Gwen Shamblin featured in Lifetime Health

Can faith help you shed pounds?
Believers say Christian diet plan works

You pray to be thin.
Gwen Shamblin says just do it. Literally, get down on your knees and pray to God, and your faith will help you to become thin.
Shamblin, the … founder of the Weigh Down Workshop Inc., based in Franklin, Tenn., will tell the masses on an upcoming “20/20” program that it is spiritual hunger – not biology, psychology or anything in between – that drives us to the refrigerator in our late-night sugar donut raids. She’s already told that to the crew on “The View,” ABC’s gal gabfest countless other journalists, and more than 500,000 readers who’ve snapped up her inspirational diet tome, “The Weigh Down Diet” (Doubleday), since it was published last March.

“We are teaching obedience,” says Shamblin, a nutritionist, who officially launched the program in churches in 1992, but ran ad-hoc support groups in malls and private homes since 1986…

Can the program work if you’re not a Christian?

“Someone can be of another religion and apply the ideas of hunger and fullness,” says Shamblin. “But you need to fill that emptiness with something that loves you back. Food can’t love you back. The only true love you can find is God.”

Shamblin says the program teaches that overeating is like praying to a false god known as food. What you must do, she says, is transfer that love of food to love of God. She also believes it is possible to lose weight without following dietary rules (Shamblin eats French fries, blue cheese dressing and steak) because, she maintains, it is more important to change who you are and not what you eat.

The reason traditional diets don’t work? Shamblin says it’s because they don’t identify the cause of overeating. Instead, they lead to a preoccupation with food.