A New Year's Resolution: Get Fit, Get Faith

I went to join a gym the other day. Maybe I should have gone to church. Like countless other Americans, I indulged too much over the holiday season and am now in penitential mode, and I figure there's no better time than New Year's Day to turn over a new leaf.

I'm certainly not alone. Some 100 million of us are making resolutions for the coming year, with losing weight and getting in shape topping the list (though reducing debt is understandably popular for 2010). The problem, however, is that fewer than half of us will stick to those vows, as obesity statistics -- and my own waistline -- can attest.

So a growing number of people are turning to God for help. The Christian diet phenomenon that exploded in the 1980s has gone mainstream. Churches across the country are adding fitness programs and health clubs to their campuses in an effort to become one-stop community centers -- and attract new members.
First Place 4 Health, for example, is a Christian weight-loss program that now has affiliates in 12,000 congregations nationwide, while consulting groups like ChurchFitness.com help churches develop fitness facilities and find the best state-of-the-art workout equipment. The online magazine Faith and Fitness started up a few years ago to "help readers make connections between the Christian faith and their fitness lifestyle," and books like "Fat Proof Your Family: God's Way to Forming Healthy Habits for Life" and La Vita Weaver's "Fit for God: The 8-Week Plan That Kicks the Devil OUT and Invites Health and Healing IN" are also part of what is often called the "fit for the kingdom" movement.

"It's an act of worship," Steve Reynolds, pastor of Capital Baptist Church in Annandale, Va., said of the practice of getting in shape and getting healthy. "I believe worship is a 24/7 lifestyle and when we honor God in this area" [keeping fit and eating right] it really is an act of worship."

Reynolds knows what he's talking about. The author of "Bod for God: The Four Keys to Weight Loss" is down 115 pounds from a high of 340 pounds three years ago. Before he started his program, Reynolds was taking eight pills a day to treat high blood pressure and diabetes, among other things. Now those conditions have disappeared, and he is off the meds. He developed his own program for weight loss and believes each person must craft a regimen that is right for them in their situation, and that they must set goals they can achieve through incremental steps. "Our biggest mistake is to try to adopt another person's lifestyle."

But for Reynolds and others the religious aspect is, of course, central: believers should view weight loss and workouts as a way to praise God because the body is "a temple of the Holy Spirit," as Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians. "You are not your own; you were bought at a price. Therefore honor God with your body." Reynolds says that bringing a religious outlook to weight loss gives believers an advantage because of the higher motivation and because they can transform themselves physically much the way they do spiritually, through familiar rituals and practices. "It's exciting because you're adding a whole dimension to your Christian walk that most Christians don't think about."

In fact, this regard for the body is relatively new for Christianity, which early on adopted a kind of body-soul dualism that often viewed the body as a source of evil or affliction that can only be kept in check by practices of self-denial. Such asceticism can certainly make you trim -- look at the paintings of early church fathers and desert hermits. But it is hardly a celebration of the body.

The "Muscular Christianity" movement of the 19th century was an attempt to overcome the body-soul split (though it focused on making manly Christian men rather than sleek women) and it largely succeeded. The Christian health-and-diet movement that emerged in the 1970s -- also largely fueled by evangelical Christians -- took the movement to another level, mirroring the fitness craze of the day and adding a religious element. It was an unstoppable combination.

And now other denominations and religions are embracing faith-based weight loss and exercise strategies, too.

Catholic leaders are urging priests to take better care of themselves, for example. On New Year's Day, the Rabbinical Assembly, the national organization of Conservative rabbis, launches The Shalem Campaign to encourage its members to "adopt healthy eating, exercise and lifestyle habits." It's apparently the first ever "fitness challenge" issued by a rabbinical group. ("Shalem" is the Hebrew word for "whole.")

Christians and Jews are also incorporating Eastern practices of yoga and martial arts into faith-based workout routines. That doesn't always please conservative Christians, as well as some Hindus for whom yoga remains a sacred tradition rather than a fun way for overweight Westerners to slim down. But such objections aren't dimming the popularity of Christian groups like Karate for Christ and Holy Yoga, for example, or Jewish groups like the Torah Yoga Association and Yoga Mosaic.

To be sure, it's hard to argue against anything that can help Americans get healthy and rein in health care costs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than two-thirds of Americans over 20 are overweight, and half of those are considered obese -- a disturbing trend that has been on the upswing for decades.

Moreover, churchgoers are actually chubbier than everyone else, and churches may be part of the problem. "America is becoming known as a nation of gluttony and obesity, and churches are a feeding ground for this problem," Purdue University sociologist Ken Ferraro wrote in a 2006 study showing Christians are more likely to be overweight than other Americans. And residents of the Bible Belt are the worst offenders.

"What attracts people to meetings is food. Churches use that to get people to come to things," Richard Kreider, director of the Baylor University Center for Exercise, Nutrition and Preventative Health Research, told the Associated Baptist Press. "They'll have after-service dinners and Sunday night ice cream -- you name it. We tell people not to drink and not to smoke and that they should take care of the temple [body], but we don't work out."

The rise of faith-based fitness programs is not without its problems, however.

States and municipalities are beginning to challenge the tax-exempt status of church-based health centers especially as tax revenues decline. Health club owners are also growing envious over what they view as unfair competition from tax-free religious spas, which are often open to the general public at subsidized prices. In November, Missouri began taxing yoga centers, declaring that they were exercise more than spiritual practice. In 2008, Washington State reversed an effort to tax yoga centers, though South Dakota and West Virginia still do.

Another objection is that there is no hard evidence that faith-based diets and exercise regimens work any better than "secular" programs, which are none too successful either. Indeed, research indicates that 95 percent of dieters fail to keep the weight off for five years, and most will gain back more than they lost.

But the sharpest criticism of faith-based diets and workout programs is that they can encourage some of the very sins that religion aims to overcome -- an obsessive focus on one's self and one's physical appearance to the point that beauty becomes more important than spirituality. That focus can exacerbate personal insecurities rather than mitigate them, and can make those who are not so fit or sleek feel inadequate. Failure to lose weight or keep it off can also make believers feel spiritually flawed or unloved by God.

The criticisms are most often leveled at leaders of the big money Christian diet industry, which has in the last decade take a big bite out of the $40 billion a year weight loss industry. One of the best known "pastorpreneurs" in the business is Gwen Shamblin, founder of the Remnant Fellowship Church in Tennessee and author of the best-selling "Weigh Down Diet" book, which has spawned popular workshops conducted through Shamblin's Weigh Down Ministries.

"I think it has become an economic opportunity in a lot of ways for the evangelical diet movement's leaders to profit off of people's anxieties about their weight," says Michelle M. Lelwica, associate professor of religion at Concordia College and author of "The Religion of Thinness: Satisfying the Spiritual Hungers behind Women's Obsession with Food and Weight."

Lelwica says some programs in the Christian weight loss industry are akin to the controversial "prosperity gospel" that convinces believers that God wants them to be rich, and tells them that if they donate to their pastor or buy a particular product they will be blessed with wealth. In the case of some faith-based fitness pitches, Lelwica says, believers "buy into thinness as a kind of false god." And men are targets as much as women. "A beefed-up body is a way men are supposed to be in control and a slimmed-down body is a way women are supposed to be in control."

For both sexes, the message is that a good body reflects a morally upright person -- one who has self-discipline. Such discipline can be a laudable goal, Lelwica says, as it can bring a sense of spiritual peace. But when thinness and fitness are used to address unmet spiritual needs, she says, things can go very badly.

In her book on the faith-based diet movement, "Born Again Bodies: Flesh and Spirit in American Christianity," R. Marie Griffith, a religion professor at Princeton, recounts the story of Neva Coyle, an early prophet of the Christian diet movement and founder of Overeaters Victorious.

Coyle eventually regained all her weight and was publicly humiliated by her perceived failure until she finally came to accept herself as an overweight woman who was loved by God. Coyle repented of her previous weight loss evangelization and wrote a book called "Loved on a Grander Scale" that includes this prayer to Jesus: "Forgive me for putting my body size before you. For spending so much time on how I look, how much I weigh, and caring more about pleasing others than I cared about pleasing you."

But even critics of some faith-based weight programs say there is a role for religion in promoting physical well-being. "Good health is absolutely a spiritual issue," says Lelwica. The irony in this modern asceticism, however, is that in some ways it reflects the old body-soul dualism that Christianity has been trying to overcome for centuries because extreme diets and workouts "put us at war with our bodies. That, to me, is fundamentally not Christian."

Steve Reynolds, the Virginia pastor, agrees, and says that proper balance and motivation are essential. "I think it's okay to want to look good. But the more you include God, the higher the motivation."

Moreover, it is important for Christians -- and especially pastors -- to present a good example. Many clergy are overworked and overweight, Reynolds says, and look like "hypocrites" who gorge themselves while preaching a gospel of sacrifice.

"I say you should look good not for vanity's sake but for the testimony's sake," he says. "You want to be a testimony for God, not just for yourself."