Today’s culture is very focused on dieting and weight loss. It seems that the way a person loses weight doesn’t matter as much as the end result — weighing less than when one started a certain program or method.
On the other hand, a focus on nutrition is straightforward. MedlinePlus, a service of the National Library of Medicine, defines nutrition as “eating a healthy and balanced diet,” which provides the “energy and nutrients you need to be healthy.” Healthy nutrition includes no blame, shame or programs that could potentially do more harm than good.
“Oftentimes a diet regimen has an agenda and end goal. … Ask yourself, ‘Am I dieting or trying to connect more with my body and relationship with food?’” said Rebecca Taylor, who holds a doctorate in counselor education and supervision and is an assistant professor of counseling who specializes in eating disorders and body image at Colorado Christian University.
“Whenever there is an agenda on restricting the body or decreasing weight, we are normally looking at a diet regimen that most likely will end up making the individual ‘fail’ and honestly blaming themselves, stating things like, ‘I guess I just wasn’t strong enough,’” she continued.
Mindset
Churches haven’t always helped.
In the late 1980s, Gwen Shamblin Lara, called the “pioneer of faith-based weight loss” on her website, developed a program that used “God-given internal hunger signals” to lose weight. She championed filling up with God’s love and not the love of food.
“The Weigh Down Workshop” began as small classes and exploded when Lara later wrote the bestseller “The Weigh Down Diet.” Over time, the focus became weight loss no matter what method. An integral part of the program became shaming those who didn’t lose or who had gained weight.
This mindset invaded churches.
“It’s not a new thing for places of worship to promote particular ways of eating,” said Leslie Schilling in her book “Feed Yourself: Step Away from the Lies of Diet Culture and into Your Divine Design.”
“You can find food rules, body shaming and diet plans wrapped up in an out-of-context Bible verse in almost every congregation in America,” she added. “I used to think of dietary purity as my Christian duty as well. It seemed like a legitimate way to depend on God more and even grow stronger in my faith.”
Schilling later recognized how harmful this attitude was. She saw lives, families and relationships falling apart. She saw church congregations that practiced and promoted weight loss over everything else. She once even saw church members get excited for a friend who was losing weight due to having cancer.
After this realization, Schilling began to see that “dieting to gain worth and offering pretend grace for one another was nothing but lies.”
Taylor said that lately culture has bounced back with Health at Every Size, a public health framework that emphasizes health over weight loss.
“Each individual person and their body is different. Therefore, to look at an individual’s body and assume they are unhealthy and at medical risk would be an uneducated mistake due to the fact that body size alone tells us very little about an individual’s health and medical status,” Taylor said.
Medication
Another concern of losing weight without considering consequences involves weight loss drugs. In 2017, Ozempic was released to help Type 2 diabetics control blood sugar.
A side effect was soon shown to be weight loss due to its main ingredient, semaglutide. As word spread on social media, it began to be prescribed off-label for nondiabetics to shed some extra pounds even though it was never approved for weight loss.
This led to a shortage of Ozempic for those with diabetes who had been successfully using the medicine for blood sugar management.
Shana Nicholson, manager at Baptist Health Diabetes Management Programs, is worried.
“As a certified diabetes care and education specialist, I am concerned about the health of our patients living with diabetes who are unable to receive their prescribed medications, such as Ozempic, due to shortages,” the Feb. 7 article “Risks of Taking Ozempic for Weight Loss” reported.
Baptist Health reported that not only was using Ozempic for weight loss harmful to diabetics who face shortages, but other issues are:
— Drug interactions if there’s no medical supervision.
— Serious side effects, including allergic reactions, low blood sugar, increased thyroid cancer risk, gallstones and swelling of the pancreas.
— Regaining weight after stopping.
— Minor side effects, including nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain and diarrhea.
In addition, doctors caution that the drug hasn’t been studied in broader populations, so there may be other possible side effects that have not yet been documented.
Truth and the ‘ideal body’
It’s important to keep in mind that an “ideal body” is simply a cultural construct.
“We are meant to live in bodies of all shapes, sizes and abilities. Not one human or any color, tongue, size or range of ability is a mistake,” writes Schilling in “Feed Yourself.”
“The experience of being at war with our bodies doesn’t have to be passed down like a family heirloom. There’s a truth you can claim instead — namely, that your body was made just for you by the God of love, no matter what the world says.”
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