- RSS FeedSubscribe
- « Previous PostA La Carte (8/4)
- Next Post »Reading Biographies Together - Spurgeon (IV)
Help Lord--The Devil Wants Me Fat!
- 08/04/10
- 21
Last year I posted a few pictures from the old 70’s classic Soul Winning Made Easy by C.S. Lovett. Recently I came across another of his books, one titled Help Lord—The Devil Wants Me Fat! The book teaches how the devil is able to influence your eating, how to deal with your appetite and how to deprogram yourself from bad eating habits. It is an odd mixture of good and bad, useful information and outright legalism (not to mention poor medical advice).
I enjoy these books as a bit of a guilty pleasure, I’m sure. They’re old, they’re retro and somehow quite amusing.
Here’s how this one starts:
Lovett largely blames overeating and obesity on Satanic activity.
Here’s a great picture of a very Caucasian Adam and Eve. Adam is totally ripped.
One of the best parts of Lovett’s books is that he always has lots of photographs of himself performing the programs he’s come up with (again, see Soul Winning Made Easy). Here he is meditating upon Jesus to see if it’s God’s will for him to undertake a fast.
The heart of the book is a fast. And this isn’t a fast for wimps—it’s 10 days of nothing but water (and he especially recommends it for pregnant women and says it will cure morning sickness). The purpose of this fast is to take complete control of the flesh. Lovett suggests that for two days you will be hungry but after that your hunger will fade and you’ll be just fine. In fact, you’ll have an increase in energy and certainly an increase in relationship with the Lord.
One strange thing about this fast is that he tells you to spend meal times away from your family. While your family is eating dinner, you are to spend time in prayer and Bible reading.
Here he is enjoying breakfast (or dinner or lunch).
And here he is demonstrating how to tell Satan to go away:
After the conclusion of the fast he introduces a whole section about New Age-style visualization. He says that in order to become thin you have to project an image of yourself at your desired weight into order to develop the faith to actually make it happen.
And then he closes out the diet portion of the book with a section about nutrition, stating that you’ll have to learn to always say “no” to fats and oils, sugars and refined carbohydrates.
The final section of the book talks about evangelism because your fabulous new body, he says, can be a fabulous provoker of conversation. As people declare how good you look, you are to take the opportunity of that conversation to share the gospel. And I guess that takes us full-circle, back to Soul Winning Made Easy.
I am a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband to Aileen and a father to three young children. I worship and serve as a pastor at 
Releasing on April 1, The Next
Published in 2008, this book
This is a guide that calls men,
This review of the bestselling
New to the site? You can get
This is a guide written
Comments (21)
It’s funny how, even though he is legalistic in many ways, he’s “meditating upon Jesus to see if it’s God’s will for him to undertake a fast.” He’s not meditating on Jesus as much as he’s meditating on a picture of Jesus, which is not the same thing by any measure. That picture reminds me of the idolatry so prevalent in the RCC.
Wow. All my health problems have been solved by his simple program.
You did say this was written in 1970, not 1670, correct? I really hope no pregnant women listened to him. And, how did he expect to sell but one book, seeing that Satan… never mind, not worth lifting my fingers for another keystroke.
I read a significant portion of this book as a young adult in the early 1990’s- the thing I did take from this book as truth is that it is unhealthy and unholy to obsess about ourselves. The person who spends 4 hours a day in the gym because that is where they get their identity from is just as sick as the person who turns to food for comfort. They have both handed Satan a “win” by taking their eyes off Christ and putting them onto themselves. This is hard for a lot of Christians to hear, but this holds true for anything we compulsively do. It’s easy to recognize addictions to food, porn, alcohol, entertainment in the form of movies and tv, or computer and video games. My mother-in-law spends literally hours a day watching tv, planning on what she will be watching, recording, cataloging her recorded tv, etc, etc. I have always found this very sick but a few years ago I looked at the amount of time I was spending reading books……a much more “holy” activity, I’m sure. Nonetheless, I was still using it as an escape from the reality that was my life at the time, and as such it had almost as much an impact on my life as my husband’s porn addiction had on his. I do distinguish the two as one behavior was outright sin and the other was thoughtless behavior. Sin always includes a much greater impact on our lives. My point is, anything we use that makes us just “feel better” instead of looking to Christ to fulfill our deepest needs is just a bandaid and usually an idol in our lives. And the book did have a small amount of merit.
Tim,
I can appreciate why these books are a guilty pleasure for you.
I very much enjoyed your presentation. It flowed nicely and your comments were as amusing as the pictures and captions from the book.
I realize the subject matter is serious, but as Lovett said of one of the above pictures, “Does [this} make you chuckle? Praise the Lord we can find something humorous in a serious problem.”
It did my soul good to laugh this morning. Thanks!
I think the devil would actually have been attracted to that shirt/tie combination.
Who has book illustration photos done of himself while wearing a pocket protector?
Simply amazing. How you find this stuff is beyond me.
I had a bunch of C.S Lovett books back in the 1980’s including Soul Winning Made Easy and Dealing with the Devil. I also had a bunch of his commentaries on various books of the Bible called Lovett’s Lights. It would be interesting to go back and review them now that I’ve (hopefully) learned a whole lot more about Scripture.
That Adam and Eve illustration: classic. Adam is really Ronald Reagan.
There is a C.S. Lovett web site. Find it here: http://www.cslovettbooks.com/index.html
Be very afraid
This book is in my church’s library and I’m the official book pruner. Thank you for helping me determine it’s fate without having to crack the cover.
For those interested, I started blogging my way through this book a couple of weeks ago - Chapter 2 should go up sometime tomorrow.
I’ll be trying to include all the illustrations from the book as I go.
Sounds like Joel Osteen and not eating pork to me…
If this wasn’t so funny, I would probably have to cry over the notion that anyone ever took this advice seriously. Lord help our pious errors.
Who needs weight watchers?
Tim,
Wondering if you’ve discovered Jacob Aranza’s masterpiece “Backwards Masking Unmasked” - it doesn’t have the same illustrations, but it does have the same level of paranoia and some hilarious caricatures of rock bands from the 80s.
I also reviewed it, here’s a list of bands and his judgment on them.
Nathan - This is the first I’ve heard of that one. I’ll have to check it out.
You said the book is a mixture of good and bad - but I’ve gotta tell ya, I’m having a hard time picking out the good stuff.
I tend to ignore advice that requires me to neglect my family. I know it looks all hyper-spiritual, but I don’t buy it. Besides, I don’t need any help in that area.
Double rainbow….all the way!!
Unlike the situation with Jesus, a Jew, we don’t actually KNOW that Adam and Eve weren’t Caucasian in appearance.I’m as creeped out by blue-eyed Jesus paintings as the next girl, but let’s not take it too far. We really don’t know what color Adam and Eve were, that artist’s guess is as good as yours. You may notice that he didn’t even touch the belly-button issue.