The promised land of weight loss: law and gospel in Christian dieting

Christian Century, May 7, 1997 by R. Marie Griffith

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.