4 lies about weight loss every Christian needs to know

It’s time to shine a light into this darkness and expose the 4 lies about weight loss every Christian needs to know and the truth to set you free.

Diet culture is a $7 billion dollar industry in this country. It sells you exercise programs, diet books, pills, products, and even surgery. So there are 7 billion reasons to keep you believing the lies.

It’s time to shine a light into this darkness and expose the 4 lies of diet culture you believe and the truth to set you free.

These diet culture lies have become so pervasive you’ve probably never even noticed them.

Many of us think these things are actually fact because we’ve heard them our entire lives, seen them in media, discussed them with the people around us, and maybe even heard them from the health care system. 

It’s time to call out these diet myths and start de-bunking them with Truth. That’s right, Truth with a capital T.

Even more important than the increasing body of scientific research stacking up against diets (proving they don’t work and they actually harm us) is the power of God’s word. 

I want you to see these diet culture lies you’ve believed (and probably still believe) so you can begin to examine them in light of God’s Truth.

If you’ve ever believed any of these lies or said anything like this to yourself before, I want you to put on your critical thinking hat and get  ready to be challenged…

“I need to lose weight to be healthier”

“Oh, I can’t eat this dessert, I’ve been so bad today.”

“If I could just fit back into those skinny jeans, then I’ll be happy”

“I care about my health so I don’t eat sugar or processed foods. Anybody who eats junk food doesn’t care about their health.”

You’re not alone, sister! I think I have thought (or even said out loud!) each one of these diet culture lies.

What is Diet Culture?

What exactly is diet culture? Christy Harrison, author of Anti Diet and host of the Food Psych podcast, defines diet culture as a system of beliefs that:

• Worships thinness and links it to health and moral virtue
• Promotes weight loss as a means of attaining higher status (as a means of obtaining worthiness)
• Demonizes certain ways of eating while elevating others
• Oppresses people who don’t match up with its supposed picture of “health”

I love this definition, it is so comprehensive and it really helped me to start to understand how deep diet culture runs in this country and how deep it worked its way into my psyche. 

Personally, I like to think of diet culture as individual lies that I believe, because when you take it one lie at a time, it’s a lot easier to dismantle the lies with the truth.

What does this mean for Christians?

So what does diet culture mean for us as Christians? Let’s break it down in terms of your identity – our identity if you subscribe to diet culture vs. your identity in Christ.

So, if you’re subscribing to the diet culture system of beliefs:

• You believe that you’re irreparably broken because you don’t look like the impossibly thin ideal. 
• You feel compelled to spend a massive amount of time, money, effort and energy on spending on your body because that’s how you can earn health, virtue and worthiness. 
• You’re forced to be all consumed and hyper-vigilant about all your eating choices, because your eating choices determine whether you’re a “good” or “bad” person. 

What all of this does is distract us from our purpose and our power!

{Related Article: Don’t Let Dieting Distract You From Your True Purpose}

For many of us, myself included, following the diet culture system of beliefs becomes idolatry. 

{Related Article: Tear Down the High Places}

As my friend Char-Lee Cassel put it:

The enemy of our souls is using diet culture to keep women running on treadmills and not getting anywhere trying to shrink their body, so they’re not answering the call that God has on their lives. So that they’re not making a difference for the kingdom because they’re so distracted with trying to shrink their bodies, trying to take up less space.

Char-Lee Cassel, co-host of Intuitive Eating for Christian Women

As Christians, we need to recognize the impact of participating in diet culture and see it for what it really is. Diet culture is spiritual warfare!

{Related Article: Diet Culture: Designed by the Devil}

4 lies about weight loss diet culture wants you to believe

Let’s start to unpack the 4 lies about weight loss every Christian needs to know.

1. LIE: Thin = Healthy
2. LIE: Thin = Happy
3. LIE: Food is either “good” or “bad”
4. LIE: Health is a moral obligation

LIE #1: Thin = Healthy

There is a widely held assumption that we need to lose weight to be healthy. Part of this assumption is yet another assumption that purposeful weight loss is even possible in the first place! 

There’s this huge assumption that if someone is determined enough, has strong enough willpower, and works hard enough, they can lose weight and keep it off. 

This assumption makes you think that you’re the one failing when it doesn’t work. But you’re not failing, the diet is. It is designed to fail and to keep you on that treadmill.

Research shows people that intentionally lose weight gain it back. 95-97% of people don’t keep weight off long term. Our biology is not set up to not allow us to lose weight intentionally like that. (This is why I say we were MADE to follow Jesus not diets)

Those statistics might seem shocking, maybe you’ve never heard them before. Diet Culture certainly doesn’t want you to know that 95-97% of people can’t keep the weight off after dieting. 

But if you’ve ever been on a diet, you probably already know this is true from your own personal experience. Nearly all of us have been there. While you might be able to lose a little weight in the short term, you eventually gain it back (and then some). 

Diet Culture is selling you weight loss as the only way to get healthy. But Health At Every Size teaches us that health is a result of our habits, not a result of our body size or shape. Said another way: Health is a behavior, not a number.

{Related Article: Health At Every Size & Faith}

Health markers (like blood sugar, blood pressure, even things as simple as your energy level and how well you’re sleeping and how your body FEELS) get better with just taking on healthy habits, like moving our bodies a little bit more, accepting ourselves, eating intuitively. 

So, when we look at the research, we actually see that:

1. You can’t lose weight and keep it off – 95-97% of people can’t do that.
2. You don’t need to lose weight to be healthy. 

Diet culture wants you to focus on weight as your sole measure of health, but true health is so much more than just your weight. 

When we reject this diet culture LIE of thin equals healthy, we can reject this false weight-focused version of health and begin to explore TRUE health for mind, body and soul.

LIE #2: Thin = Happy

Diet culture is fatphobic. It teaches us that being fat or being in a larger body is the worst possible thing. 

So if you are fat or in a larger body you are stigmatized, embarrassed and oppressed by the culture you live in (maybe even oppressed by the church you go to!). If you’re in a smaller body or have a socially acceptable amount of fat on your body, you live your life in fear of becoming fat. 

This is another example of how diet culture is spiritual warfare, it’s all rooted in fear.

Diet culture has us conditioned to avoid fat and run towards thin. It sells us a diet program because we’re going to be happy after we diet (or at least we won’t be as afraid of fat). 

Diet culture sets us up for a life of conditional happiness, that can only be achieved after we lose those last 10 pounds, after we can fit back into our skinny jeans, after we lose the baby weight… THEN we will finally be happy. 

This core lie teaches us to believe we aren’t good enough as we are and we have to change our bodies to become “good enough” and measure up to the unrealistic thin ideal celebrated by diet culture. 

The lie that thin equals happy falsely ties our happiness, worthiness and value to our physical appearance. But this does not line up with our identity in Christ.

LIE #3: Food is either “good” or “bad”

Diet culture keeps us in a judgment and shame cycle with food by labeling it as “good” or “bad” and, by extension, the people who eat it as “good” or “bad”.

These food labels are manufactured by diet culture and simply not true. All food fits in biblical healthy eating. It’s all morally equal. 

You are not a better person because you are eating a salad and you are not a worse person because you’re eating a bag of chips.

The truth is you don’t have to eat a certain way to be healthy. Jesus sets us free from this type of thinking about food in Mark 7:18-19 when he declared all food clean saying, “don’t you see that nothing that enters a person from the outside can defile them? For it doesn’t go into their heart but into their stomach, and then out of the body.”

Diet culture promotes such judgement of ourselves, our choices and of other people choices. It’s such a great example of how the enemy uses diet culture to keep us focused on the things we don’t need to be focused on (like food labels!)

LIE #4: Health is a moral obligation

Diet culture ties your righteousness and worth to your pursuit of this worldly and narrow definition of “health” (aka dieting to lose weight). 

Diet culture tells you being healthy (their way) is the “right thing to do” and it is a moral obligation. Diet culture sells you the idea that “good” people are healthy and people who are not trying to be healthy are lazy and “bad.”

This is just the enemy’s way of broadening his net to catch not just the people who want to look good but also the people who want to do the right thing.

Fight the LIES of diet culture with God’s TRUTH

Diet culture is full of lies, deception and distraction. As Christians, we can see it’s worldly wisdom, it’s not serving us, and it’s not truth. 

Diet culture is this system of beliefs that the enemy has created to keep us believing these lies and running on treadmills, both literally and figuratively, and it’s time to fight back with truth.

The truth of your identity in Christ

You don’t have to subscribe to that identity of the woman stuck on the diet culture treadmill. You have an identity in Christ! 

• You don’t have to earn love. God gives it freely. That’s grace!
• You are inherently worthy as a child of God, so you don’t need to earn your worthiness or your righteousness.
• You’re not trying to become good enough, God says you already are.

If you’ve always hustled for worthiness with dieting and trying to improve your appearance, it can be challenging to let go of the hustle – as tired as you are – because it’s what you’ve done for so long. To let go you have to learn to see yourself in a totally new way – the way God sees you!

To fight the lies of diet culture, we have to remember WHO we are and WHOSE we are. 

The truth of your purpose in Christ

You are made for so much more than this struggle with dieting, weight and worth. The truth is you don’t have to serve diet culture, that is not your purpose. God has a purpose and plan for your life.

Let’s cling to our true purpose and keep an eternal perspective.

• We are in this world, but we are not of this world
• We are serving the one true God and living for life eternal with Him

{Related Article: Don’t Let Dieting Distract You From Your True Purpose}

Diets are designed by the enemy. It’s time to call out this spiritual warfare for what it is.

As Christians, we have to recognize and reject the lies of diet culture that offer us the false hope of salvation by weight loss and try to steal our lives with dieting. Let’s reject those lies and evict them from our lives for good!

Pray with me:

Heavenly Father,

Open our eyes to see the places in our hearts, minds and lives where these LIES of the enemy have taken root. Help us to weed out each lie and plant Your truth in its place. Lord, we want to stand on our identity in Christ and walk out our true purpose. Help us each day to fix our eyes on the cross and not the scale.

In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.