Thinness: Ideal or Idolatry?

Were there "best practices" you found amongst Christian weight loss programs?  Any new approaches that you found innovative or promising?

Well, I am critical of the weight loss project as a whole.  At this point, so many studies have shown that these weight loss programs are not a viable way of achieving long-term weight loss that the burden of evidence is on people who are claiming that things like dietary interventions are effective in the long term.  The project of losing weight through exercise and dietary restriction is extremely flawed, and Christian weight-loss programs have those problems just as much as every other weight loss effort.

In terms of best practices, I think the people who have done the most interesting work are the people who have been in Christian weight loss long enough to see that people cycle with their weight and the endless pursuit of weight loss over time isn't necessarily the best thing for health or well-being.  If what they say is true, and they're emphasizing health and well being and the love of God as opposed to the impetus of social standards, then maybe what needs to be rethought is how God thinks about fat people.  Is it true that fat people make a bad witness for the Lord?  Is it true that God cannot use a fat person as an instrument? Are these notions that Christians should accept or challenge?

Some who have been in the Christian weight loss world for a long time have rethought these things.  Neva Coyle is a famous example.  She was the director of a program called Overeaters Victorious, and she had a weight loss surgery--if I recall the story correctly--and she and was faced with life-threatening side effects.  She had the procedure reversed, gained a lot of weight, and received a great deal of vitriol from her followers who were disappointed that she had re-gained the weight.  She developed a size-acceptance Christian perspective, saying that God loves me as a person who is larger than average, and there's a way to think about food and health independently of whether the scale goes up and down that actually might be more in alignment with what God has in mind for us. 

Another example is Carol Showalter, who started a program in the 1970s called 3-D, focusing on diet, discipline and discipleship.  It began as a standard Christian weight loss group.  As the years wore on, she came to feel that the problem was in thinking that God couldn't love her as a fat person, and this pursuit of weight loss was not actually the godly calling she had once thought it was.  She started rethinking questions of how you actually pursue health independently of whether the scale goes up or down.

This is in contrast to others, such as Carole Lewis, director of First Placefor over twenty years.  She also has gone up and down in her weight--although, I would add, not very far, since she was never very large in the first place.  But she wrote a book when she found herself, after being in First Place for twenty-five years, larger than she had ever been before.  She was still trying to find a way to make that work in a diet-centered paradigm.  I have concerns about that. 

Yet First Place does provide a space for people to talk honestly and openly about their size.  It gives some fat people a place to discuss their marginalization.  And certainly the people in the programs I visited valued their time there and got a great deal of friendship and connection and good opportunities to talk about health.  What makes it problematic is framing that sense of community and shared struggle in a practice that tends not to bear the kind of fruit that is hoped for.  It's the conflation of health with a number on the scale, and the relative impossibility of changing that number in any kind of permanent manner, that's a concern of mine. 

Why are the evangelicals you observed so concerned with weight loss in the first place?  Is it a reflection of old-fashioned Christian antipathies toward the body in general? 

In the Christian weight loss realm, they're quite concerned with what the body says about them as representatives of God in the world.  For people who believe that their task from God is to communicate God's truth to others, they feel the need to be effective messengers.  They feel that body size is a huge factor in how that message will be perceived and understood, and they're extremely concerned about that.

One interesting part of the evangelical culture project is the question of which terms are they going to accept and which are they going to challenge.  As years have gone by, and evangelicals have been more successful at engaging the culture, they've become increasingly concerned about the elements which they think are basically the price of the ticket-body size being one of them.