Marleen Williams is a clinical professor of counseling psychology at Brigham Young University, a Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints school in Provo, Utah. She specializes in women’s mental health and focuses her research on eating disorders, depression, trauma and spirituality in women. She says religious beliefs that see the body as a God-given gift […]

Stacey Kole Shetler is a former Miss Arizona USA (1998) who speaks to young people about how her relationship with Jesus Christ helped her battle an eating disorder. She says anorexia is not uncommon in Christian households because it is the “good girl’s syndrome.” It does not involve a taboo substance, such as alcohol or drugs, […]

Mark Roehling is an assistant professor of labor and industrial relations at Michigan State University in Lansing. In 1999 he published a study that found that overweight and obese people were discriminated against – often openly – in the workplace.

Daniel Sack is a program officer at the Associated Colleges of the Midwest in Chicago and author of Whitebread Protestants: Food and Religion in American Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2001).

Gillian Feeley-Harnik is a professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has written about religion and food and the role food played in early Judaism and Christianity.

Dr. Don Colbert is a Christian nutritionist and dietitian who wrote What Would Jesus Eat?: The Ultimate Program for Eating Well, Feeling Great and Living Longer and The What Would Jesus Eat Cookbook (both from Thomas Nelson, 2002). He says that following a Mediterranean diet – full of the grains and vegetables known in Jesus’ time – can eliminate obesity. He […]

The Rev. George Malkmus is the founder of the Hallelujah Diet and Hallelujah Acres, a Shelby, N.C.-based Christian vegetarian and health ministry that promotes Bible-based diet and nutrition.

Mary Louise Bringle is chair of the humanities division of Brevard College in Brevard, N.C. She wrote of her eating disorder in “Confessions of a Glutton” in the Oct. 25, 1989, issue of The Christian Century.

Tami Coyne and Karen Weissman are known as “The Spiritual Chicks” and are authors of The Spiritual Chicks Question Everything: Learn to Risk, Release and Soar (Red Wheel, 2003). In the book, they discuss whether God loves fat people and conclude that God does. Both Chicks live in New York City.