Robert L. Brown is a professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has written about Buddhism, asceticism, health and the body.

Jill Dubisch is a professor of anthropology at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. She has written about religious aspects of the health food movement in a journal about magic, witchcraft and the supernatural.

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.

Claire Cloninger is co-author of Faithfully Fit: A 40-Day Devotional Plan to End the Yo-Yo Lifestyle of Chronic Dieting (W Publishing, 1991). She lives in Baldwin County, Ala.

Julie Morris is the founder of the Step Forward Diet, a Christian weight loss program. She lives in Hoover, Ala.