Weigh Down Diet Con Review
Submitted by a past visitor to chasefreedom.com
Dear Review Editors of Chase Freedom,
I read your review of the Weigh Down Diet at www.chasefreedom.com. I am writing to inform you that in my opinion, based on my personal experience and the experience of many others, The Weigh Down Workshop has turned into a recruiting ground for Remnant Fellowship, a church that Gwen Shamblin founded in the spring of 1999. Remnant Fellowship exhibits many of the characteristics of a cult, and has been responsible for driving wedges into many family relationships and recruiting participants out of their churches.
My wife and I participated in the WeighDown and Strongholds Program for about 5 years (1996-2001). Early on, we found that participation in the program helped invigorate our spiritual walk, calling us back to the Bible and a deeper relationship with God. We lost weight and refounded our marriage on solid, spiritual ground. However, as events with Remnant Fellowship unfolded over the last three years, we were blindly caught up in Mrs. Shamblin’s call for faithful followers to leave their churches. As a result, in the summer of 2001 we left our church for a brief period and nearly joined Remnant Fellowship.
In my opinion, a couple of problems are evident with the original Exodus Out of Egypt program. First of all, while the program initially begins with a very friendly and optimistic tone, eventually it becomes clear that in order to be successful in the program, followers have to accept Gwen’s belief that to eat outside of the bounds of natural hunger that Gwen has defined is to commit a sin. In other words, followers begin to accept that to be obedient to God is to be obedient to the WD diet. This axiom is established in the program through the use of various scriptures that condemn gluttony. Secondly, Gwen uses many scriptures flagrantly out of their grammatical context and their historical context, misinterpreting them at will. If at fac e value a passage of Scripture seems applicable to her beliefs about dieting, Gwen interprets it in that fashion, even if the passage was contextually about something else. And finally, Gwen encourages her followers to downplay the advice of scientific authorities on food and weight loss in her diet plan. This mistrust of science begins to funnel her followers’ loyalty and trust towards herself rather than anyone in the scientific or medical community.
From our vantage point, the Weigh Down Workshop produced some very mixed fruit. Many adherents were successful at losing some of their target weight loss. However, there is little-to-no hard scientific evidence on weight loss. Gwen Shamblin has not released any statistics demonstrating that her program is more successful than others, and tends to rely on testimonial evidence. Therefore, it is not clear in the long run whether people are successful in keeping the weight off. Undeniably, many followers do lose some weight permanently, and many followers also report that being in the Bible and prayer so intensely did wonders for their spiritual lives and their relationships with God. However, we can also remember many peop le who left the program early because it wasn’t working for them, as well as people who felt condemned and guilty because they were not able or willing to accept Gwen Shamblin’s food intake standards as God’s will for them.
I have written in more detail about the harmful aspects of Remnant Fellowship and the cult characteristics that it exhibits. People who join Remnant Fellowship are very likely to have been recruited from people who participate in the Weigh Down Workshop. The entire staff of the Weigh Down Workshop is made up of Remnant Fellowship members, and Gwen has made no secret that she sees her use of the Weigh Down Workshop as a tool for recruiting people to join Remnant Fellowship.
I hope that you will choose to post either this warning or a more general warning about the cult connection between WeighDown and Remnant Fellowship, so that visitors to your site will not find themselves referred to WeighDown and then recruited into a high pressure cult group.
Thank you for reading my opinion and considering it for posting at your site.
Sincerely,
Adam C. Brooks
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