Does God Want You To Be Thin?

Correction Appended: June 6, 2012

Rick Warren was once a very fat man. It’s not as if he’s skinny now, which as you discover when you meet him is kind of a nice thing. “Have you hugged a pastor today?” he asks as he enters a room. “It’s good for your health.” And it does seem that way, since to share a hug with Warren is to be gathered into a big, benign, bearish embrace — a feeling that makes you hope he never loses another ounce.

But Warren, 58, once weighed 295 lb. — 90 lb. too much for his 6-ft. 3-in. frame — and still needs to drop another 35 lb. to reach a healthy weight. It hasn’t taken him all that long to lose as much as he has; he began getting fit only in the past 18 months, which is an awful lot less time than it took him to get fat. “I’ve only put on 3 lb. a year,” he tells the members of his evangelical Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif. “But I’ve been your pastor for 30 years.”

Nearly everything about Warren is big. Saddleback has a stunning 20,000 weekly attendees across 10 campuses. He is the author of multiple books, including The Purpose Driven Life, the best-selling nonfiction hardback in American history — after the Bible, appropriately — with 32 million copies in print worldwide and editions published in 97 languages. He gave the invocation at the 2009 presidential Inauguration and interviewed candidates Barack Obama and John McCain one on one on national TV in 2008, a gig most news anchors would kill to land.

But in 2010, Warren discovered a problem in his church. It was after a high-volume baptism session, when he and other Saddleback pastors administered the rite to some 800 congregants in under four hours. That’s three per minute, and since Warren prefers to baptize by immersion, he wound up having to dip and lift a whole lot of cumulative weight. “Man, we’re all fat,” he recalls thinking.

And so they were. As the church members later learned, the average weight of Saddleback women was 170 lb., and it was 210 lb. for men — which meant Warren and the others immersed 160,000 lb. of very unhealthy humanity that day. Before the ceremony was even over, he decided to do something about it. The answer, he believed, lay in the Book of Daniel.

One of the 39 books of the Old Testament, Daniel tells the story of four Jewish boys who were taken to the court of the conquering King Nebuchadnezzar to be trained and fed in the royal manner so that they might serve in the King’s palace. The boys, led by Daniel, accepted the King’s teaching but would go nowhere near the King’s table, refusing to defile themselves with the meat and wine he offered them. They chose vegetables and water instead — and grew fitter and finer for their efforts.

Warren’s congregants were moving in precisely the opposite direction, and Americans in general have been doing the same: two-thirds of adults in the U.S. are overweight or obese, as are up to one-third of children. More than 20% of all adolescents have diabetes or prediabetes, up from 9% in 2000. Portion sizes and waistlines are out of control, and the current generation of kids is on track to be the first in American history to be less healthy than their parents.

Warren reckoned that he was in a position to help change all that and on Jan. 15, 2011, launched the Daniel Plan, a sweeping health-and-fitness program for Saddleback members that begins with a commonsense diet of 70% unprocessed fruits and vegetables and 30% lean protein, whole grains and starchy vegetables. The plan includes exercise groups, nutrition training, sports, recipe tips, small support-group meetings, Walk and Worship sessions and more.

Warren and his team expected perhaps 200 people to sign up after the kickoff rally, but 6,000 did, with another 1,200 joining online — a number that has risen to 15,000. The church has lost a collective 260,000 lb. in the past year, and Warren jokes that he’s shooting for the equivalent of a jumbo jet (800,000 lb., for the record, fully fueled and loaded). A man with Warren’s profile attracts other big names, and Drs. Mehmet Oz, Daniel Amen and Mark Hyman — a cardiologist, a neurologist and a nutritionist (and significantly, of Muslim, Christian and Jewish roots) — have volunteered their time to the cause.

You don’t have to be a cynic to observe that diet plans that make and at first support extraordinary claims are not new. But you don’t have to be a person of faith — any faith — to admit that a wellness plan based at least in part on Scripture seems fresher. A robust body of scientific evidence supports a link between faith and health. Attendance at religious services has been shown to add two to three years to life, for example. You may believe there’s something divine in that; you may believe it’s simply the proven ability of any group to improve the welfare of all its members. Either way, you can’t argue with the results.

“The community is the cure,” says Hyman. “The group is the medicine. There are feedback loops, accountability, support.”

Those are all things Warren’s church serves up — along with a very generous helping of evangelical Christianity. The central belief that drives the Daniel Plan is best captured by a T-shirt many of the participants wear that reads, “God created it/ Jesus died for it/ The Holy Spirit lives in it/ Shouldn’t you take care of it?” The it, of course, is the body, and evangelicals teach that it’s not yours at all. Instead, our bodies are gifts from God, and we are expected to return them in the best shape possible. In the same way some religious communities found their way to environmentalism through the idea that we are only stewards of the earth, so too must we remember that we are not the sole owners of our flesh.

“My body is not my own. My body is on loan,” says Jim Black, a physical therapist who joined the program with his wife Melanie. “I have to give it back.”

The Book of Daniel does not actually prescribe a diet to help us look after ourselves. “Nowhere in the Bible does it say, ‘This is what they should eat,'” says C.L. Seow, a Daniel scholar and professor at Princeton Theological Seminary. The critical passage, he explains, has to do with resistance, with a rejection of privilege. “The point is the triumph of God.”

Even the sins of gluttony and vanity — dieting’s opposite poles — have no real role in the Daniel Plan. “That doesn’t reflect my heart,” says Dee Eastman, a Saddleback member and the director of the Daniel Plan. Instead, she explains, it is about freeing people from shame or illness so that they can fulfill God’s plan for them. God does not necessarily want you to be thin, but he very much wants you to be healthy.

All of this works well on the Saddleback campus, but Warren has dreams of taking the plan wide — to a billion people around the world in the next decade, says Hyman. That means either recruiting and converting a great many new members or finding what’s scalable and nondenominational in the program and getting it out to a global population that’s getting fatter, slower and sicker all the time.

Bodies on Loan

It was just 16 months ago that Chloe Chiquita Seals decided to change her life — and it badly needed changing. At 270 lb., she spent most of her time in her house, too self-conscious to leave. “I was a hermit,” she says. “I was afraid to go out, to walk down the street.” Seals didn’t have much, but she did have a friend — Etienne Stephen, a Saddleback member she had known since college. He encouraged her to attend the Daniel Plan kickoff rally, and she signed up for the program straightaway.

More important than simply introducing Seals to the program, Stephen has also guided her through it. Daniel Plan participants are encouraged to form small groups with only five or so members, led by what the church calls a champion. Currently, about 5,000 such groups meet regularly, and they are the true core of the program. Stephen takes his role as Seals’ champion seriously — helping her make food substitutions, teaching her to read supermarket labels, even paying for a gym membership for her.

The plan has worked extraordinarily well for Seals so far: she has lost half her body weight and gone from a size 22 to a size 2. And in the spirit of the pay-it-forward fellowship that the Daniel Plan is designed to foster, she has recruited Carol Hasbun, a friend of four years’ standing who has been in the program for about a month. Seals has helped her shop, taught her to make healthy pizza, gone through her kitchen cabinets and, following a Daniel Plan video, cleaned out all the nasty stuff.

“My goal is to lose 80 lb.,” Hasbun says, “hopefully in a year or two years.” Seals is quick to back her up. “You are going to get there,” she says.

By keeping the menu interesting, the Daniel Plan makes such an ambitious goal easier to reach. Cooking classes and recipe tips are offered on the Saddleback campus and online and include dishes like agave-glazed-salmon tacos in blue-corn tortillas with poblano-and-avocado lime sauce accompanied by napa-cabbage slaw — weighing in at just 370 calories.

It would be easy if the Daniel Plan called on its members to do nothing more than meet, shop and cook, but it’s a decidedly more vigorous regimen than that. On a recent Sunday morning, 60 people had already shown up on the campus for a 9 a.m. boot-camp class, led by Tony Lattimore, a church member and personal trainer. Lattimore’s usual rate is $75 per hour, but his Saddleback classes are free. “We live completely on faith,” says his wife Kimberly.

Nearby, a volleyball game is going on at the community center and restaurant known as the Refinery — recalling the biblical passages that refer to God’s refining power. The building also has a basketball court and Frisbee golf course, and outdoor lights are in the works so members can play at night. An organic garden has been planted, and the harvest is used in the restaurant and in the food pantry that helps feed the needy. Not all the fare in the restaurant is healthy (Warren believes the program should neither be nor feel mandatory), but each selection does bear a green, yellow or red star indicating the degree of caution church members should exercise before choosing it.

Even doctors who don’t agree with the religious element of the plan would find it hard to dispute that the overall regimen is well designed — and that this kind of program is badly needed everywhere. “By the end of this decade, there will be 50 million people per year dying worldwide from chronic, lifestyle-related diseases, compared with 20 million dying from infectious diseases,” says Hyman. “These are things we could be preventing.”

Taking It Wide

If churches can be a solution to the obesity problem, they also, in some ways, helped create it. Amen was a devoutly practicing Christian long before he became involved with the Daniel Plan. He recalls a day in 2010 when he entered the church he regularly attended and found doughnuts for sale and hot dogs and sausages cooking outside while the minister talked about the ice cream festival held the night before. Amen began scrawling notes to himself: “They have no idea they are sending people to heaven early. This has got to change.”

He began praying for guidance, and just two weeks later, Warren called and asked him to participate in the Daniel Plan. “I’m thinking, No way,” Amen says. “God does not usually answer my prayer that fast and in a big way.”

Warren’s idea of keeping the church in the game but using it to fix rather than create problems appealed to Amen, in part because it’s applicable to all faiths. There’s nothing that says a mosque can’t have exercise classes and cooking demonstrations; there’s nothing that says a synagogue can’t have a website and small-group support. Other churches are already clamoring for the Daniel Plan, and a friend of Warren’s who is a rabbi wants to offer the plan in his synagogue.

Tapping the church as an existing root system for health can be used in an even bigger way in the developing world, something that’s central to a newly launched mission Warren calls the PEACE Plan, an acronym for planting churches around the world, equipping leaders, assisting the poor, caring for the sick and educating the next generation. A beta test for the PEACE Plan occurred in 2005, when Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, moved by the message of The Purpose Driven Life, contacted Warren and told him he wanted to create a purpose-driven country.

Saddleback volunteers traveled to Rwanda and saw that while there were just three large hospitals in one province, there were 869 churches, most of which could do double duty as clinics and care stations. Today 4,000 church-affiliated volunteers have been mobilized in Rwanda, providing screening for HIV/AIDS and hypertension and initiating feeding, clean-water, education and adoption programs. Saddleback is focusing on a dozen other cities around the world — including Amman, Johannesburg, Moscow, Tokyo and Mexico City — for the access they provide to local disadvantaged populations. The Daniel Plan might actually have a role in the PEACE Plan too, since even in desperately poor places, cheap, processed Western-style fare has wreaked havoc on health. “Eighty percent of all diabetics are in the developing world,” says Amen. “The commercial used to say, ‘I’d like to buy the world a Coke.’ Well, I guess we did.”

Is It for Everyone?

There’s no guarantee that the Daniel Plan, innovative as it is, will move the health needle over the long term. Diet plans have an extraordinary failure rate for a great many reasons. A daunting mix of habit, genetics and even addictive behavior drive obesity, as does simple metabolism: the earlier in life you become fat, the more you change the way you process food.

And yet there’s no denying the hand-in-glove way that faith and health mix. People who attend services have a lower risk of dying in any one year than people who don’t. Studies have shown that belief in a loving God as opposed to a punishing God is linked to faster recovery postsurgery. People with HIV/AIDS tend to do better when they belong to a religious community. One study even found that church members who give service have better health profiles than those who receive service — confirming that it truly does pay to care for others. The precise mechanism behind these findings — divinity, biology or both — matters less than the fact that the benefits are real.

But the plan could face other obstacles. One of the things that make an evangelical health program so easy to take in nonevangelical communities is Warren’s singular style. There’s a hint of good-natured mischief to him, which nicely leavens the messages he delivers about such profound issues as life, death and afterlife. He takes an almost teenlike pleasure in talking about his Twitter feed and then adds, “You know, if you don’t follow me on Twitter, you’ll go to hell.”

The line gets the intended laugh, but the fact is, hell does remain part of his teachings. “You have friends who don’t know Jesus,” he has told his followers. “You know people who are headed to hell.” That may be a common evangelical belief, but it fits uneasily with the no-judgments ethos of the Daniel Plan.

The plan’s website also makes clear that for all the multicultural character of the program, there is a line that will not be crossed. The Frequently Asked Questions section of the site explains that while doctors of other faiths are part of the plan, they “are helping us as friends,” and the church will never compromise its belief that “Jesus is the only way to Heaven or that the Bible is the 100% completely infallible and perfect Word of God.”

And while the idea that your body is on loan can be a nice motivator if you want to lose weight, it can be just as powerful a tool to regulate — and proscribe — sexual behavior. “You don’t have the right to just share your body with anyone!” says one piece of Daniel Plan material that addresses sexuality. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Warren has earned the wrath of the gay community for his opposition to same-sex marriage, though he has not belabored the issue.

All the same, it would be more than a little disingenuous for outsiders to profess themselves shocked, shocked that an evangelical church believes in heaven, hell and a literal interpretation of the Bible and has a rule or two about human sexuality. You can hardly walk into a vegan restaurant and then get mad when you can’t order a burger.

More important, unlike evangelical teachings as a whole, the Daniel Plan can easily be taken cafeteria-style. Embrace what it has to say about the power of community and the responsibility of caring for the only body you’ll ever have, fold in some of your own religion if you choose, and leave the rest. Hyman, who likes to laugh about how a Jewish doctor from New York wound up partnering with Warren, thinks about this a lot. “Community-based models work,” he says. “I go on The 700 Club, and people ask me why I appear with Pat Robertson. But we all get sick, regardless of religion. We have bodies, we care about our children and about creating a healthier world.”

That’s not a bad goal — and harnessing the power, commitment and organizational skills of the faith-based community is not a bad way to get there. It’s not the only way, but no one — not even Warren — says it has to be. You may or may not believe in heaven, but good health, long life and the fellowship of a community do feel like a little slice of it.

The original version of this story included some errors. Saddleback members describe baptism not as a ‘sacrament’ but as a ‘rite.’ One of several beta tests for the PEACE Plan took place in Rwanda in 2005, not 2008 as originally stated. There are just three hospitals in one Rwandan province, not in the entire country. And there were 859 churches, not 3,000.