LASTING WEIGHT LOSS MAY DEPEND ON FILLING YOURSELF UP WITH GOOD THINGS

March 2 2007: There has been much debate recently over the ethics of various Christian groups who have been making weight loss and weight control the focus of their evangelistic missions. These various bodies-for-Christ movements claim with varying degrees of moral dogmatism that slimness is next to Godliness and that obesity is a sin. Many commentators are simply condemning such messages as just the latest absurdity to inhabit that crossover area between established religion and surreal consumerism.

But perhaps the issue deserves a much closer look, if not from a personal belief standpoint then perhaps with regard to the psychology of natural, lasting and painless weight loss. Something will always strike you if you visit a mainstream place of prayer - and it doesn't have to be a Christian house of worship; it can also be from amongst the World's rich heritage of other great monotheistic religions.

And for those of us obsessing about our weight, or caught up in long-term and futile dieting cycles, this differentiating detail is very, very obvious indeed. The rate of overweight amongst these congregations is often way below the societal average. These are congregations who buy in generally to the messages of love and respect at the core of their belief systems.

Moderation and temperance also feature on the menu but these are by no means the main event, as is the case for the specific dieting-for-Jesus sub-cults, which make great play of weight control advice. If one seeks out other, modernist, congregations of non-religious but like-minded believers, then the pattern repeats. It is most obvious at entrepreneurial conventions. These are not closed-attendance events for the members of senior professional associations, where the attendees have frequently grown plump on the back of long-term monopolistic fees.

No, these are places where self-starters gather from all corners, ravenous to lap up the motivational cream from their success story idols and so nourish their own precious start-up and expansion plans. What all of these individuals share, both sacred and secular, is a burning passion. Food is removed to a secondary, or indeed, an even lesser role in their lives. Life is not measured by feeding and food fretting but rather in terms of a personal morality of creating, doing and achieving. And this is where dieting will fail its own deluded believers every time.

Once the latest artificial creed of what is right or wrong to eat comes to an end, as it always must, what is left to fill the sudden void within? Nothing except the cravings of old which rapidly tumble back into full and riotous flow, perpetuating the feast-famine cycle of weight un-control.

The lesson for today is that Jesus may well fill you with good things but there are many other ways forward which also leave no room any longer for dieting nonsense, food worries or other such junk. Don't diet, do it – and do it with passion, relevance and meaning and draw your happier sustenance from this instead. Solid and satisfying life passions fill people up with lasting meaning and may hold a key to natural and sustaining weight loss and weight control.

Living one's life completely abandoned to the vagaries of mass consumerism does not have to be seen as immoral but it most certainly must be viewed as bad planning.