Pastor Rick Warren, has spent his life spreading the word of God and opened up about his life in his bestselling book, "The Purpose Driven Life".
Now the 59-year-old pastor is trying to help people heal their health. "The Daniel Plan: 40 Days to a Healthier Life", co-written with doctors Mark Hyman and Daniel Amen, describes the lifestyle program that helped Warren shed 65 pounds in 2011.
Warren, founding pastor of Saddleback Church in Southern California, helped his congregation get healthier by dropping more than 250,000 pounds collectively that year.
The book included five essentials that can lead to a healthy lifestyle such as food, fitness, focus, faith and friends. Warren calls faith and friends the special sauce that makes the Daniel Plan unique. Focus is also called a critical component.
"It's not just what you eat that makes you unhealthy, it's about what's eating you," Warren said.
The Daniel Plan list healthy eating, regular exercises, pray and support from church members as key opponents to the plan working. The plan was inspired after Warren baptized more than 800 people in one day.
"Wow! Everybody's fat!" Warren said he thought after lowering more than 145,000 pounds of weight in the water.
Despite not being the most spiritual thought for a pastor, Warren said he looked at himself and thought "I'm fat, too. I'm as out of shape as everyone else is." Warren said he confronted his congregation and asked them to repent.
"I told them I had gained 2 to 3 pounds a year, and I've been your pastor for 30 years, so I needed to lose about 90 pounds," Warren said.
The Daniel Plan was inspired by the first chapter of Daniel, in which Daniel challenges the king's official guard to challenge men to eat the king's diet of rich food. Daniel and his friends would eat healthy fruits and vegetables.
"We just took the title from that concept," he said. "It doesn't try to follow what Daniel ate, because the Bible doesn't tell us exactly what he ate."
Warren said the idea is about eating "healthier, fresher and more natural foods."
"The line we use is: 'If it grows on a plant, it's healthy," he said. "If it's made in a plant, don't eat it.' My rule is no snacks, no sweets, no seconds."
Co-author Hyman, a family doctor, called the message about the food is simple; eating more whole foods and less processed foods and junk food.
The 6-foot-3 pastor said he was doing well with the program before his son, Matthew, who suffered from a mental illness, committed suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot wound in April at 27. Warren said he gained about 35 pounds in six months, grieving his son's death.
"My back went out, and I wasn't able to exercise for an extended period. I didn't feel like doing anything, and our members who are so loving were bringing us meals every night. They weren't necessarily healthy meals," Warren said. "They were rich in creams and enormous portions, far more than we could possibly eat. It was comfort eating. I wasn't making some good choices in terms of what I ate."
After months of grieving, Warren said he ask his friends to help him get back on the right track.
"When I began to get a handle on the grief, I already knew what to do," Warren said. "I am going to prove that this plan works twice.
Warren has dropped about 25 pounds and said he is planning dropping more. In his garden he grows 57 different kinds of vegetables from zucchini to tomatoes. Warren's workouts include hiking, swimming, a treadmill routine and weight-training exercises.
Warren calls Prayer another key essential for the Daniel Plan.
"We talked about not just eating right but thinking right. We were praying for health," he said, "I tell people if you prayed as much as you worried, you would have a lot less to worry about."
Warren is expected to release a cookbook in April. Other resources to help individuals and churches lose weight include DVDs and on the site danielplan.com. The proceeds from the books are donated to Saddleback Church's charitable effort.
"You think that God is only interested in your soul? No, he is interested in your body, mind and soul. Jesus went into each village teaching, preaching and healing. The Daniel Plan has to do with healing," Warren said. "The Bible says, 'God made my body; Jesus died for my body; the spirit lives in my body.' So I had better take care of it."
