Remember the DaVinci Code Diet? Well, fuck that Catholic-baiting calorie-control blasphemy. Why follow a diet based on heresy when God himself is waiting for you to pray those inches off of your fat ass?
Jordan Rubin is convinced God can help you lose weight. Rubin, author of The Maker’s Diet, is fresh from a speaking engagement at Toledo’s Cathedral of Praise. He’s in town to spread the word about his yearlong “Healthy Toledo” initiative, the name a church-friendly play on “holy Toledo.”
Am I the only one who would never have seen that pun on my own? Didn’t think so. Anyway, God wants you to be thin. Rubin knows this because God once helped him lose 80 pounds!
Just kidding, actually Rubin credits prayer with getting him through a serious illness and does not credit God with inflicting the disease in order to help him lose weight. But I think if he phrased it the way I just did, it would help him sell more diet books.
Somewhere in this experience Rubin was inspired to read a lot, which naturally lead to writing a book. You’d think a nice memior about the power of prayer to heal would be appropriate, but Rubin noticed that there might be more money and longer tours if he wrote a self-help book instead. Maybe the kind that helps insecure people solve their problems by tricking them into thinking that they’ve shunted the responsibility off onto someone else, then telling them to eat a balanced diet while they are waiting for God to work his magic. God, you see, wants you to be the kind of needy sponge that believes that He’s just hanging around waiting for you to hand him all of your problems. Then, he solves them! It’s that easy!*
“Before I came to First Place, I had never thought to pray about anything I ate—I just thought God thought I should have self-control,” says Carole Lewis, who was 39 when she first attended the Bible-centric healthy-living program in 1981, and has since become the group’s national director.
Attendees of the program practice a “biblical approach to weight management,” mixing Bible study with recipes for black-bean enchiladas. “I thought God was interested in my marriage, my finances, my kids—but now I do believe he is interested in everything about us.” For Lewis, “everything” includes her food choices.
Unfortunately for Carole, God wasn’t even interested in her marriage or her kids, He was just being polite.
*Disclaimer: God helps those who help themselves. That’s why in addition to prayer, “The Maker’s Diet eschews processed foods for pared-down preparations like broiled halibut, ginger carrots and cilantro lime chicken cacciatore, made with organic ingredients where possible.”
Lewis emphasizes the role prayer plays in helping her make good diet decisions. “My body is always going to want what it’s going to want, and that’s not always going to be healthy for me,” she says. “But God gives me strength.”
Yes, this is a diet for people who feel they need the support of an Omnipotent God in order to switch from ice cream to fat-free frozen yoghurt. Kind of makes you feel bad for a deity. Isn’t there a patron saint he could be delegating this shit to? Maybe it’s just my former Catholicism showing, but my God didn’t have the time or interest for this shit.
And not to raise any red flags or anything, but despite the claim that the God-diet market is “exploding,” their second example involves an honest-to-God fringe church that has been called a cult by former members.
Other programs, like Gwen Shamblin’s The Weigh Down Diet, speak more directly to modern-day conveniences like processed foods, and the ready availability of weight-loss pills and surgeries—all elements that have been decried by secular health-care professionals as well. (It’s crucial to note that Shamblin’s weight-loss program is associated with her Remnant Fellowship Church, which has been termed a cult by the group Spirit Watch; Shamblin filed a libel suit against the organization in March.)
But Shamblin addresses the emotional side of eating, too. “There are just two empty holes in the body—one is the longing heart, and one is the stomach. [The former] is for your relationship with God, and you cannot put chocolate cake in it—nothing will work, not money, porn, or drugs. You only want to eat when there’s an actual, physiological hunger.”
Hmmm, a weight-loss book affiliated with an alleged cult that, when you almost inevitably fail to keep the weight off, will then offer to help address the unfulfilled emotional needs that are clearly leading to your excessive weight. Nope, can’t see anything shady here. I hope someone glances over the fact that this is the church associated with the beating death of an 8-year-old boy and focuses on their more upbeat healthy living cottage industry.
All the same, it’s occasionally difficult to imagine a non-Christian feeling comfortable with such God-centric language, but all sources interviewed for this story emphasized their devotion to members of all faiths.
And of course we will take their word at face value, because really, why would non-Christians be feeling excluded or uncomfortable with evanglical Christan weightloss programs? Who tied their panties in a knot? Don’t they realize that everyone can enjoy losing 10, 20, even 30 or more pounds with the help of our One True Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.
Rubin hopes his healthy-living programs will expand well beyond Toledo, through the U.S. to “Asia, Africa, India, and hopefully Australia”—and of course, two of the three continents he mentions are not predominantly Christian.
This demonstrates the movement’s devotion to being welcoming and inclusive of non-Christians, because as everyone knows, evanglical Christians are dead set against missions and conversions.
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