Your pastor wants you to lose weight.
“Jesus Christ was not obese,” [Rev. Steve] Reynolds told the audience, pointing to passages in the Bible that describe Jesus walking 40 miles in one day. “I believe the heart of God is so sad today when it comes to our physical shape.”
That must explain why God lets the poor Ethiopian kids starve…
As Skepchick Elyse points out:
… I find it suspicious that there’s no mention of Jesus’ love of all-you-can-eat fish buffets.
The reasoning for the church weight-loss programs include your body being a temple, gluttony being a sin, and other diets not working.
Karen Cunningham, 41, said she’d always blamed genetics for being overweight and for unsuccessful diets. A Christian since age 10, she didn’t make a connection between God and her body until she started going to Capital Baptist Church with her 16-year-old daughter last year for the weight-loss program.
“I didn’t think what I was doing was sinful,” Cunningham said. “Going to McDonald’s was getting a hot meal.”
Cunningham says she and her daughter cut down on fast-food trips, started drinking water instead of sweet tea, read the Bible and exercised. She’s lost 70 pounds; her daughter Laura Belle has lost 40 pounds.
(Really? You didn’t make a connection between McDonald’s and your weight…? The food being “sinful” is the least of my worries if I eat there.)
Elyse recaps:
So let’s go over that again:
1. Gave up Whoppers
2. Gave up sugary beverages
3. Started drinking more water
4. Read the Bible
5. Started exercising
6. Did it all with a diet buddy for support
I wonder which one of those is going to be #1 on Karen’s list of reasons she lost weight…
Another case in point:
Michelle Stanley, who lost 90 pounds with Bod4God last year and wants to lose 40 more this year, says the message of obedience to God was what worked for her.
She literally combines the physical and the spiritual each day, when she gets up at 4 a.m. to use the elliptical machine and read her Bible.
“You have to put God first,” Stanley said.
Yes, put God first. The elliptical machine is secondary to that, I’m sure.
At least the churches are doing something to help those who are struggling to lose weight. Some of them need it:
… Kenneth Ferraro, a sociology professor at Purdue University, has studied religion and obesity and found that religion is related to the prevalence of obesity. His research in the U.S. has found, for example, that Baptist and fundamentalist Protestants had higher rates of obesity than other Protestants, Catholics, Mormons, Jews and other non-Christians, including Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists.
I wonder where atheists are on the weight continuum.
Probably toward the heavier end.
Those babies contain a lot of fat…
[tags]atheist, atheism[/tags]
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