Thirty-nine years ago the CHRISTIAN CENTURY printed a waggish but eloquent essay by William B. Mueller titled "Of Obesity and Election." An article so named today. Formerly 'husky' Anthony Anderson discusses 47-pound weight loss following Type 2 diabetes diagnosis. By Cassie Carpenter for MailOnline. Published: 17:29 EDT, 29. The Promised Land of Weight Loss: Thirty- nine years ago the CHRISTIAN CENTURY printed a waggish but eloquent essay by William B. Shedd: Pray Your Weight Away (1. 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. Mueller had apparently labored hard to instill fear of all things flabby in her young son, awakening him daily at 6 A. M. 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, . ![]() Today I eat with Him. All the while, readers could emulate Shedd in imagining the mountain referred to in Matthew 1. With a heavy dose of positive thinking to balance his rebuke of excess poundage, Shedd assured readers that beneath their bulk . Peel off the layers, watch it emerge, and know the thrill which comes when you meet the real you. 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 1. 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. ![]() ![]() Ron Arvine, President of Arvine Pipe & Supply Co., Inc. MYTH #4: EATING FRUITS AND VEGETABLES IS THE SECRET TO WEIGHT LOSS. Eating more fruits and vegetables is a key strategy for boosting weight loss because they are. Melissa Joan Hart displays fuller figure. By MailOnline Reporter. Published: 21:37 EDT, 7 October 2014 ![]() Perhaps it is time to try to assess the full scope of this movement and formulate a cogent theological response. Since the 1. 95. 0s 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. ![]() ![]() 100 Pound Weight Loss Male Photos 50100 Pound Weight Loss Male Photos For Profile![]() Episcopalian Deborah Pierce, transformed from a 2. Evangelist Frances Hunter produced God’s Answer to Fat in 1. Shedd’s numbers, with 1. Charles Colson’s Born Again and the inspirational autobiography Joni. Other striking successes in this period include C. Lovett’s Help Lord—The Devil Wants. Me Fat! The New York wife of a Presbyterian pastor, for instance, gave up the strict regimen of Weight Watchers in 1. D (Diet, Discipline, Discipleship), advertised as . About the same time, 2. Neva Coyle from Minnesota, having failed at every commercial diet program she tried, turned to the Bible, lost 1. Overeaters Victorious in 1. This trend hardly faltered in the 1. The recent plethora of publications includes books on . That program is likely to gain new ground with the recent release of founder Gwen Shamblin’s The Weigh Down Diet, stocked at both commercial and religious bookstores across the nation. Just as Christian exercise programs have taken the country by storm (in 1. Sheri Chambers’s . Readers of theologian Mary Louise Bringle and church historian Roberta Bondi, both of whom have written moving accounts of their struggles with food, recognize that eating compulsions of every variety bedevil liberal Christians no less than their evangelical sisters and brothers. Awareness of this point, and of the extreme suffering that accompanies such compulsions, should make us sympathetic toward Christian weight- watching. Yet I suspect that more than a few churchpeople, conservative and liberal, continue to scorn those who relish the earnest, homespun approach of Charlie Shedd, Neva Coyle and Gwen Shamblin—those who pray feelingly about issues that may not seem to the rest of us to be on God’s top list of concerns. We may well chortle at Coyle’s belief that God actually urges faithful dieters to abstain from fattening treats, or at Shamblin’s insistence that the deity ? Yet hundreds of thousands of downhearted dieters look to this kind of devotional advice for redemption as assiduously as they have ever listened to Sunday sermons, and often with a great deal more desperation. While it is easy to find the comic in this genre, we ought not lose sight of the living people generating and responding anxiously to these titles and teachings; Mueller’s own humorous account was, after all, laced with regret for the diet prison in which his mother had trapped herself. The tone of Christian diet writers themselves is usually one part ebullience and two parts anxiety. Shored up by relief at having successfully reduced proportional body fat, they remain haunted by dread that the pounds, the scorn and the self- hating misery may surge back at any time. Neva Coyle reached her peak size at the age of 2. Joan Cavanaugh, author of More of Jesus, Less of Me (1. I felt like a joke to Him. My fat had become such a fortress around me that even God couldn’t penetrate it with His love and help. These are stories of serious despair and alienation, and perhaps of grace as well. These and scores of similar stories ought to make us cringe at the ease with which Bible- based diet books (and the writers of them) are fodder for highbrow derision, as when B. Laurence Moore in Selling God cattily dismisses them as . Perhaps those who have never felt ashamed of their own bodies or feared that God saw them as a . In any case, these poignant accounts merit compassion, not cheap shots. Even where the theology seems highly questionable in its trivialization of the gospel, drowning in bathos, the issues addressed deserve serious reflection. What does it mean to be embodied in a culture that celebrates both thinness and indulgence? The mocking of these texts also highlights a persistent tendency, both within and outside of the church, to devalue what are viewed as . From Charlie Shedd to Victor Kane, C. Lovett, Harold Hill, Jim Tear, Edward Dumke, Charles Salter and Nathan Ware, men have contributed significantly to it and have addressed a reading audience of men as well as women. But an unmistakable difference separates the writings of male and female authors: far more women than men identify their food habits as . Men (with a few exceptions) focus less on the emotional dimensions of being overweight than on its detriments to physical health, stamina and vigor. Perhaps the intensity of the women’s testimonies, accounts of uncontrolled bingeing and self- hatred that terminate in divine surrender and ultimate triumph, prompts critics to judge them delusional and overwrought. But the pain and humiliation at the heart of these stories signal a powerful despair that ought not to be trivialized, nor should writers simply be indicted for reinforcing the very standards of thinness that gave rise to that despair in the first place. Failing to take their stories seriously, to let them stir us to understanding, intensifies the marginality and shame articulated by their authors, male but especially female; whereas opening our ears to hear them ought to sharpen our attentiveness to that same pain in the churches and communities that surround us. What marks the more recent literature as distinctive is not its concern with corporeal thinness and good health per se but the apparent willingness of authors to accept, ardently and without flinching, the somatic standards of the wider culture and convert them into divine decree. Another insists that God wants us aware that . Patricia Kreml, author of Slim for Him, warns her readers against vanity even while assuring them that they will become more beautiful via her regimen. This will be a result of our efforts but not the main reason for them. An irate writer published an essay in Daughters of Sarah in 1. The message, whether blatant or subtle, is that fat- is- sin- and- the- righteous- are- thin- amen. In Bringle’s succinct avowal, . Fatness is a pseudo- sin. Christian diet books, brochures for Bible- based weight- loss programs, and evangelical women’s stories about their bodies do not articulate a uniform message. In fact, these sources present strikingly varied interpretations of the role that food and weight- watching play, or ought to play, in the Christian life. Whereas Shedd presumed that excess weight was the result of gluttony, pure and simple, recent writers have given a distinctly therapeutic spin to the varied reasons why people eat more than their bodies require. The most commonly voiced predicament now is addiction rather than greed: one confesses no longer to being a penitent sinner but rather to being an acute . As Frances Hunter put it as early as 1. As Shamblin puts it in The Weigh Down Diet, the purpose of a Christ- centered diet program is to . Authors increasingly stress not the carnal sign (. Writers today do not declare, with Shedd, . Rather than choosing between sinful- but- scrumptious indulgence on the one hand and godly- but- tiresome obedience on the other, the challenge is to select between enslavement to unwholesome and distasteful foods—bondage to Boston cream pie is one author’s illustration—and deliverance into the possibility of living a truly energetic, salubrious and meaningful existence. The problem in view is not fat but loving food more than God. And the cure begins not with denying the flesh but with revealing the deeper, spiritual needs that trigger anxious eating. A more conspicuous development in this literature is its growing systematization: it includes charts and graphs and regular pretensions to . Well into the early l.
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