Diet Strategies: The Bible and Weight Loss  

The first thing Andy Sorrells did after the planes hit on September 11, 2001, was smoke a bowl. Then, eyes glued to the horror on his friend's TV in Unionville, Tennessee, he started shoveling junk into his mouth, then smoked some more, then ate some more. And then, for the first time in ages, he prayed. And that is when, arms folded down over the endless ripples of his blubbery torso, he realized he was going to have to change things for real this time. He called his ex-girlfriend. Today Andy Sorrells and the ex are not only blissfully married, they are a combined 540 pounds lighter than they were that fateful day. And they couldn't have done it without Jesus, or for that matter, Gwen Shamblin, the multimillionaire queen of Christian dieting, who has sold two million books and whose Weigh Down diet program has outposts in more than 30,000 churches, all preaching the simple idea that praying before you take a bite and eating only when God tells you to (He'll make your stomach growl) is the ultimate way to a lean body. "I was running to the food and running to the drugs and now I just run to God," explains Sorrells, an attractive 27-year-old with a faint drawl and a small paunch on an otherwise lanky 6'2", 219-pound frame. Adds his wife Maggie, "I always thought I had big bones, but it turns out I'm actually pretty tiny. My ring is a size five!" They can eat in booths now and no longer need seatbelt extensions when they fly. But the biggest blessing, they both agree, is their renewed faith in God. Jesus and weight loss have not always gone together. Your Catholic correspondent grew up thinking vanity was at least as bad a sin as gluttony; Jane Fonda herself renounced the importance of weight loss after she was born again. And if there is anything with which we media are constantly beating people over the head, it's that America is full of Christians, and it is full of fat people, and that those demographics are often the same. Maggie and Andy Sorrells, after all, were both Christians when they were fat. Their overweight parents are Christians, too. But a new rationale taking hold in churches and Christian groups these days has spawned a multibillion-dollar faith-based diet industry. It goes like this: God created us thin, He can save us from our fat, and the Greatest Diet Book Ever Written already sits in most hotel rooms, church pews and households in America.For the Bible Tells me soAs with many human dilemmas—whether or not to stone disobedient wives, for instance—the Bible is fraught with mixed messages about food. And so are the various Christian weight-loss programs. In Genesis 1:29, God granted us "every green herb for food," providing the basis for Rev. George Malkmus's vegan, mostly raw Genesis 1:29 diet?also known as the "Hallelujah Diet." It reasons that Biblical characters like Adam and Methuselah lived more than 900 years in the era before God pronounced, a few Genesis chapters later, that He had created animals for food, too (at which point the Bible characters started dying off at 120 and 130.) Meanwhile, Dr. Don Colbert of the bestselling What Would Jesus Eat? diet, advises humans to simply eat as Jesus ate—meaning some fish and meats are allowed, as long as they are not deemed by the book of Leviticus to be unclean, like pork and shellfish. The PRISM Christian weight-loss program focuses on sugar and refined carbs as the enemy, noting in an instructional video that they've "been giving us trouble since the Garden of Eden," and Jordan Rubin's The Maker's Diet argues that God is dismayed by carbs. But Gwen Shamblin, a moderationist, says it's all bunk; fat people can eat junk so long as they stop worshipping food as a false god and walk away from their "enslavement" to it, just as the Israelites walked out of Egypt.For the rest of this article...Order the current issue of Weight Loss, by clicking here.

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