The following is an excerpt from...

Diet Help from On High?

January 2007

Catherine Rector couldn't remember the last time she liked the way she looked. Overweight for most of her life, the 5-foot-4 Nashville accountant had tried-and failed at-dozens of weight-loss programs. By 2001, at 32, she weighed 280 pounds, wore a size 32, and found it more and more difficult to walk short distances. Increasingly worried about her health and about finding clothes that would fit, Rector, a regular churchgoer who had attended Christian schools, decided to try the Weigh Down Workshop, a Bible-based weight-loss program that offered a class at a local church. In three months she shed 53 pounds-without counting calories or carbs or exercising. Now 39, she has lost 150 pounds, wears a size 6 and is confident she'll never backslide into obesity again. "I replaced my wanting food with filling myself up with my relationship with God," she says. Millions of overweight individuals have taken the same path. The movement, overwhelmingly Christian, is a phenomenon that takes a spiritual approach to a growing health crisis. With obesity at epidemic levels-more than 60 million Americans and climbing-and spirituality huge in the lives of many, religious leaders are increasingly delivering a message to the faithful: God wants you to lose weight. ...

...The Weigh Down workshop, the program Catherine Rector attended, was created in 1986 by Gwen Shamblin, a fundamentalist Christian dietitian, who believes overweight people have mistaken a spiritual emptiness for hunger for food. Though a dietitian, Shamblin doesn't believe in counting calories or fat grams ("it makes you focus on food and accelerates your love of food"). Instead, she urges people to tune in to Physiological cues and eat when a growling stomach indicates true hunger-then simply stop eating when they are full. If they aren't sure that the longing for food is true hunger, she says to wait a little longer and in the meantime fill themselves with scripture and prayer. ...

...The method worked for Rector: "If I feel like I might have the munchies between meals, I pick up my Bible and start reading it or simply pray."