Each week, there is an Ignatian-styled review – based on the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Participants choose one fault to work on in the coming week. At the end of each day, individually, they review how they did and whether they struggled. They consider what they will do in “prayer and action” next time, and if they succeeded, how Jesus helped them.
The spiritual inventory helps participants identify “stomach hunger versus heart hunger” and learn to respond appropriately, said Marquez.
“If you feel this longing and you think, ‘Oh, if I could just eat something and I’d feel better,’ that’s a spiritual hole,” she explained. “Other people fill it with alcohol or smoking…overeaters tend to fill it with food.”
But that “hole in your heart” is “a call from God,” Marquez observed. “He made us this way so we would want to call for him,” she explained. “So what we need is prayer…to be nourished by his Word.” In fact, one of Light Weigh’s mantras is, “The walk to the refrigerator is just as far as the walk to the Bible.”
Doughnuts in Moderation
Along with prayer, Light Weigh stresses moderation.
“Your body is a temple,” said Marquez. “God gave us these bodies. We didn’t make them. And our body gives us signals when we need things. You know when you’re thirsty, so you drink. And you wait until you’re hungry before you eat,” she said. But that’s “a discipline that most of us have, many of us, I know I have, overridden through habits early in life: eating because of stress, eating because of social situations.”
As with other addictions, she said, “You have to turn over your will to God and say, ‘God, help me with this. I don’t want to over-eat, I don’t want to abuse my body in any way.’ And ask him to guide you.”
Participants learn to eat proportionately-sized amounts of food and only until they are just satiated. And whenever the old overeating habits return, participants “turn to prayer to overcome the compulsion.”
“We’re trying to get back to that natural way of responding to our bodies’ needs,” explained Marquez.
No foods are off-limits. “It’s not what goes into you that’s evil, it’s what comes out of you,” said Marquez, referencing Christ’s spiritual maxim from the Gospel.
(Story continues below)
Subscribe to our daily newsletter
“You can eat anything you want, as long as you just eat a finite amount of it,” she continued. In the videos, participants learn how to consume “very delectable foods in very reasonable quantities” – including doughnuts and pizza, which makes Marquez happy. Even with those carbohydrates and fats, since the first session in June, the 46-year-old has lost 20 pounds – and other participants have lost in the “double digits,” as well.
The Narrow Way
Although most are first drawn to Light Weigh to lose weight, they find the weight loss to be a “fringe benefit,” Marquez noted. As it turns out, these dieters are becoming spiritual heavy weights. The Light Weigh program, she said, means a “deepening of our faith.”
So is the Light Weigh program the answer to the never-ending cycle of diet fads? Marquez thinks so, precisely because it’s not the “world’s diet.”
Jesus Christ said that neither he nor his Kingdom is “of this world,” said Marquez, so “we know through our faith, the way the world is going is not the way we are called to go. We are called to go the narrow way. And that’s what this is. It’s very simple. It’s very truthful.”
Printed with permission from the Catholic Anchor, newspaper for the Archdiocese of Anchorage, Alaska.