Thirty-nine years ago the christian century printed a waggish but eloquent essay by William R. Mueller titled "Of Obesity and Election." An article so named today would likely be one more tiresome expose of Bill Clinton's struggle for girth control, but Mueller intended "election" to ring predestinarian bells as he reviewed the latest book by a then youthful Presbyterian minister, Charlie W. Shedd: Pray Your Weight Away (1957). As Mueller observed with due irony, Shedd had managed to blend the tone of a down-home preacher with the shrewdness of an entrepreneurial fitness broker in order to peddle the gospel of slimness, condemning portly bodies in the unequivocal lexicon of sin and guilt while touting born-again reduction through sustained and humble prayer.
Though Mueller winced at Shedd's theology, he confessed its resonant power in his own life, remembering his weight-obsessed Presbyterian mother, over whose dressing table hung portraits of John Calvin and fitness guru Bernarr Macfadden in paired consecration. Mrs. Mueller had apparently labored hard to instill fear of all things flabby in her young son, awakening him daily at 6 A.M. for strained carrot juice, a brisk jog around Baltimore's Lake Ashburton and "a grueling order of calisthenics" before sending him, exhausted, off to school. Mueller's wry commentary on these weighty matters, mixed with tenderness for his well-intentioned mother, doubtless prompted many readers to chuckle sympathetically, though I suspect more than a few paused long enough to order Shedd's popular book for themselves.
Those who did obtain the book could reflect on what it really meant to pray their weight away by pondering such apparently irrefutable points as, "When God first dreamed you into creation, there weren't one hundred pounds of excess avoirdupois hanging around your belt." Shedd, who claimed to have divested that much from his own body, recommended various treatments for successful slimming, including vocal mealtime affirmations such as: "Today my body belongs to God. Today I live for Him. Today I eat with Him." He also advised, as a useful time-saver, combining daily devotions with 15 minutes of calisthenics, and encouraged readers to follow his own regimen, which included executing karate kicks while reciting the third chapter of Proverbs and timing sit-ups to the spoken rhythm of Psalm 19. All the while, readers could emulate Shedd in imagining the mountain referred to in Matthew 17:20 as a mountain of flesh, able to be moved (i.e., lost) by the person of true faith. With a heavy dose of positive thinking to balance his rebuke of excess poundage, Shedd assured readers that beneath their bulk "there is a beautiful figure waiting to come forth. Peel off the layers, watch it emerge, and know the thrill which comes when you meet the real you."
Shedd and his readers could hardly have foreseen the impending explosion of Christian diet literature into a multimillion-dollar industry, one that rode the back of the American diet craze and capitalized on it by creating a message specially geared to the evangelical multitudes. Today the shelves of Christian bookstores bulge with material that makes Charlie Shedd look like a prophetic sage (even if he did recommend only a trifling 15 minutes of exercise per day) rather than an object of easy derision. However amusing William Mueller may have found Shedd's dieting strategies, Shedd seems to have had the last laugh, judging from the millions of Americans who consume Christian fitness publications, sweat to the industry's exercise regimes and otherwise venerate the gods of reduction.
I suspect many Christians are, as I am, puzzled if not troubled by recent developments in this industry. Perhaps it is time to try to assess the full scope of this movement and formulate a cogent theological response.
Since the 1950s American Christianity has seen the rise (and sometimes fall) of groups and concepts like Overeaters Victorious, Believercise, the Faithfully Fit Program, and the Love Hunger Action Plan. Episcopalian Deborah Pierce, transformed from a 210-pound object of campus ridicule to a "high-fashion model" in Washington, composed I Prayed Myself Slim in 1960, followed seven years later by pastor Victor Kane's Devotions for Dieters, a book that was reprinted in 1973 and again in 1976.
When Christian diet literature underwent its initial boom in the 1970s, Charlie Shedd again led the way: his 1972 book The Fat Is in Your Head remained on the national religious best-seller list for 23 months and sold more than 110,000 copies by 1976. Evangelist Frances Hunter produced God's Answer to Fat in 1975, a top religious best seller that far exceeded even Shedd's numbers, with 1977 sales figures nearly matching Charles Colson's Born Again and the inspirational autobiography Joni. Other striking successes in this period include C. S. Lovett's Help Lord--The Devil Wants Me Fat! (1977), Patricia Kreml's Slim for Him ( 1978) and Neva Coyle's Free to Be Thin (1979), which sold more than half a million copies and spawned a virtual industry of Coyle-authored diet products, including an exercise video and an inspirational low-calorie cookbook.
Along the way, women who had failed to lose weight on their own took a cue from the strategy of such commercial groups as TOPS (for Taking Off Pounds Sensibly, founded in 1949), Overeaters Anonymous (1960) and Weight Watchers (incorporated in 1963) and began seeking help from other struggling dieters, adding a biblical dimension to the program. The New York wife of a Presbyterian pastor, for instance, gave up the strict regimen of Weight Watchers in 1972 to form 3D (Diet, Discipline, Discipleship), advertised as "a Christian counterpart to national weight-watcher programs" and expanding to more than 5,000 churches and 100,000 participants by 1981. About the same time, 248-pound Neva Coyle from Minnesota, having failed at every commercial diet program she tried, turned to the Bible, lost 100 pounds, and founded Overeaters Victorious in 1977, which launched her successful career as a best-selling author and inspirational speaker.
This trend hardly faltered in the 1980s end '90s. The recent plethora of publications includes books on "spiritual discipline for weight control," "biblical principles that will improve your health" and achieving "greater health God's way." More Christian diet groups have emerged and gone national, including Houston-based First Place (founded in 1981), with programs in nearly 5,000 churches across the country and in 13 other nations, and smaller programs like Jesus Is the Weigh.
Currently, the largest of these programs is the Tennessee-based Weigh Down Workshop (founded in 1986), a 12-week Bible study program that is now offered in as many as 10,000 churches in the U.S. and elsewhere. That program is likely to gain new ground with the recent release of founder Gwen Shamblin's The Weigh Down Diet, stocked at both commercial and religious bookstores across the nation. Just as Christian exercise programs have taken the country by storm (in 1996 Sheri Chambers's "Praise Aerobics" video immediately went gold, fast selling over 50,000 copies to compete numerically with the latest offerings from Bon Jovi and Janet Jackson), Bible-based diet programs are expanding rapidly, with no ebb in sight.
Concern with weight and dieting is hardly the sole province of religious conservatives. Readers of theologian Mary Louise Bringle and church historian Roberta Bondi, both of whom have written moving accounts of their struggles with food, recognize that eating compulsions of every variety bedevil liberal Christians no less than their evangelical sisters and brothers. Awareness of this point, and of the extreme suffering that accompanies such compulsions, should make us sympathetic toward Christian weight-watching. Yet I suspect that more than a few churchpeople, conservative and liberal, continue to scorn those who relish the earnest, homespun approach of Charlie Shedd, Neva Coyle and Gwen Shamblin--those who pray feelingly about issues that may not seem to the rest of us to be on God's top list of concerns.
