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‘This is a cult’: inside the shocking story of a religious weight-loss group

In a strange new docuseries, the dark world of the Remnant Fellowship and its ‘pray yourself thin’ leader Gwen Shamblin is brought to light

In May of this year, film-makers Marina Zenovich and Nile Cappello had nearly wrapped on a documentary series about Remnant Fellowship, an insular, eerily cheery church in Brentwood, Tennessee, which preached weight loss as a spiritual assignment. For more than three years Cappello and her team had researched Remnant, which had faced accusations of being a cult that promoted child abuse, and its charismatic leader, Gwen Shamblin Lara, a stick-thin woman with an inflated blonde beehive who gained fame for a theological diet program to pray one’s way to thinness.

Related: ‘It’s very culty’: the bizarre billion-dollar downfall of fashion company LuLaRoe

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from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3kRMijq
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