Weight-loss Cults

Ramblin' About Shamblin

In the 1990’s when my children were teenagers, more or less, I had the best job ever—I was the Youth Pastor at St. Mary’s Church in Vacaville. I was a full-time employee, so I also assisted the parish with other ministries, like CCD, or liturgy.

I can’t exactly recall what year it was during this time period, but the Pastor of the church, Fr. Ben, asked me to facilitate a Christian weight-loss program called “Weigh Down.” Now, I have never been what people would call “fat,” or whatever, but I have always had this up and down situation with my weight. Except when I was pregnant, I never carried more than about 20 pounds over, anyhoo, I agreed. St. Mary’s Catholic Church sponsored the Christian fundamentalist program: Weigh Down. The Weigh Down Group used my youth room which had sofas and a large tv with a VCR (an ancient streaming technology that required things called “video tapes” and a machine that kind of looked like an X-box console, but much bigger).

To keep sectarian peace in our household, I had converted to Catholicism soon after our fourth child was born. Public schools were (and still are) a mess where we lived at the time, so our older children were already attending Parochial School. As someone who came from a church that were literal bible thumpers, I succumbed, and, among other things, I found the devotion to human authority of the Catholic faithful extremely odd, and not scripturally based, but I also found I could live with it. Then, as my eventual ministry showed, I became Ms.Super-Catholic.

Why is this relevant, today? I couldn’t sleep last night and I found a documentary about the founder of the Weigh Down Weight Loss Program, Gwen Shamblin Lara. I didn’t know anything about her when we followed the Weigh Down program, worked in our scripture based workbooks, AND WE LOST WEIGHT! The program really worked. Before I get into the program, I would like to dig somewhat into Gwen.

To we Catholics who always like to quote the “bible” saying, “It’s somewhere in the bible” when it could have been, for all we knew: in the Constitution, or Poor Richard’s Almanac, or an Erma Bombeck column, the scriptural part of the Weigh Down program solely gave us a jumping off point to discuss our successes and struggles with the program. We met on a weekly basis which also gave us some fellowship opportunity, without the doughnuts.

In the documentary I watched last night, I discovered that Gwen had a Master’s Degree in nutrition and grew up the daughter of a very fundamental Christian surgeon who would take her on his rounds at the hospital with him. She grew the Weigh Down program from her garage into a multi-million dollar cult in Tennessee where she owned $20 million dollars worth of real estate at the time of her accidental death. Gwen Shamblin Lara, her gold digging husband, Joe Lara, and five other cult members were killed in a plane crash on what would have been my son Casey’s 42nd birthday: May 29, 2021. Gwen’s gold digging husband Joe was piloting the plane and it was later learned that his license was fraudulently cleared and the instructor who did so had his own license suspended. As I had buried the memory of following Gwen’s program under layers of so many other experiences, I didn’t even know she had died.

Her cult Remnant Fellowship in Brentwood Tn, reminds me of Scientology. Congregants were closely monitored by the all-male church leadership and corporal punishment for children was encouraged: Two cult members were even prosecuted for the brutal death of their eight-year old son. I viewed recorded calls with Gwen talking about their great “success” with their son, before his death. Sick, sick, shit. Of course, as an ex-Catholic, I know of the institutional child abuse which is far and above what the small Remnant Fellowship committed—but if they could have grown to be the largest Christian denomination, I am sure they could have rivaled the cult of Rome.

Anyway, looking at Gwen’s program after about 20-25 years after I participated, it was actually very simple and effective. I think now I would call it “mindful eating.” Of course, her bullying of cult members as not being sufficiently faithful to the “Word of God” if they carried some extra weight didn’t come through on her tapes (again—old school streaming)—but her program was basically what I follow today: Don’t start eating in the day until you are hungry (intermittent fasting): This gives your digestive system time to do its job and restore itself.

Gwen was also into eating SLOWLY to enjoy your food. Chewing food 25+ times for each bite is a wonderful exercise and, believe it or not, after about 25 times of chewing (of course, it depends on what you eat, you cannot chew oatmeal), you unlock some flavors in some foods you never knew were there. Eating slowly and mindfully also gives your stomach time to signal your brain with the “satiety” signal. If you drive through Mickey-Deaths and wolf down a burger, how does your brain even know you ate anything? If you don’t already do slow eating, TRY IT! (I am always the LAST one at the table).

The small-plate strategy was also one of her suggestions. Is it better to put a small amount of food on a big plate, or fill up a small plate with a lesser amount of food? A little eye-brain trickery, there.

Asking for a to-go container at the same time you order a meal in a restaurant was also one of the key points of Weigh Down. As soon as your meal comes, put half of it in the “doggy bag” because, most restaurants put a couple of day’s worth of calories on one plate. Eat slowly, and stop just before you are full. Since I followed her program, I have rarely (even on holidays) had that horrible feeling of being too full and bloated after a meal. I think most of you know what I am talking about.

As I said, her program worked for us, but we didn’t know she was, or would become, such an objectively terrible person. At the time of her death at 66, she was enormously wealthy, but pretty emaciated and as Jay Leno once said of Nancy Reagan, she looked like a “human Pez dispenser” with her big head, big hair, and twig-like body.

For us scripturally-casual Catholics, I think the program would have worked for our group without the God part, because the plan was solid-mindful eating.

A few years ago, I read a book about the Slow Food diet where a dietician was constantly encouraging one of his clients to stop going through Mickey-Deaths to get a couple of Egg McMuffins to slam them down on the way to work every morning. The client refused the good advice, but the dietician told him to at least park and chew each bite 25+ times. It’s so funny, because when the client did that, he discovered that the food tasted disgusting and it cured him of his daily dip into nutritionally deficient, mindless eating.

Anyway, I don’t know what this has to do with anything, I am just ramblin’ about Shamblin and not telling anyone, how, or what to eat—you do, you, but sometimes some of us are not happy with where we are, right now.

Our culture today is so fast and too often, mindless. It’s no wonder many of us cleave to diet gurus, political pundits, t.v. personalities, religious figures—anything to relieve us of that pesky activity of being forced into actually thinking for ourselves. Gwen had a very lucrative cult, but so many of us engage in cultish behavior, on a daily basis, which enriches big pHARMa, Mickey-Deaths, and other soul-crushing entities.

I prefer to slow down, smell the roses, play with children and animals, enjoy my food, and engage my brain on the regular.

Question everything.

Trust yourself.

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