A CULTURAL ANALYSIS OF CHRISTIAN
WEIGHT LOSS PROGRAMS
Samantha Kwan and Christine Sheikh
Over half a century ago, in 1957, Presbyterian minister Charlie Shedd introduced his book Pray Your Weight Away. In it he attributed overweight/obesity to personality flaws in people with these body types including, as he stated in an interview with Patsi Farmer, “a guilt complex[,] inferiority complex, resentment toward the world in general, hatred for one person or group of persons, escapism or just plain loneliness.”1 Shedd’s solution to this web of pathology was a regimen of exercises, set to the rhythm of verses from Psalms and Proverbs, coupled with acknowledgment of how inner spiritual turmoil becomes externally manifest in what Shedd understood to be the sinful fat body. Not one to mince words, Shedd famously remarked in Pray Your Weight Away that “we fatties are the only people on earth who can weigh our sins.”2
Since the publication of Shedd’s best-selling book, followed by two more best sellers, The Fat Is in Your Head: A Life Style to Keep It Off and Devotions for Dieters, an entire Christian diet culture has flourished. Hundreds of Christian weight loss programs have inundated a fortybillion-dollar-a-year secular diet industry,3 inspiring an array of questions for sociological and cultural inquiry. In her ground-breaking work, R. Marie Griffith examines the role of religion in the history of U.S. weight-loss culture, paying special attention to gender, class, and race.4 This chapter builds on her work in that, while Griffith offers an exhaustive analysis of how various forms of Protestant Christianity in the U.S. engage diet and fitness discourses in ways that are novel and mundane, this chapter examines how contemporary Christian elites use secular diet and body discourses to foment an ostensibly unique Christian identity. We thus address several questions: What do these diets say about the body and health? How do these diets differ from and/or resemble conventional diets? How do Christian leaders who developed these diets engage religion to promote their messages? Finally, what do these diets say about bodies and religion, including the reproduction of gendered beauty norms?
Five prominent Christian diets contain answers to these questions. They are Neva Coyle and Marie Chapian’s Free to Be Thin diet, George Malkmus’s Hallelujah Diet, Jordan Rubin’s Maker’s Diet, Gwen Shamblin’s Weigh Down Diet, and Carol Showalter’s 3D Plan Diet.5 These diets were and continue to be highly visible, clearly articulated, and extensive in scope. Most came or still come with elaborate Web sites and offer workshops, workbooks, support groups, and/or inspirational talks. The books accompanying each diet have also been labeled best sellers. Simply put, these were and still are leading Christian diets.
This chapter thus presents an analysis of these diets with an eye toward a critical cultural understanding of health, beauty, body, and religion. It begins with an overview of two camps in which these diets can be classified, followed by a discussion of several mainstream assumptions about fat bodies, health, and beauty. An analysis of these Christian diets then illustrates how they both embrace and reframe these secular assumptions. The chapter closes by examining the social significance of these diets for understanding gendered bodies and hegemonic cultural norms.
CHRISTIAN DIET TYPOLOGY: SUCCESS WITH
GOD AND GARDEN OF EDEN DIETS
An analysis of Christian diets suggests that they can be classified into two camps. On the one hand, like secular diets, Christian weight loss programs draw upon a simple algorithm for weight loss: weight loss is inevitable if one reduces caloric intake and maximizes caloric output. Both secular and Christian diets profess some variation of this equation, differing only in the type and amount of food and exercise recommended. However, these Christian weight loss programs are unique insofar as followers are told to turn to God for success. In other words, religious faith lies at the heart of these regimens. For example, participating in Coyle and Chapian’s Free to Be Thin diet means entering into a covenant with God. In their words: “You are making a commitment with the Lord today regarding how you treat your body.”6 Drawing on the Holy Spirit through prayer and devotion brings strength in times of temptation and weakness; God will provide followers with the discipline needed to lose weight. Shamblin’s Weigh Down Diet, along with Showalter’s 3D Plan Diet, urges a similar core method: Trust in God and weight loss is forthcoming. These modes of Christian dieting can be referred to as Success with God.
On the other hand, Rubin’s Maker’s Diet and Malkmus’s Hallelujah Diet can be labeled Garden of Eden diets. While these diets also emphasize faith, Scripture, and God as key sources of empowerment, discipline, and inspiration, they differ from Success with God diets in that they are also characterized by a nostalgic return to an “ancient” style of eating. For example, the Maker’s Diet encourages Christians to purge their bodies of processed or artificial foods and preservatives and adopt what is thought to be a more natural way of eating. The Hallelujah Diet advises even greater restrictions, in part resembling a raw foods vegan diet. Malkmus, formulator of the Hallelujah Diet, likens our civilization to a modern Babylon.7 His diet plan, which he also refers to as a “Genesis 1:29 diet,”8 stresses the foods Adam consumed in the Garden of Eden—foods derived directly from the earth such as fruits, vegetables, seeds, and nuts. According to Malkmus, individuals are overweight because God-given systems of immunity and self-healing do not work to their maximum potential when individuals fuel their bodies with the Standard American Diet (SAD). The SAD lacks nutrition because foods are cooked, processed, and devoid of life. Returning to a more natural and blessed way of eating thus promises health and weight loss. Notably, Garden of Eden diet proponents maintain that their diets cure not only “obesity” but also an array of health maladies—from cancer to irritable bowel syndrome to depression and anxiety.
THE FAT BODY: SECULAR ASSUMPTIONS
Western body discourses make various assumptions about fat and fat bodies that construct the discursive milieu in which Christian elites generate their own uniquely Christ-centered understanding of the appropriate body. Gaining a nuanced understanding of Christian diets, then, requires a more general grasp of how fat bodies are understood within Western culture.
First, as Susan Bordo maintains, the external body functions as a metaphor for internal processes in which the fat body represents unconstrained desires, impulses, and the appetite.9 Despite biological limitations and structural constraints such as access to affordable healthy foods and leisure time for exercise, there is a pervasive belief in Western cultures that individuals can change their bodies. Fat bodies are seen as a choice and considered a product of laziness and a lack of will or discipline. These “moral models of fatness” emphasize personal responsibility and are prominent in Western societies.10 This ideological outlook means that fat individuals are admonished for their supposed weakness and for making poor decisions. Indeed, research suggests that this individualistic ideology correlates with size-based discrimination.11 For example, fat individuals are treated more negatively when others assume they are responsible for their physical condition.12
Second, contemporary body discourses sometimes assume that weight gain is a result of psychological stress or disorder. Specifically, fat individuals are thought to suffer from some form of psychological emptiness such as loneliness or depression.13 To deal with this void, individuals turn to food as a source of comfort and/or control, and this behavior potentially results in an “overweight” or “obese” body. Others have argued that eating disorders at either end of the spectrum, that is, extreme weight gain or weight loss, are a reaction to social oppressions such as hetero/ sexism and racism.14 In both perspectives the fat body is a problematic response to psychological or social stressors, whereby individuals employ food as a coping mechanism. In secular discourses, addressing this problematic response may involve some form of therapy, working with nutritionists to develop “better” eating habits and/or turning to the services and products of commercial programs like Weight Watchers, NutriSystem, and Overeaters Anonymous.
Third, Western medical discourses deem fat unhealthy. Public health messages promoted by the medical community claim that it is unhealthy to be overweight or obese—conditions defined using the Body Mass Index (BMI).15 According to the Centers for Disease Control, these conditions can increase an individual’s risk of type 2 diabetes, stroke, and hypertension.16 The medical community encourages fat individuals to lose weight by eating healthily and exercising daily.17 This medical perspective remains pervasive despite assertions by Health at Every Size and fat acceptance advocates who challenge the obesity-health risk link; these advocates also contest the claim that the fat body is itself unhealthy.18 Indeed, the social power of the medical establishment,19 the medicalization of obesity,20 and the multibillion-dollar-a-year weight loss and diet industries all help to legitimate the dominant medical paradigm that equates fat with unhealthiness.21
Lastly, mainstream U.S. culture generally deems the fat body unattractive. Despite the celebration of the voluptuous body by seventeenth-century painters such as Peter Paul Rubens, contemporary Western aesthetic norms typically dictate that, to be desirable, women should strive for slim bodies and men should pursue a muscular Adonis physique.22 Feminist scholars have identified the socially and politically debilitating effects of this aesthetic ideal,23 the numerous and harmful body modification practices associated with it,24 and the innumerable ways the beauty industry has profited from women’s body insecurity.25 Nevertheless, these ideals remain ubiquitous and function as taken-for-granted hegemonic norms.
THE FAT BODY: UNIQUELY CHRISTIAN ADAPTATIONS
Western body discourses thus make several assumptions about the overweight body including the beliefs that fat people lack will or discipline and make poor choices that affect their weight; overeat or eat compulsively to fill an internal emptiness; and are unhealthy and unattractive, but can become healthy and more attractive by losing weight. These assumptions are not only embedded in secular talk, but are directly mirrored in American Christian dieting discourses. However, while Christian leaders adopt these assumptions, they also uniquely reframe them in Christian rhetoric. In the frameworks presented in these Christian diet programs, attaining a healthy body becomes a religious obligation where God provides the motivation and proper guidelines for body transformation.
CHOICE, WILL, AND DISCIPLINE
For example, like other Christian diets, Showalter’s 3D Diet Plan stresses individual choice. Thus, similar to mainstream thinking, Showalter presumes the fat body is caused by poor lifestyle decisions. She embraces the attitude that individuals can control their weight and, in fact, make “right” choices. As she states of herself: “The problem was me, not God. I loved to eat—I just hated to gain weight. And even after ‘willing’ the weight off through Weight Watchers, I still chose to begin eating the wrong foods again. … If I ate what I wanted, when I wanted to, I was going to get fat again. … The problem was me!”26 Coyle and Chapian take an even stronger position on poor personal eating habits. They ask followers to consider whether their unhealthy eating habits are actually sinful, especially when nutritious and healthy food is available.27 Essentially, they frame eating unhealthy foods not only as a poor choice but as a sin that ultimately violates the sacred temple of the body.
Again resonating with mainstream diet gurus, these Christian authors connect the fat body to individual moral fiber. Overweight Christians, like overweight nonbelievers, are thought to be lacking in character. These authors argue that overweight individuals overeat and/or fail to exercise because they lack the will and discipline to do so. Without discipline and a firm rootedness in biblical imperatives, they easily succumb to worldly desires. As Rubin writes of his Makers Diet: “we have allowed food to become our idol. Too many people admittedly ‘live to eat.’ … In our promiscuous society, we say yes to virtually every whim and desire of our palate, resulting in the national dilemma of becoming overweight, sedentary, and an increasingly sick population.”28 At the same time Christian diets individualize weight problems in this secular manner, they also claim that the answer is found in one’s relationship to God. True weight loss success, they argue, requires turning to God for strength and discipline. Indeed, this is a key dimension of Showalter’s 3D program—discipline (the other two are diet and discipleship). So while Christian diet leaders profess that inadequate character manifested in laziness and poor choices leads to the overweight condition, the solution ultimately lies with God. For example, in both the earlier and recent versions of her 3D Diet Plan,29 Showalter admonishes herself for relying upon her individual will, rather than God, for weight loss. It is God, she argues, who is the long-missing element of her weight loss journey. Showalter is explicit that one must rely upon God for successful weight loss. Or, as Coyle and Chapian say of their Free to Be Thin diet, their diet is a formula for success since “God cannot fail.”30 Trusting in God and turning to Him through prayer and devotion will provide the strength and knowledge necessary for weight loss.
Embedded in this discussion of overeating and poor choices, which ostensibly characterize the production of the fat body, is the conjecture that these poor habits are motivated by internal emptiness. While secular discourses presume that individuals overeat because of social stressors, emotional neediness, depression, and unfulfilled lives, Christian leaders use the concept of emptiness to highlight spiritual deficiencies. Whereas secular authors suggest that fat people require therapy or some other intervention to uncover the roots of their ostensibly poor eating habits, Christian authors intimate that fat individuals attempt to fill the God-shaped holes in their hearts with food. While Christian weight loss programs, mirroring mainstream discourse on the fat body, also tie poor eating habits to loneliness, histories of abuse, or other kinds of trauma, they ultimately still argue that overweight/obesity is born of distance from God, idolatry of worldly things, and other problems that can only be remedied by seeking to please and draw closer to God rather than to the self.
For example, Shamblin talks expressly about the emptiness she believes motivated overeating. In her Weigh Down Diet she describes “two empty holes”31—one in the stomach, which requires food, and one in the heart, which she describes as a proxy for emotional and spiritual needs. Shamblin makes her argument about human emptiness clear by including a diagram of the human form with two empty spaces in it, one shaped like a stomach and the other like a heart. Of the heart, she notes: “The person who attempts to feed a longing heart with food will stay on the path to overweight.”32 The solution to the dilemma of overeating to fill an empty or “longing” heart, Shamblin argues, is to “relearn how to feed or nourish the longing human soul with a relationship with God.”33 Her Weigh Down program focuses on teaching followers how to distinguish between actual physical hunger and the longings of an empty heart. Ultimately Shamblin argues, “if you love and trust the Lord, you will feed yourself the appropriate amount, and you will not indulge in desire eating.”34
Like Shamblin, Showalter assumes that being overweight is caused by excessive eating. Showalter implicitly ties this “lack of discipline,” an oftused phrase in her books, to unresolved emotional and spiritual troubles. She invites readers to “be open to new understandings of your weight struggles,”35 with said “understandings” being an analysis of willfulness and rebellion vis-à-vis one’s food consumption. Showalter argues that “food, like everything else, needs to come under the Lordship of Christ. … The whole area of food brings out rebellion, fear and anxiousness, and it reveals a lot about who we are inside.”36 She also includes an assignment during week 6 of the program, advising readers: “Examine your [eating] journal for clues of rebellion regarding food. How can you constructively deal with resentment, rather than with food?”37 Thus like secular diets, Christian diets offer a set of strategies for dealing with pathological eating habits, although it is now framed in terms of accepting God’s love into one’s heart. In the end, Christian leaders argue, it is only by so doing that the spiritual emptiness at the root of overeating may truly be remedied.
HEALTH
One dimension of striving to live in obedience to God is trying to discern what God wants for and from human beings. A few of the Christian diet authors suggest that God does indeed have a “natural state” intended for humans in which they eat the appropriate kinds and amounts of food. This line of thought was identified earlier as the Garden of Eden model of Christian dieting, which rests on the assumption that human beings do in fact have a primordial state where they may live according to God’s plan by consuming natural whole foods. Eden enthusiasts argue that contemporary modes of food production, such as the development of manufactured preservatives and artificial ingredients, produce foods that are toxic to the body and run counter to the natural state in which God wants his creation to exist.
Rubin, for example, bemoans the state of contemporary foodstuffs, the majority of which he argues is a departure from the idyllic diet intended for humans by their creator: “We have departed so far from the wisdom of our forefathers that fully 55 percent of the American diet is ‘new food’—not designed by the Creator or eaten by our ancestors. … We must leave behind our disease-producing diets and lifestyle and return to our Creator’s dietary guidelines, as incorporated in the Maker’s Diet!”38 Similarly, in his Hallelujah Diet, Malkmus maintains that modern innovations in food production are an insidious corruption of how human beings were intended to live by God. His Hallelujah Diet, is comprised of mostly raw foods (85 percent living foods and only 15 percent cooked foods). It also focuses on the elimination of toxins, emphasizing clean air, clean water, moderate sunlight, exercise, and rest.
All the Christian weight loss programs analyzed here rest uncritically on modern medicine’s declaration that fat is directly linked to poor health outcomes, despite evidence that the location of fat on the body matters and that fat may even serve a protective function against certain diseases.39 Indeed, Showalter explicitly accepts the most standardized version of health definitions by including the BMI chart in her books and advising program followers to calculate their BMIs and figure out what their “healthy”—that is, normal—weights should be. Shamblin too includes charts for her readers to use when tracking weight loss and decreases in measurements.
These Christian diet advocates also demonstrate their belief that fat is unhealthy by including an array of illustrative vignettes and success stories in their books. For example, in 1977 Showalter recalls being scolded for her weight gain by a doctor who tells her that she is too young to weigh almost 170 pounds. She quotes him as saying that “young mothers fall into depression from being overweight [and] older people literally die from overweight.”40 Thirty years later, Showalter retells this story with no revision or critical commentary, tacitly accepting the doctor’s assertion that being overweight is essentially a death sentence.41
In the Maker’s Diet, Rubin refers to obesity as a “disease,” and the book includes several testimonials from those whose health problems are essentially defined by what they consider to be excess weight. Five of the seven “success stories” explicitly describe weight loss as a key to improved health. The theme of thin as healthiness and fat as sick and diseased is also evident in Coyle and Chapian’s Free to be Thin Diet when they tell followers that weight loss indicates that one is “on your way to a healthier you.”42 The conflation of obesity with poor health is thus a thread that runs throughout the Christian diet programs examined here. Like their secular counterparts, Christian diet authors profess the fat body to be a diseased body a priori and offer their readers tools to become healthier by losing weight.
BEAUTY
Lastly, Christian and secular diets both engage, albeit through different lenses, beliefs about fat aesthetics. While mainstream diets tend to embrace hegemonic norms that celebrate thin and muscular aesthetic ideals, for women and men respectively, Christian authors warn their audiences not to fixate on external beauty. Coyle and Chapian ask followers to reflect on their motives for weight loss. Chapian admits that her life only changed when she made “the decision to stop pursuing thinness and become dedicated to health and wholeness instead” (21). Christians should be motivated by a desire to “feast on God’s precious Word” (23) since “in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37). As Coyle and Chapian put it, “food abuse, pigging out on unhealthy junk food … lying in bed all day with an overeater’s hangover” can all separate believers from Christ’s love (24).
They concede, however, that there is “nothing wrong with wanting to look attractive” and note a fine line between wanting to look good and the vanity that can hinder God’s work in a Christian’s life (26). The Free to Be Thin diet reminds followers of Philippians 2:3: Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit (26). In addition, Shamblin’s Weigh Down Diet emphasizes that “the motivation to be thin is not vanity—it is natural. God has programmed us to want the best for our bodies.”43 In fact, Shamblin makes clear that God “programmed” individuals to desire a “right weight” and that health problems suffered by overweight individuals reinforce this desire. Similarly, Showalter rebuffs external beauty as a motivator to weight loss and criticizes her previously self-centered dieting motivations. As she puts it: “I dieted so I could wear nicer clothes, get more attention from my husband and family, and have a good selfimage. I was at the center, but the center of my life was supposed to be God.”44 In sum, these diets all frame external beauty as prideful and unchristian. Thus both Success with God and Garden of Eden diets agree that Christian weight loss should focus on physical, emotional, and/or spiritual wellness.
The emphasis on inner beauty ties in part to the Christian’s view of the body as a temple that must be pleasing to God. All the weight loss programs examined here refer to 1 Corinthians 6:19–20 or similar passages that underscore the body as a sacred temple: “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God? You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your Body.” Like the Eden diets, to honor God with one’s body is to keep it pure by not ingesting modern, anthropogenic, processed, and artificial foods or preservatives. These impure contaminants are, both literally and metaphorically, toxins. Honoring God with one’s body also comes in other forms. For example, Rubin warns readers against getting tattoos, citing Leviticus 19:28,45 and Malkmus rebukes options such as surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, drugs, and other medical interventions, arguing that they are not God’s answer to sickness.46 Like other Christian diet gurus, Malkmus relies on Romans 12:1–2, stating that, “your bodies [are] a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God.”47 Similarly, honoring God with one’s body means not engaging in self-harm, particularly through overeating.48 Indeed the four themes are interconnected.
This analysis of five prominent Christian weight loss programs examines the various ways in which these programs adapt mainstream assumptions about the fat body. While secular discourses claim that fat individuals are fat because they lack will and make poor choices, experience some form of emptiness, are unhealthy, and are aesthetically displeasing, Christian leaders encourage their followers to turn to Scripture and the Holy Spirit—rather than food—to fill this emptiness, overcome weakness, and develop strength. The goal is a body that is sacred, healthy, and pleasing to God. Even though external beauty is not in and of itself an unholy motive, Christians are reminded that vanity and conceit are ungodly; holy motives include a desire for spiritual, emotional, and/or physical well-being.
Discussed elsewhere,49 these subtle yet powerful Christian adaptations of mainstream tenets are among several means that evangelical leaders take to solidify a collective Christian identity. They do this by employing various cultural resources in their available “cultural toolkits” such as religious doctrine and Scripture,50 while simultaneously promoting body modification—an end that can be deemed a superficial, anti-Christian, and antimodern goal.51 By doing so, Christian weight loss programs reframe parts of mainstream culture to resonate with Christian discourses. Diet talk is no longer secular, but simply another dimension of how Christians can live a uniquely Christian life.
These Christian adaptations, along with Christian leaders’ general condemnation of the “obesity epidemic” and the fat body, have solidified and expanded the realm of control over the fat body. Despite the various meanings of fat and recent challenges to mainstream understanding of the fat body,52 Christian body messages undeniably reproduce the conventional view that fat is both unhealthy and unattractive.53 Christian weight loss programs thus continue to reinforce a traditional body hierarchy that privileges thin and conventionally beautiful individuals and stigmatizes and discriminates against those deemed physically unattractive.54 This cultural hierarchy becomes even more firmly entrenched and difficult to dismantle now that it is has the support of a powerful social institution, the Christian church. Christian weight loss programs can therefore contribute to ongoing fat phobia, a phobia that is distinctly gendered in Western culture.
These observations can also be contextualized within today’s culture of food as well as the history of Christianity. Practicing food restraint and dieting in general has become a widespread norm, particularly for women.55 This food restraint occurs, however, in a rather paradoxical cultural context that simultaneously promotes overindulgence and overconsumption.56 While individuals encounter countless opportunities and temptations to consume, they are expected to exercise restraint. This is especially true for women.57 Indeed, it is well documented that cultural body norms affect women more significantly than men. The thin body ideal is one means by which women “do gender.”58
Yet, even through the highly gendered scripts of mainstream body discourses, Christian weight loss programs tend to exhibit a form of gender neutrality.59 Despite occasional gendered talk about, say, losing weight to find or please a husband, Christian diets target both women and men in their transformation efforts. It is worth noting that the diets selected in the current analysis were promoted by both female and male figures. However, most leading Evangelicals, including those who discuss weight loss, are men. When promoting their weight loss programs, these men often share the difficulties they encountered trying to achieve health and/or a certain weight. Their visibility as dieters is, in and of itself, a challenge to gendered body rules.
This rather remarkable gender neutrality is particularly evident in Showalter’s program. In her more recent 2007 work she excises a section from the 1977 book in which she locates the roots of her personal overeating in the childhood competition between herself and her older brothers for parental attention. In 2007 Showalter also includes reference to male participation in her 3D groups as well as a comment box called “Tips for Men” authored by nutritionist Maggie Davis. This contrasts with the earlier version of the 3D Plan that assumed a solely female participation in the program. Undoubtedly, a key difference between the two versions is the gender neutral nature of the latter, while the earlier text is primarily oriented toward the experiences and needs of women, particularly those living gender-traditional lives as primary caretakers for husband and children.
In conclusion, one key strategy by which the American Protestant Christian subculture successfully creates a distinct collective identity is by selectively engaging and appropriating mainstream cultural discourses. Christian weight loss programs provide a compelling case study of how Christian cultural producers encourage their consumers, that is, both Christian women and men, to perceive themselves as striving for uniquely Christ-centered lives while simultaneously sharing the goals and interests of mainstream secular culture. This dynamic of cultural consumption and co-optation, considered extensively by Christian Smith,60 lends greater complexity to the concept of secularization, whether it is understood in its classic form,61 in terms of differentiation into separate spheres of society,62 or as the diminishing of religious authority.63 Religion, as Emile Durkheim famously noted, is “destined to transform rather than disappear.”64 Indeed, rather than disappearing or retreating to the dark corners of contemporary society, Christian cultural producers are adeptly engaging mainstream culture in ways that are simultaneously conventional and uniquely Christian.
Notes
1. Patsi Farmer, “Minister Loses 100 Pounds by Praying Weight Away,” Sarasota Harold-Tribune, February 28, 1957, 13.
2. Griffith, Born Again Bodies, 162.
3. “The Diet Industry a Big Fat Lie,” Business Week, January 2008, http://www.business week.com/debateroom/archives/2008/01/the_diet_indust.html.
4. Griffith, “There Seems to Be a Growing Interest”; see also Griffith, Born Again Bodies.
5. While both Peter Shockey and Stowe Shockey contribute to Malkmus’s The Hallelujah Diet, we reference Malkmus solely hereafter as he is the key proponent and formulator of this diet.
6. Neva Coyle and Marie Chapian, The All-New Free to Be Thin Lifestyle Plan (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1993), 17.
7. Malkmus, Shockey, and Shockey, The Hallelujah Diet, 36.
8. Genesis 1:29: “Then God said, “Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed; it shall be food for you” (New American Standard Bible).
9. Bordo, Unbearable Weight.
10. Sobal, “The Medicalization and Demedicalization of Obesity.”
11. Crandall et al., “An Attribution-Value Model of Prejudice”; Puhl and Brownell, “Bias, Discrimination, and Obesity.”
12. DeJong, “The Stigma of Obesity”; Weiner, Perry, and Magnusson, “An Attributional Analysis of Reactions to Stigmas.”
13. Markowitz, Friedman, and Arent, “Understanding the Relation Between Obesity and Depression.”
14. Orbach, Fat Is a Feminist Issue; Thompson, A Hunger So Wide and So Deep.
15. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, The Surgeon General’s Call to Action.
16. Ibid.
17. For specific guidelines see Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Physical Activity for Everyone”; U.S. Department of Agriculture. MyPyramid.gov.
18. Bacon, Health at Every Size; Campos, The Obesity Myth; Campos et al., “The Epidemiology of Overweight and Obesity”; Gaesser, Big Fat Lies.
19. Conrad, “Medicalization and Social Control.”
20. Sobal, “The Medicalization and Demedicalization of Obesity.”
21. Fraser, Losing It.
22. Pope, Phillips, and Olivardia, The Adonis Complex.
23. Wolf, The Beauty Myth.
24. Gimlin, Body Work; Sprague-Zones, “Beauty Myths and Realities.”
25. Fraser, Losing It.
26. Showalter, 3D, 12–13.
27. Coyle and Chapian, The All-New Free to Be Thin Lifestyle Plan, 11.
28. Rubin, The Maker’s Diet, 32.
29. Showalter, 3D; and Showalter, Davis, and Shannon, Your Whole Life.
30. Coyle and Chapian, The All-New Free to Be Thin Lifestyle Plan, 16.
31. Shamblin, The Weigh Down Diet, 1.
32. Ibid., 2.
33. Ibid., 3.
34. Ibid., 187.
35. Showalter, Davis, and Shannon, Your Whole Life, 5.
36. Showalter, Members Plan, 9.
37. Showalter, Davis, and Shannon, Your Whole Life, 133.
38. Rubin, The Maker’s Diet, 49.
39. See, e.g., Gaesser, Big Fat Lies, 117–134.
40. Showalter, 3D, 7.
41. Showalter, Davis, and Shannon, Your Whole Life, 19.
42. Coyle and Chapian, The All-New Free to Be Thin Lifestyle Plan, 29.
43. Shamblin, The Weigh Down Diet, 5.
44. Showalter, Davis, and Shannon, Your Whole Life, 39.
45. Rubin, The Maker’s Diet, 86.
46. Malkmus, Shockey, and Shockey, The Hallelujah Diet, 55.
47. Ibid., 55–56.
48. Coyle and Chapian, The All-New Free to Be Thin Lifestyle Plan, 22.
49. Kwan and Sheikh, “Paradoxes.”
50. Swidler, “Culture in Action,” Talk of Love.
51. Kwan and Sheikh, “Paradoxes.”
52. Kwan, “Framing the Fat Body.”
53. The Christian critique of external beauty can be interpreted as a progressive challenge to cultural assumptions. For example, Coyle and Chapian’s 1979 emphasis on physical, emotional, and spiritual wholeness over thinness per se can be seen as a critique of the dominant medical paradigm, which tends to equate a high BMI with health risk and a lower BMI with healthiness, regardless of other risk factors. As Annemarie Jutel has pointed out, an oppressive “aesthetics of normality” says more about our culture’s standards of beauty than about health and has resulted in health and social disparities. See “Does Size Really Matter.”
54. Kwan and Trautner, “Beauty Work.”
55. Rodin, Silberstein, and Streigel-Moore. “Women and Weight.”
56. Bordo, Unbearable Weight.
57. Ibid.
58. McKinley, “Ideal Weight/Ideal Women”; Rothblum, “The Stigma of Women’s Weight”; West and Zimmerman, “Doing Gender.”
59. Because of limited space, this chapter does not analyze the role of race in depth. The Christian diet pundits considered here are all white, and, in general, with the exception of African American pastor T. D. Jakes, who has written a weight loss book (see Lay Aside the Weight!), Christian weight loss programs have been developed by white men and women. The prominent Hispanic evangelical Reverend Luis Cortés Jr., president and CEO of Esperanza USA, focuses primarily on economic and immigration issues and has not yet promoted a specific diet program.
60. Smith, American Evangelicalism.
61. Berger, The Sacred Canopy.
62. Gorski, “Historicizing the Secularization Debate.”
63. Chaves, “Secularization as Declining Religious Authority.”
64. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 432.