Excerpts from Gwen Shamblin's Books
© 1990 - 2006, Gwen Shamblin. All Rights Reserved. This content is used with special permission granted to this website by the author, Gwen Shamblin, and The Weigh Down Workshop). Many thanks are due to Mrs. Shamblin for her generosity.
From The Weigh Down Diet:
The Weigh Down Approach
What does God have to do with this anyway?
With God's help you can learn to stop in the middle of a meal and have no desire to eat the second half if your stomach is satisfied! God did not put chocolate or lasagna or real blue cheese dressing on earth to torture us, but rather for our enjoyment. However, He wants us to learn how to rise above the magnetic pull of the refrigerator so that food does not consume our lives!
The problem and the solution
We have been created with two empty, needing-to-be-fed holes in our body. One is the stomach, and the other is the heart. The stomach is a literal hole in our body which is to be fed with the proper amount of food. As for the heart, I am speaking figuratively of our deep-down feelings. To satisfy these deep-down feelings, needs, or desires of the heart, we may often turn to food and overload our stomach with more than it needs. Trying to feed a hurting, needy heart with food or anything on this earth (alcohol, tobacco, antidepressants, sexual lusts, money, the praise of other people, etc.) is a common error. The person who attempts to feed a longing heart with food will stay on the path to overweight. Those who pursue an overindulgence of alcohol or tobacco or power will also reap the consequences of those pursuits. There is nothing inherently evil about food, alcohol, tobacco, money, credit cards, etc. However, it is wrong to become a slave to any of these things or to let them master you.
The solution for overweight
We have been trying to feed our hurting, longing hearts with physical food. We have also learned to love food. Therefore, the solution is as follows:
- Relearn how to feed the stomach only when it is truly hungry.
- Relearn how to feed or nourish the longing human soul with a relationship with God.
- Relearn how to recognize the different hunger urges and not confuse them.
Am I a failure?
Your major concerns will be: "How can this work for me? Because:
- "I feel a distance between God and me because I thought He made me overweight and, for years, has not answered my prayers to take this weight off."
- "I've tried every diet five times, every diet pill and exercise, and failed miserably, so how can this work?"
What we are really asking is... "Am I a failure, or is God angry at me and sabotaging me?" Well, you are not a failure, it is not genetic, and God is not sabotaging you. He does hope that your slavery to diets and overweight will make you call out to Him. He is in love with you, and He wants you to depend on Him for deliverance so you can see how mighty He is and how important you are to Him.
Why have diets not worked so far? The reason is that you (like me and the rest of the world) have tried using man-made rules (diets) instead of God's rules. God has never asked anyone to eat food off of a list, to count fat exchanges, or to take an appetite suppressant. You have just been applying the wrong medicine to this condition. You were using your willpower and man's rules. God is too smart to let a local weight-loss group or fat gram counting be your Savior and thereby get all the credit. Man-made rules will not work.
Now, welcome to the Weigh Down Workshop, a place that teaches you God's rules for eating and shows you the futility of man-made rules. Welcome to the Weigh Down Workshop, a place that shows you how to use God's strength rather than your willpower! Welcome to the Weigh Down Workshop, a place where thousands of people are now thin after years of trying. In summary: you are not a failure. You have been using man's rules and your willpower, and now you are going to use God's plan for eating and His strength. There is hope, and God will get the credit!
Diets will never work
Diets do not get to the root of the problem. In fact, diets aggravate the problem rather than alleviate it. Diets just boil down to making the food behave. Food companies have spent several decades and millions of dollars to pull out the fat and calories so that the food is righteous! Actually, billions of dollars are spent by the food industry to make us feel needy. Many food companies may not want us to succeed in losing weight, but, rather, would prefer to make us feel dependent on them so we will consume whatever is sold. In fact, the more diets fail, the better off the industry is.
The root of the problem is not the food ingredients, but how much volume is going down the old hatch (our esophagus)! And, indeed, we consumers have wanted the food industry to take the fat out of the Twinkie so that we can simply eat more Twinkies. Changing the food but not changing the volume of what is swallowed will leave us on a roller coaster of weight loss and weight gain. Changing our metabolism or our nervous system by taking pills and hormones is not permanent, because we cannot stay on them because of the side effects. The motivation to be thin is not vanity;it is natural. God has programmed us to want the best for our bodies.
We cannot continue to have the doctor suck out the fat from one part of the body (suction-assisted lipectomies) while we continue to stuff our mouths. We must surrender the root of the problem; that is so much easier to do than diets or surgery. Weigh Down is different from all other diet systems because it is not selling a diet plan, a food, or whatever. It is selling a future, a future to be filled and fulfilled. Hunger is filled, God's love is embraced and enjoyed, and appetites are under control and given to God.
Do you have to be religious to do the program?
For those of you who do not feel particularly religious,do not worry. You have exactly what you need to be able to do this program. You see, each of us has a heart to worship, and we all adore something. That tells us we have the capacity to give our heart to something. The question is: can you transfer your devotion from one thing to another? The answer is: yes!
Giving our hearts over to something is a learned process and can be relearned. For example, some people enjoy sports, but other people seem to worship sports. Some people enjoy material things, but other people seem to worship things. Some people use money, but other people will do anything to get it. Some people use food for fuel to run the body, and some people dream about food. Some of these dreamers have been known to get up in the morning and find the bony remains of fried chicken on their chest! This old relationship with food can be transferred to a relationship with God or to a heart for God. In the past you may have loved the feeling of planning a binge and dreaming over recipes, cookbooks, and magazines that have food plans and pictures of food. You may have looked forward to the feeling of waiting for everyone to go to bed (and they had better not get back up out of bed) so you could prepare, cook, and consume the food without the judgment of anybody.
The good news is that you can relearn how to get that feeling from the Lord. When you learn to get this happy feeling from finding God, you will experience much more fulfillment. Bingeing out on seeking God has no yucky, guilty, depressing side effects. In other words, it is possible to let go of that old way of having fun and replace it with something so much more filling (yet with no calories!). By choosing this new path you will lose weight and never regain the weight.
I know some of you are reading in disbelief. I can hear you thinking, "You're telling me that if I am not hungry and want to eat a pan of brownies, that I should go to the Bible and read it instead!?" This concept is not "pie in the sky." Keep reading. I dare you to let me prove this to you.
Thousands of people have taken the Weigh Down Workshop seminar or have read this book. They no longer get this "binge high" from food, but from focusing completely on our true Heavenly Father and trying to please Him. Jesus said, "My food is to do the will of Him who sent me and to finish His work" (John 4:34). Some people have experienced a "high" when they became involved in exercise. While the "high" is not wrong, it is not complete. And usually, obsessive, tedious exercise to become thin eventually wears thin if the exercise is self-focused rather than God-focused. Exercise, like food, must also be put in its place and not worshiped, but enjoyed. The transfer to a heavenly focus from a focus on food, exercise, or anything else is much more delightful and fulfilling. It has so many rewards that you will never want to return to giving your heart to anything else!
How do you lose weight?
Once you stop going to food for sensual indulgence, escape, spacing out, a tranquilizing effect, comfort, and so on, and start swallowing regular foods only when your stomach growls, you will swallow or eat just one-half to one-third of what you used to swallow. The desire eating goes away. That means you will lose weight! You will be able to do this; it happens naturally. You will not have to measure the food or count the grams;your stomach will guide you. The volume of food decreases as you focus on hunger and fullness. Thousands of ex-dieters are doing this within twenty-four hours of starting Weigh Down.
The typical weight-loss program suggests losing weight through diet and exercise. We suggest that if you lose the passion for food, the result will be that you eat less food and therefore lose weight permanently. The typical 1950s/1990s approach tried to fix the body or the food but did not address the passion. The Weigh Down Workshop approach fixes the heart first, and the body follows.
We are not running against the current national medical suggestion that the fat content needs to be reduced; rather, we just propose another means to accomplish this goal. The Weigh Down Workshop will show you how God can bring us to peace with food, never to return to the nightmare of endless overweight, yo-yo dieting and "have-to" exercise regimens, but rather to a calm, nonmagnetized approach to regular foods with the ability to approach foods such as rich entrees and desserts without losing control. Exercise need no longer be connected to burning calories; instead it can be an enjoyable activity. You will be free!
What to expect on the journey
You are about to embark on a unique program of weight reduction. Instead of emphasizing the caloric content of food, our focus will be on your natural, internal hunger control; more importantly, our focus will be trained to turn toward the will of God and away from a focus on foods.
We liken the journey you are about to take, from the slavery of diet programs (fat gram and calorie counting) and overweight to being a normal eater, to the journey the children of Israel took from the slavery of Egypt, through the Desert of Testing, and finally to the Promised Land. The Biblical book of Exodus in the Old Testament is the age-old story of the exodus of God,s children from Egyptian bondage. Do you remember the story of how God parted the Red Sea? God sent Moses to lead the Israelites and to let them know that He was delivering them from bondage. God sent plagues upon the Egyptians to make Pharaoh let His people go. After ten horrible plagues, Pharaoh let the Israelites pack their bags and go. Pharaoh changed his mind and tried to recapture the Israelites, but God parted the Red Sea with a mighty east wind. Once the Israelites were safely on the other side, Pharaoh,s mightiest warriors and finest chariots and horses were buried by the sea as God put the water back into its place. The Israelites had witnessed God,s mighty deliverance of them from the clutching hands of Pharaoh.
But before God could let His children inherit the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey, He took them on a journey through the Desert of Testing. Deuteronomy 8:2,3 says, "Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the desert these forty years, to humble you and to test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep his commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord."
Just like the Israelites, you will experience a deliverance from dieting and the bondage of food and diet programs that treat you like children. This book will explain to you how thousands have handled the Desert of Testing. Finally, you will be shown how to follow in the footsteps of God's children who entered the Promised Land of milk and honey. "So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed" (John 8:36). The Promised Land is a place out of the hot Desert of Testing, a place where you no longer feel tempted to eat when your stomach is not hungry.
No matter what your age, no matter what your size, no matter what your means of control, whether it be dieting, exercising to keep the weight off, bulimia (vomiting the food to maintain control), anorexia (extreme bodily deprivation for means of control), or just flat giving up self-control, this program is for you. As recorded in the Bible, God came to rescue His people, the Israelites, from slavery. He got the old and the young, the bricklayers and the basket weavers, the weary and the brokenhearted. God came, and He rescued them all.
You are about to read how thousands have turned toward God and watched Him rescue them from the love of food and, therefore, the unwanted pounds. There is hope for you, for it is by no coincidence that you picked up this book. You will ultimately find that God has everything to do with weight control!
From Rise Above:
The Struggler
Please do not feel bad if you have struggled. We live in a world that bombards us with a massive amount of information, and it is easy to get sidetracked. You may have lost one hundred pounds and gained some, or even all, of it back. You may have joined a Weigh Down seminar and never quite got the hang of it. You may have lost your weight but are still battling temptations frequently. Don't worry about all of that. I want you to know that God has put in my heart a love for each of you, and I truly wish I could give every one of you a hug and a sweet word of encouragement.
You are truly a precious eternal creation who has been given a world of choices. I understand that there is much confusion, but do not give up. I'm telling you, you can't give up now. You're going to make it. The victory is going to be sweet and worth the searching and the battles. God is the God of all comfort, and we are weary sojourners. If you are needing more comfort right now, please be sure to refer to chapter 9, Save Your Heart for Me. Remember that your weight problem has caused you to cry out to God, and it is bringing you closer to God. You will eventually appreciate the thing that has caused you so much pain, for it will bring you into a deep and permanent relationship with the God of the universe.
Weigh Down has been available in churches since 1992 and is becoming very well known. As a result, there have been numerous copycats and many tempting diet plans to run to when the going gets tough. I know that eating less food is going to be the most difficult battle that some of you will ever face in your lifetime. You were brought up to clean your plate and to worship and focus wholeheartedly on food. This chapter is going to discuss many of the tempting diet plans and arguments against The Weigh Down Workshop. I hope you will see more clearly the logic and the reason for eating God's way.
It Is Not Wrong to Defend the Truth
There will always be Satan-inspired differences, even by people who claim to be followers of Christ. God allows for false teachers so that we will be prompted to dig and seek for truth. He doesn't just hand truth to us on a silver platter. Divisions and differences are going to happen when two forces are out there: good and evil. But following a false teacher is wrong, and we will be responsible and accountable to God for supporting wrong teachers and false teachings. Jesus said there will be five in a household, three against two and two against three (Luke 12:52). He also said that He did not come to bring peace, but a sword (Matt. 10:34). Hebrews 4:12:13 says, For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account.
There is nothing wrong with arguments. God allows for debates. The Apostle Paul debated the Jewish Sanhedrin court and the Pharisees, who were the religious leaders of the day (Acts 22:30 - 23:10). Jesus was constantly debating and reasoning with the Pharisees. Jesus even ran money-grubbers out of the temple court areas (Matt. 21:12). God Himself says in Scripture: Come now, let us reason together (Isa. 1:18a). So come along with me and let's reason together using God's Word, so that you can be assured that you are following God's truth, not Gwen's or anyone else's.
Diets, Raw Food Plans, and Biological Feedback
New programs that have been popping up over the last few years are agreeing with bits and pieces of Weigh Down, but they are not endorsing the major concepts. In other words, they may agree with the hunger and fullness concept, but then they tell you that you can eat only certain foods. Then there are those programs that suggest it is too hard to find hunger and fullness; they don't even know what hunger and fullness are. They make suggestions that we are to eat only raw foods or uncooked foods and, on top of that, claim to back up the suggestion with Scripture. There are others that insist they know exactly what the human should consume. They imply that the body does not have a biological feedback mechanism, and that, indeed, you would be sick if you ate what your body craved.
Projection Is Common, but Wrong
You've got to keep in mind that when you have struggled or failed with The Weigh Down Workshop, the hardest thing in the world to do is to admit that you have not eaten less food. The human was made with a strong self-preservation instinct, and it will rarely point a finger at itself first. Keep in mind that Cain killed his own brother (Gen. 4:8) because (1) Cain felt that Abel made him look bad, and (2) if Cain could put down or get rid of the source of truth, it would allow him to do whatever he wanted to do; or so he thought. Poor reasoning. Cain would have been better off to let Abel live and just continually try to imitate Abel's behavior until he got it right. God is patient with that attitude only up to a point. But if you look at history, mankind has always killed off and tried to quiet the prophets who were asking them, rather than the environment around them, to change.
God has blessed The Weigh Down Workshop, and many people have been through the program. And some have not lost all their weight. But if you stumble, be very careful that you do not try to lay blame on the people around you or on the situation. And be careful that you do not make the mistake of grabbing hold of a program that wants the food to change. I know how hard it is to change your own heart. If I hadn't gone through it myself, how could I have written this book? It can be very hard, and there are times when I would rather have died first. But I promise you that good health, longevity, and a healthy spiritual relationship come from focusing on reading the labels on your own heart, studying the content of your heart, stirring up a new recipe in your heart, and finally, boiling off the self-indulgence in your own heart by obeying God's Word (1 Peter 1:22).
Why Do We Love Diets?
Why do we want to cling to having food rules? Well, for one thing, we want to stay as close to our idol as we can. Lust is a fleshly feeling that we want to have, and yet it is a counterfeit feeling that leaves us empty and wanting more. We may not get to eat everything we like on these diets, but at least the diet allows us to dream about it. But if you follow a misguided teacher who discusses foods, asks you to read the labels and examine the foods, endorses special preparations, and gives you a new food rule to adhere to every week, then that misguided leader is encouraging you to lust after your idol instead of turning you away from it.
I have warned you from the beginning. I have pleaded with you to stop dieting and to stop these special foods programs because if you are lusting after food all day long, you cannot stop overeating. You will never lose the weight. God's rule is to stop being greedy. There is no way to stop the lust if you are told to focus on and prepare certain special categories of foods. The only way to stop lusting is to not think about food until you are hungry and then get what you are craving. That is moderation and appropriate enjoyment of foods. Not too little and not too much.
What if your problem was pornography and you joined a program that told you not to indulge in these graphic movies anymore? Imagine if the method (or program) gave everyone pictures of people half-dressed (the equivalent of our low-calorie foods). They would then meet in support groups to share the new, half-dressed pictures. The group could even exchange these new, halfway cleaned-up pictures with each other. With this focus, who would be set free from lusting and desiring for more? Remember what I said earlier about the alcoholic. What if a support group leader suggested that every alcoholic in the support group just drink low-alcohol beverages, share favorite low-alcohol recipes, sample each other's concoctions, look at pictures of mixed drinks, examine all the ingredients in each beverage, and talk about alcohol in every meeting? Do you think that that person would ever be free from the lust for alcohol? The answer is, Of course not.
It is amazing, but many of us might prefer to be with, lust over, and talk about food rather than the Creator of food. But when we realize this and face this truth, then we can escape. We can get it straight. Please escape. Do not focus on foods or their contents. Do not worry about the content of the food; instead, worry about your eternal heart, and examine your motives for wanting to diet, read food rules, follow Jewish customs, resurrect the food laws for Adam and Eve (raw foods), or pick Noah's food rules. Please do not pick and choose from Old Testament food rules that have been set down by Jesus (Mark 7) and the apostles (Acts 15). Do you know more than God's great men who wrote the New Testament Scriptures?