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Today Shamblin's business, in the words of her book-jacket copy, has risen from a garage startup to a multimillion-dollar, Nashville-based corporation. There are now 30,000 Weigh Down Workshop locations in the United States, Canada, and overseas. The Weigh Down Diet (Doubleday), Shamblin's first book, rocketed up the bestseller list soon after its release in 1997 and has sold more than a million copies. Her latest books, Rise Above and its companion devotional Out of Egypt (Nelson), focus even more deeply on the spiritual dimension of weight loss. Shamblin's success has put Christian dieting books in the spotlight lately, but the genre goes back nearly half a century.

The modern Christian dieting industry probably began in 1957, when Presbyterian minister Charlie Shedd published Pray Your Weight Away. The book, which would never fly in today's Christian self-help market, used the guilt-trip style of a folksy preacher to persuade readers that God never intended for "one hundred pounds of excess avoirdupois" to be hanging around their belts.

"We fatties are the only people on earth who can weigh our sins," Shedd wrote. Along with a host of hokey affirmations ("Today I eat with Him"), He offered an exercise regimen that, among other things, instructed readers to perform karate kicks while reciting Proverbs 3. The book was a bestseller.

Christian Reader dieting and fitness movement focuses less on sin and more on the individual's addiction and recovery. With Shamblin as its most popular guru, the industry has exploded. According to nutritionist David Meinz, author of Eating by the Good Book, the dieting industry in America is worth $30–50 billion. "A conservative estimate is that 5 percent [$1.5 billion] of that is the Christian dieting industry," Meinz says. "Many Christians are also buying Lean Cuisine. The 5 percent estimate does not include that."

Meinz offers another way to parse it: "Thirty-nine percent of the American population considers itself born again. So [up to] 39 percent of that dieting industry is Christian dollars. That's a huge amount of money."

Christian dieting programs fall into two camps. First are the programs like Shamblin's Weigh Down Workshop, which try to avoid the strict rules and regulations of many diets, focusing on the "spiritual" side of eating to the exclusion of calorie-counting.

Most other Christian dieting programs are more regimented. They advocate food exchanges, measuring four ounces of this and two ounces of that. The national ministry 3D—Diet, Discipline, and Discipleship—embodies this approach. Considered the mother of Christian dieting programs, 3D was founded in 1973 by Carol Showalter, a New England Presbyterian pastor's wife who struggled with her weight. "Weight Watchers met in the church," she recalls, "and I had a hard time not noticing it as I was off to Bible studies." As Showalter considered enrolling "for the third or fourth time. … God spoke to me in a most extraordinary way: through a hand-painted sign on a Sunday-school wall. The message was this: God has the answer.

God's answer, she determined, was for her not to return to Weight Watchers. Instead, she organized 3D, which teaches that Christians, meeting in small groups, can lose weight if they lead disciplined lives: disciplined eating but also disciplined prayer.

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September 4 2000, Vol. 44, No. 10