The Way of The Weigh Down

Gwen Shamblin Lara and her husband founded the Remnant Fellowship Church in 1999, which promotes the Weigh Down Diet. However, the church's practices are questionable. Lara encourages extreme fasting and unhealthy habits, disguising them as religious practices. Former members have reported harmful treatment and control within the church. The diet promotes eating disorders rather than addressing them. Lara's background as a registered dietitian makes her behavior even more concerning. The church has gained popularity but is seen by many as a cult. The environmental impact of the diet is debated, but the negative effects on individuals and society are evident. The church has been involved in scandals and crimes, including child abuse. There are still many secrets to be uncovered. In 1999, Gwen Shamblin Lara and her husband Joe Lara created the Remnant Fellowship Church which is an easy 20 minutes from Belmont University. Today, the church has grown to have over 1,500 members who follow the church's teachings. Lara created the Weigh Down Diet with the intention of creating a faith-based approach to overcoming obesity and eating disorders, according to Religionite. But looking deeper into Lara's diet and the execution at the church, it's as religiously driven as she says. I'm Lauren. I'm Ethan. I'm Lily. And I'm Monomi. And this is The Weigh of the Weigh Down. Gwen Shamblin Lara and the rest of the church's leaders have disguised their harmful practices as a Christian church that values being subservient to Christ. While Lara is preaching obedience to God and to your parents, she is truly condoning acts of violence against children behind the scenes. As truth becomes uncovered regarding the nature of the Remnant Fellowship, we have learned more and more troubling things regarding the values of its leaders. Like Lauren just mentioned, Lara created the Weigh Down Diet that encourages members to starve themselves in God's name and pray to him in order to overcome hunger. By making this a religious practice at the Remnant Fellowship, she is making a mockery of the religious practices of other religions. Lent and fasting are a religious kind of sacrifice to test one's self-discipline to represent Jesus' sacrifice when he prayed for 40 days in the desert before fasting and dying on the cross. Lara's diet, on the other hand, seems to be more directed to the satisfaction of physical appearance and not the commitment or sacrifice of God. And, while Lara might not be portraying it this way, similar patterns of fasting and specific diets are important to many different religions and cultures. So many groups of people feel and act differently with food, such as Muslims avoiding pork and only eating halal foods, Jews eating only kosher-approved foods, and even people simply choosing to be vegan or vegetarian for many different reasons, whether it be health-related or for environmentally conscientious reasons, like to reduce their carbon footprint. Diets and different avoidances of food for moral and ethical reasons are moderated in some forms to still be safe and healthy for those who partake. Exactly, but instead of fixing obesity and eating disorders through Christ, as she claims, it seems like Lara is just presenting her church with unhealthy habits and starvation. Didn't she explain her message as fulfilling hunger for God and saying this is holiness? Well, yeah, but not only that. She would suggest people not only in her church, but through her book as well, not to eat until they were so hungry that their stomach growled. And even then, only eat enough to stop your growling stomach and turn to prayer at all other times of number. And it honestly seems like this was Lara's way of getting that power in her church in multiple ways. So not only was she the pastor with power and a well-known family to back her up, but she also felt as if she knew what was best for all of the members within the church, and she made them believe that too. Past members attest to this, saying she acted as if she was of a higher power or that she had some special right over all of their lives. I heard from the HBO documentary that many of her own church members called her Gwen Almighty and even believed she would decide if they went to heaven or not, and that their weight was removed by God himself. That documentary also compared the church members, but specifically the women, to the Stetford Life, which is a novel that basically talks about the women of the town called Stetford being turned into robot copies of one another. I think besides the obvious statement of many documentaries and fiction accounts, there's a major issue with the Weigh Down's diet regimen that promotes the issue of eating disorders rather than fixing them. Going without food for these long periods of time can be extremely harmful to your body, and especially if you're doing it because someone told you it'll bring you closer to God, when that is supposed to be a place of love and support. Depriving your body from the food it needs also deprives it from vitamins and minerals you may only be able to receive through those foods. Nutrient deprivation can lead to very serious cases of diabetes, hair loss, muscle pain, and even risk the development of chronic illnesses. It's a serious thing, and it can be very well sparked by this kind of diet. And not to mention, Laura was a registered dietitian and should know the health risks of these bad habits. In Laura's church alone, members have claimed to lose a total of 30,000 pounds as a whole, and that doesn't even include those people outside of her church that have chosen this diet as well. And many people outside of her own church live by this diet. Since its beginning in 1986, it's become extremely popular in different churches around the country as a way to become healthier through Christ and spirit and beat the standard of obesity, which is defined by the person or church's pain, by the way. So it really does seem like this diet is more promoting the issue of eating disorders instead of improving the health of the people. And they're using the safety and comfort of religion to cover it up. Yeah, that's exactly it. As many former members of state media continue to tell people when the spooky name Gwen Laura is mentioned, this whole situation was more like a cult than a church. Hey, hey, hey. Maybe it's not all that bad. Let's analyze this from an environmental perspective. Think of all the plastic and paper packaging waste that is saved from the landfills. Think of the energy transfer between trophic levels, all the 502 steps, and all the water and grain and corn that won't be used to sustain the cows. If adopted on a grand scale, deforestation for agricultural purposes could be dramatically reduced. And the methane reduction from less cows. So you're saying if you care about the future of our planet, it's a good idea to join this cult? Okay, okay, maybe not that exactly, but I do see your point. Vegans and vegetarians really do change their diet for environmental reasons and to try to help the world in some way. But that's also a better reason than Laura's. Your diet is a great way to help with your day-to-day environmental impact, but Laura's way down might not be the right way to do so. Yeah, I completely agree with what you're saying. Food waste comes in different forms, but the most common is preventable waste, meaning that food wasted was perfectly fine and edible, but the consumers chose to throw it out instead. The Remnant Fellowship is known for their big events and weddings hosted for the members of the church, but that makes me wonder if they're practicing the diet at those events too, and if they may be neglecting their food sources. Also, it's important to not forget the negative ways that this radical group has impacted the social side of the environment. A lot of the members have been involved in scandals and even major crimes. For example, one of the couples that attended this church went to prison for murdering their child because of the beliefs that this church has about discipline. It's actually insane. A&D made a whole article about it, saying that when the church was investigated, they found out that several of the members used three-foot-long hot glue sticks as weapons to whip younger church members in order to get them to behave. Oh, they definitely hit every checkpoint of environmental science impacts, social, economic, and the environment itself. They're literally a cult that converts people into having extreme beliefs of all kinds, make thousands of dollars off of this crazy diet book that their psycho leader wrote and the TV shows that are obsessed with them, and is so anti-food that their food waste can be heavily impactful to the environment. This church, aka crazy food cult, seems like they have plenty of secrets to be revealed. That's all the time we have for today, loyal listeners. We'll see you next time. Thanks for watching! Wait, what about that plane crash she was in at Pristine Priest? Guess you'll have to wait until the next episode to hear about that one.