How Diet Culture Hijacked Religion
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Diet culture is good at one thing: finding places people go to belong, and nesting inside them. Churches, sports teams, wellness communities, families. It shows up with a meal plan and a very specific idea of what being good and worthy looks like. This episode is about what happens when the places we go to find belonging become the places that try to make us smaller.
Zoë, Kylee, and guest Leslie Schilling, RDN — Kylee's mentor and author of Feed Yourself — trace how American evangelical Christianity became one of diet culture's most effective delivery systems. This isn't a critique of faith. Leslie is a practicing Christian. It's a reckoning with how theological concepts get stripped of context and weaponized: gluttony flattened from a "heart posture" about greed into a moral judgment about body size; "your body is a temple" deployed to sell weight loss programs to children; Daniel's protest against idolatry repackaged by Rick Warren into a church-wide weigh-in.
In this episode: the sixth-century origins of gluttony as a deadly sin and what Aquinas actually wrote versus what got passed down; R. Marie Griffith's scholarship on "born again bodies" and the Puritan roots of bodily discipline as proof of spiritual character; the Weigh Down Workshop and Gwen Shamblin's program that spread through 30,000 churches; a 2022 study showing that people who used religious fasting simultaneously as a weight control method showed significantly higher rates of every measurable disordered eating behavior; and what research on 13,000 churchgoers actually shows about religion, community, and health.
The body is already the temple. The Holy Spirit didn't say it needed a renovation.
References
Bullew, A., & Best, L. (2022). Religious eating practices and disordered eating behaviors: A dual-purpose framework. Journal of Religion and Health.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10943-022-01504-4
Griffith, R. M. (2004). Born again bodies: Flesh and spirit in American Christianity. University of California Press.
Moffat-Carney, J. (2018). Daniel didn't enter the Christian canon for weight loss purposes: A feminist critique of Christian diet culture. Theology & Sexuality, 24(1), 18–34.
Schilling, L. (2023). Feed yourself: Step away from the diet culture buffet and into your God-given freedom. Worthy Books.
Warren, R. (2013). The Daniel plan: 40 days to a healthier life. Zondervan.