Every January, churches begin promoting fitness and wellness programs with the best of intentions. The flyers promise renewal, discipline and a fresh start, all spiritual-sounding words. The messaging suggests we can honor God with our bodies through diet and exercise.
But for many, especially women, these campaigns stir something more complicated than motivation. They awaken memories of shame, control and even spiritual harm.
For years, I believed changing my body would earn God’s favor. I first attempted to intentionally lose weight at 12, just as my body began to change. I learned to restrict calories and to trade extra walks or a diet soda for a snack cake. Later, as a young adult preparing for marriage, I joined my first weight-loss program. Later, through another program, I shed enough pounds that my hair thinned and my skin flaked.
Michelle Rayburn
The reward? A newspaper ad from the diet center celebrating my “success.”
Over the next few decades, I lost and gained more than weight. I lost trust in my own body. I cycled through every method, including faith-based ones. At church, I memorized verses about self-control while being told to “eat like a thin person.” I learned to spiritualize my hunger, to view food through the lens of sin and obedience. I believed holiness looked like self-denial and God was most pleased with it.
Looking back, I see how Scripture was used, or misused, to reinforce these ideas. First Corinthians 6:19–20, for example, became a verse about dieting rather than sexual ethics. When stripped of its context and repurposed to sanctify self-discipline, the concept of being a temple of the Holy Spirit became a mantra. Even more so, a weapon of shame.
I learned thinness meant virtue, fitness equaled stewardship and larger bodies revealed a lack of discipline. I came to believe my size and my food journal gave a spiritual progress report.
This is not the gospel of Jesus Christ.
The incarnation tells a radically different story. God took on flesh, a human body that knew hunger, thirst, fatigue and pain. Yes, Jesus fasted, but when he fed crowds of people, they ate until they were satisfied, and there was food left over. Jesus invited them to rest. He rested too.
Jesus didn’t treat people as problems to be solved but as humans in need of spiritual renewal first and physical healing second. But in every healing he performed, he did not shame or accuse anyone of a lack of obedience. He never said, “Go and cut calories,” or, “Peter, put down the bread and eat more figs.”
“When churches merge faith and body shaming, they unintentionally offer a counterfeit gospel.”
When churches merge faith and body shaming, they unintentionally offer a counterfeit gospel. They replace the good news of freedom with a moral system built on measuring performance. It’s a subtle form of spiritual abuse and not always deliberate but deeply damaging all the same.
For those who have lived under that burden, healing can take years. It begins with separating God’s voice from the noise of cultural expectations, from the diet culture that focuses on restricting as a solution. It means releasing quantifiable measurements of portions, macros, calories, dimensions and pounds in exchange for trusting how God created our bodies with amazing feedback systems.
Healing means viewing eating and moving as acts of gratitude. Thanking the Creator for a wonderful body to inhabit. Thanking God for the gifts of delicious food, a delightful creation in which to move and explore and the beauty of just being. I had to throw away the scale, stop tracking calories and trust that my worth never was hanging in the balance of a number or in performance.
The biggest awakening was seeing how I had turned it all into idolatry, the very thing faith-based programs were supposed to treat. I realized the brownies weren’t my idol. Instead, my idol was a hyper-fixation on dieting and metrics.
The church also has work to do. It must confront how easily diet culture has crept into its ministries and messages. Before launching another “faith-based wellness challenge,” we need to ask: Are we offering freedom or leading people into idolatry? Are we teaching godliness or distortion? Are we confusing spiritual discipline with body obsession?
Holiness never has been measured in pounds or inches or calories. To honor God with our bodies is not to micromanage them but to care for them, and for one another, as living expressions who move and delight and celebrate God’s gifts.
If our wellness programs and sermons produce shame instead of gratitude, we have lost the heart of the gospel. Jesus came to heal our hearts, to deliver and restore. When the church teaches people to love God and others as they love themselves, it offers a truer picture of embodied faith, one that celebrates nourishment, rest and joy as acts of worship.
That’s a version of wellness that aligns with the gospel.
Michelle Rayburn is a freelance writer whose work centers on faith, spiritual transformation and exploring a more authentic Christianity. She writes at Disillusioned Faith on Substack and holds a master of arts degree in ministry leadership.