“Feel Fine in ’09,” a series of health meetings held by the Smith Mountain Lake Seventh-day Adventist Church, just concluded its final meeting. Every Monday night in January and February at 7 P.M., this small church of less than 50 members met together with the community for two hours to learn more about getting healthy and losing weight for the new year.
Each Monday evening, church members arrived early to set up everything for the more than 30 community members that came out to participate. The meetings began with a health screening and weigh-in. Health screenings included such things as blood pressure checks, flexibility tests, blood sugar counts, and the like. Each participant’s weight was recorded weekly on a card.
Then, the group gathered to listen to a local health professional discuss some important aspect of living healthy lives. Since only one member of our church works in the health profession, we had to bring others in to do our health talks. Speakers included local doctors, psychologists, and even the nutritionist from the local grocery store.
This was followed by the fitness segment, in which one of the church members showed the participants some new exercises and handed out a take-home challenge that had to be completed each week. For example, on the first night, we discussed the benefits of walking, so the fitness challenge was to walk for at least 25 minutes a day for five of the next seven days. The fitness leader also handed out a dietary challenge each week. The first week, the challenge was to replace all beverages with water on five of the next seven days. These challenges were used in the next segment of the program, the weight-loss contest.
Being located in Bedford County, Virginia, the church decided to call the weight-loss contest segment of the program “Bedford’s Biggest Loser,” and modeled the contest after the popular television show “The Biggest Loser.” Unlike the TV show, no one was voted off or had to leave. Instead, participants were encouraged to bring friends to participate in the contest. The group was divided into four teams, working together to lose weight. We made sure to include some church members on each team. The weight of the entire team was calculated from the individual participant’s weights taken at the beginning of each meeting. The team that lost the greatest percentage of weight won the weight-loss challenge for the week.
Along with the weight-loss challenge, we included two other challenges—the take home challenge, which was given out by the fitness leader, and an on-site challenge, or game. From spitting grapes into a container for points or relaying a balloon around the room using only heads to acting out health-related words as team-members guessed, the weekly onsite challenges were a highlight of the evening. The teams earned points by winning each of the three weekly challenges, and the team with the most points at the end of the eight weeks was the winning team. Bedford’s Biggest Loser was the member of that winning team that lost the greatest percentage of weight.
We followed up the contest with a Spiritual nugget that related our physical health to our Spiritual health. We told the participants from the beginning that these meetings were being conducted by the Smith Mountain Lake Seventh-day Adventist Church, and that we believed that God wanted your life to be the best that it could be.
The final segment of the meeting was the cooking demonstration and the tastings. We left this part until last because we believed that we could socialize over the food and make friends with the people who came. While we were excited about the prospect of helping people lose weight, our real goal was to make friends for Christ and see more souls in His kingdom.
All of the dishes we prepared were vegetarian, quite healthy, and delicious. We handed out samples of the foods for the participants to try and even got them involved in making some of foods. From smoothies to homemade chips and salsa to the delicious desserts, we tried to keep the recipes simple and fun.
We even extended the tastings to a full vegetarian buffet, which we told them was really our fellowship dinner being held after church on Saturday. We invited anyone who was interested to come for just the buffet or, if they wanted, to join us for church a little earlier. Imagine our excitement when eight people showed up for church and stayed for lunch!
Although the meetings are finished, our mission with these new friends is not over. We’ve invited them all back to a Revelation Seminar in April, and our church members will be working on maintaining and growing our new friendships in the mean time. We know that the world sees losing weight as a wonderful thing, but we also know that God is not interested in skinny people going to hell. So, we will be diligent is winning those souls for Christ.
You may be thinking, “This Smith Mountain Lake Seventh-day Adventist Church must be so young and healthy. My church could never pull off such an event.” Here are a few things you should know about us: The average age of our membership is well over 60 years of age. The youngest member is 30 years old, and there are only three of us in our thirties. There are no children. We have several overweight members, and even some who did not lend a hand or even come to any of the meetings. There were some in our own church that said, “This will never work. People won’t come out.” However, just a handful of us worked hard to see this event through, and by God’s grace, it was a huge success!
So, here at the Smith Mountain Lake Seventh-day Adventist church, we “Felt Great in ’08,” “Felt Fine in ’09,” and plan to “Get Thin in ’10.”
Jill Weeks