did in Genesis 1:29 -- and then telling man it was OK to eat meat as He did in Genesis 9:3. ... If we took these two teachings at face value, it would certainly appear to be a contradiction. However, I do not believe there are any contradictions in the Bible!"

Seven paragraphs later the website author concludes that God meant us to be vegetarians.

Other Christian nutritionists believe the Bible recommends using food to assuage certain ailments.

According to the Health and Nutrition volume of the "God's Word for the Biblically Inept" series -- Christian books published by Starburst Publishers this year -- many characters in the Bible exhibited problems we're familiar with today:

Eli the priest was chubby. Hannah had an eating disorder. Elijah suffered from depression.

Although food will not feed men's souls, it sometimes makes them feel a whole lot better.

Elijah was so depressed, according to "God's Word for the Biblically Inept," that he considered suicide. So God sent him some bread.

"When Elijah was depressed and wanted to die, God sent an angel to feed him," the book says. "That's right! He sent whole-grain bread baked on coals and water. Whole-grain bread of wheat and/or barley contains carbohydrates which can improve your blood sugar levels and lift your spirits ... all of (the nutrients in whole grain bread) are known to help prevent or reverse several different kinds of depression."

"The Bible is life's handbook," Hurd said. "If you have any problems, anything at all, the answer is in the Bible."

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