3D and the 3d Program: Diet, Discipline & Discipleship

The best way to know the heart of the 3D program, is to know the heart of the woman who took it national and has guided its development ever since. Writing with transparent and endearing honesty, Carol Showalter, the wife of a prominent Presbyterian minister in upstate New York, tells of fighting (and mostly losing) the battle against excess weight all her life.

In 1972, she was about to enroll (again) in a well-known secular diet program that was meeting in her church, when she was arrested by a Sunday school poster of a happy face, with a slogan, "Smile, God has the answer!"

She could not get it out of her mind. And when she prayed about it, she found He did have the answer.

Today, there are nearly one million graduates of the 12-week program, 3D, many of whom have had their lives wonderfully changed, as they discovered that God would meet them, wherever thay were at and would heal them, often through others who shared their struggles.

That revelation—and how much more time He desired her to spend in prayer with Him, conferring with Him on everything— changed her whole way of looking at things, and her life.

The originator and guiding light of the first Christ-centered group diet program, Diet, Discipline and Discipleship, Carol Showalter has been a prominent spokeswoman for the program for more than thirty years. Her national best-selling autobiographical account of the founding of the program, 3D, gave the reader an understanding of the program's broad scope and spiritual depth.

After three decades the 3D program is undergoing a major updating. As a part of this makeover Carol Showalter has done a major revision to her book, rewriting its ending and bringing it into the twenty-first century. Reading the new 3D is still the best way to get a quick sense of the program. As the author says, "There's so much more than we realized, and it's so much deeper!"

Carol has been interviewed by major publications including The Chicago Tribune, the New Yorker, and Christianity Today. She has appeared on CNN, the 700 Club, and numerous other television programs, and has spoken at conferences nationwide. Carol and her husband, Dr. William Showalter, are members of an ecumenical religious community on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where Bill serves as a Presbyterian minister on the community's clergy staff and Carol serves as the Director of Marketing for Paraclete Press. Carol and Bill have four grown children and five grandchildren.