Losing weight at church
It’s hard not to feel a bit envious. Saddleback Church recently launched the Daniel Plan, a church-based diet regimen that includes small group accountability sessions, expert opinion, recipes and exercise classes before Sunday services. The program appears to be working: so far, some 15,000 participants have lost a collective 260,000 pounds. What can mainline churches learn from the Daniel Plan’s success?
These days, it’s common for mainstream culture to coopt Christian rituals and symbols. Christmas is a shopping season; apocalypse is a blockbusting movie moneymaker; Jesus appears on Saturday Night Live to chide Tim Tebow’s embarrassing public displays of piety. The Daniel Plan inverts this fomula: Saddleback has sidled into the $60 billion weight-loss market with ease and influence.
The Daniel Plan recognizes that everyone knows how to lose weight—eat better and exercise more—but few do this on their own. People need a community—and as public spaces decline and socializing moves online, church is one of the last bastions of honest-to-God community left. A church-based program exists within an accountability and meaning-making system that can transform lives (an insight Alcoholics Anonymous came to decades ago).
