Fighting Fat : No Magic, but Plenty of Choices

Morton Shaevitz is no stranger to fad diets. He’s seen them all, even tried a few. He once weighed 270 pounds. Now he’s slim and svelte, and runs more than five miles a day.

Shaevitz, a clinical psychologist, is director of Forever Thin, a weight-loss program for moderately overweight people at Scripps Clinic in La Jolla. Many of the hundreds who take part in Forever Thin each year have tried and failed at fad diets.

Shaevitz knows why.

“Magic,” he said. “People want magic. The major reason these diets succeed is that the people they induce are so desperate. And the thing is, all diets work--on a short-term basis. The hazard is, they offer fantasy solutions to a long-term problem.”

Many fad programs carry with them, Shaevitz said, a “one- or two-food program, high in protein.” (Many nutritionists now favor a diet of mainly complex carbohydrates--fruits, grains and vegetables--supported by protein with minimal fat.) The virtues of protein are largely a myth, he said, one promulgated in the 1950s.

“The road to heaven is paved with protein,” he joked. The reason such diets work in the short term, he added, has mainly to do with fluid loss--” Enormous fluid loss, which isn’t fat loss, but it shows on a scale.”

Quick Fix Seductive

For many programs, that’s the catch. Sudden weight loss to an overweight--or obese--person can be like manna from heaven. For the entrepreneur, it’s money.

Fat people mean money.

Money becomes a bigger issue considering the programs dieters suffer through. Shaevitz says one such as his--citing long-term weight loss and balanced, nutritious eating--run a risk of not being sexy to a consumer searching for a quick fix.

“You don’t make a lot of money saying you need to eat lots of fresh fruits and vegetables and get plenty of exercise,” he said. “There’s resistance to it, because the key is, it isn’t magic.”

So why is magic so appealing?

“Because it offers instant solutions,” he said. “ ‘If you do this for three weeks and three weeks only, you’ll have it! You’ll live happily ever after! Isn’t that wonderful? All you have to do is take this wonderful pill, and it works while you sleep. Isn’t it great!’ ”

“If such pills existed,” he said with a sigh, “I’d buy them.”

Chronic dieters have long been exposed to the lures of pills, injections, even creams promising weight-loss magic. Some have spent thousands of dollars in making themselves guinea pigs for this or that new fad.

Sheila Henry, a La Jolla hypnotist, has seen many such cases.

“When they come to me,” she said, “they’re thoroughly discouraged. They’ve been through all the programs--Overeaters Anonymous, Thin Within, protein powders. It’s sad.”

Cultural Imperative

But even Henry claims only a 50% success rate with weight-loss clients. And the Southern California ethos of look-good, feel-good, be-good makes many feel “that much guiltier.”

“Some are satisfied with being overweight,” she said, “but the culture keeps telling them, ‘You should be thin.’ ”

The culture also provides no guidance (or at best, very little) on how to distinguish good from bad programs. Diet experts say no commercial program works perfectly for all people, no matter how immodest its boasts.

Most are expensive. Forever Thin costs upwards of $350. The Diet Center, which has 16 local outlets and thousands worldwide, charges $295. The San Diego Weight Reduction Medical Clinics, boasting 14 facilities locally, charge $229. A hypnotist, clinical psychologist or psychiatrist charges anywhere from $50 to $100 an hour. (Group rates are lower, often on the order of $125 for eight sessions, though all prices vary.) And some programs are outright rip-offs.

Gray areas abound in the search for the right diet. Some, such as Forever Thin, are considered solid nutritionally and contain more information than a fleet of scholarly textbooks. But Forever Thin does have a weigh-in each week. If you’re embarrassed by that, maybe it’s not your baby.

The Diet Center ranks with the best, according to diet and nutrition experts, but sessions include group therapy-type discussions. If that isn’t your thing, maybe The Diet Center isn’t either. The best guideline seems to be: Go for health, solid nutrition, accurate information and reasonable cost.

And don’t be surprised by surprises. Or incredible contradiction.

Mostly Women

One shock to some clients is the ratio of women to men in weight-loss programs. (Men seem to favor exercise, the more “macho” way of fighting fat.) Henry, the hypnotist, says almost all her clients are women. And Shaevitz concedes an “overwhelming number” of Forever Thin enrollees are women. The same was found at nearly every program in the county.

“There’s more of an emphasis on women having to look good,” Henry said. “A man can get away with a pot belly--he can hide behind a suit. A woman in the workplace is expected to look good, and looking good means no pot bellies, no double chins.”

Looking good often means spending thousands of dollars and trying dozens of methods before finding the right one. It means sorting out a refrigerator full of tangled theories, many contradicting all others before.

More confusion, more frustration.

Jeanne Wade is supervisor of nurses for the San Diego Weight Reduction Medical Clinics, in business now 14 years. This is a program big on nurses. Twenty-four are on staff, with three doctors and 14 “lay people.” (“I don’t know why,” Wade said of the number of nurses. “It just worked out that way.”)

The clinics, whose client list is 70% women, use injections and medication. The primary injection is pyridoxine, which Wade described as “a co-enzyme, part of the B-vitamin or B-6 family.”

What it does is curb appetite, albeit for a short time. A client hoping to lose 10 pounds might try a five-week “miniseries” with injections each day.

“If you want to lose 50 pounds, you could do it in segments, maybe in a six-to-eight-week program,” Wade said. “You’d stabilize for a while, then start the injections again.”

The clinics abhor fad foods--no pills or liquids in place of meals--but are, she said, imbued with the notion that proteins work best.

“Oh, yes,” said Wade, a small woman with jet-black hair and a friendly, matronly manner. “They’re the energizers. They’re the fuel bodies need to replace cells. We’ve got to have proteins for amino acids, for vital life support.”

Wade also believes fats are needed in the diet--in numbers that aren’t small (a contradiction to much of the current thinking). “You just wouldn’t want to cut them completely,” she said. “Fat burns as fuel. They’re very important.”

However, she believes teaching clients--especially women--the essence of low-fat cooking. She also believes carbohydrates, the complex kind, are essential. “We get that in our fruit and bread sticks,” she said, adding that whole-grain breads are considered risky for a client struggling to lose. (Other programs say the fiber lost is detrimental, maybe hazardous.)

“Without the complex carbos,” Wade said, “we just won’t get the results we need. We need the combination. The body works that way.”

Food combining is a popular theory among some. Combining means eating the right foods at just the right time, leaving time for the body’s inscrutable tides and rhythms to take over.

Carmen Rios Hartman, director of The Weightloss Center in Clairemont, says an eater can gobble down a cheeseburger and fries and not gain weight only if “the right foods” follow such an onslaught. Surely, she means fasting or sucking down a grapefruit pill every day for a week later? Whatever, Hartman won’t say. She agreed to be interviewed but begged silence on “the secret to my magic program.

“I’m no dummy,” she said with a winsome smile. “Ain’t nobody gonna steal this business.”

Hartman, a short pretty woman with gobs of fast-talking energy, is not a doctor or a nurse or a psychologist. Neither is she a nutritionist, though she claims to know more than many in the field. She describes herself as a “victim” of a weight-loss jungle.

“I once spent $800 on shots,” she said. “I tried ‘em for six months, three, four times a week. I tried medication. As soon as I stopped, the weight came back. I gained the 30 pounds I had lost, plus 10 or 12 more.”

She later lost 58 pounds by going to the library and reading as much as possible on food, health and the sweet high of being thin. Thus came the seed for The Weightloss Center, now in business a year and a half. Hartman likes the Bruce Springsteen line--” Whole world is out there, just tryin’ to score/I’ve seen enough, don’t want to see anymore “--and says it applies to the hundreds of weight-loss scams that litter the advertising columns of the nation’s newspapers.

“There’s a lot of bad centers out there,” she said with a scowl. “Everybody’s just tryin’ to grab somebody.”

Despite the secrecy about food combining, Hartman deems her efforts sound. Baked potato, chicken, pasta, fruit--”Everything,” she said. “Here, you get it all.”

The “average person” will, she said, lose eight pounds the first week and 20 to 30 over six (at a cost of $180). Everyone--and the program is 90% female--who reaches a goal in six weeks gets a free year of “maintenance” (counseling and rah-rah encouragement that most centers preach). Hartman concedes exercise is important, although not as much as getting the feared fat off first.

“We urge that after each meal you walk,” she said. “Get that engine jumpin’ right away. But take it easy . It’s hard enough just losing. Why do two things at once? First master the discipline to lose, then the discipline to exercise.”

Morton Shaevitz, a gaunt man with a runner’s look, disagrees. Exercise is the law in his program.

“We simply do not believe you can possibly lose and maintain weight without an ongoing (exercise) program--right from the start,” he said. “It’s the core component of all our efforts.”

He, like the many dietitians, doctors and nutritional experts who lecture for Forever Thin, extols the virtues of exercise not only in burning off fat but also in readjusting (and redefining) metabolism.

Hartman, who concedes exercise is the best way for a person with “too many fat cells” to maintain proper weight, still doesn’t believe a doctor is needed to tell someone that. It’s one reason she abhors the “high-priced,” medically inclined programs.

“You telling me you need a doctor to say potato chips and dips are gonna make you fat? No way, man.”

She also pooh-poohs calorie-counting, calling it a time-consuming, wasteful enterprise. Forever Thin and dozens of other programs consider it paramount. Such tabulations lead, in the end, some say, to old bad habits and substandard eating.

“Purely a game-playing mechanism--and destructive at that,” says Paula McIntyre in sharp contradiction. McIntyre owns an East County franchise of The Diet Center and acts as its San Diego representative. “Pretty soon, you’ll have no program at all. They’ll tell you you can eat hamburgers and ice cream, all sorts of junk, just budget it in, as long as you don’t go over 1,000 or 1,200 calories a day. It’s nonsense. Pretty soon, you’re eating nothing but junk. Back to square one.”

Some programs--Forever Thin and San Diego Weight Reduction Medical Clinics among them--permit the eating of “forbidden foods” as long as they’re treated as treats (always earned, never mandatory). The Diet Center casts a vehement no. The Diet Center has rules that carry reprimands (stern lectures from “coaches” who themselves were once overweight).

“If you say you want to lose weight,” McIntyre said, “but don’t want to eat our food, we say, ‘We don’t want you in the program.’ ”

The Diet Center states flatly: No refined sugar, no chicken skin, no refined flours. Hamburgers and ice cream are treasures (evils?) of the past. Water (one-half gallon a day) is considered a staple. Bread is forbidden, except for bran crackers and Melba toast sold by the company.

“We’re really into no additives, watching ingredients, eating foods that are healthy and clean--living foods,” McIntyre said. “We also believe in eating as often as eight times a day, but--and this is the key--the smallest of portions. We allow a bit of caffeine but no more.”

The Diet Center includes six weeks’ reducing and daily one-on-one counseling. After that comes “stabilization” and up to a year of maintenance. Counseling is the key, not by licensed clinical therapists--by Diet Center personnel.

“Five years before I met Sybil Ferguson (the Idaho-based founder), I battled weight constantly,” said McIntyre, who lost 35 pounds. “Other programs are just body shops. People go in, go out, and whether it’s advice, a pill, a shot, there’s no counseling, no caring, no personal touch. Answer me this, where’s the love in that?”

McIntyre, now a trim, attractive woman with a go-getter’s panache and a resume’s worth of marketing skills, preaches the spiritual virtues of dieting. She counsels each client about God.

“They come from many different faiths and religions,” she said. “But it is important. I got where I am through God.”

The Diet Center claims a higher success rate (85%) than the 65% to 70% McIntyre says constitutes the national average. The El Cajon man who recently lost 100 pounds in 22 weeks is, she said, not uncommon. It all gets back to care and “ good eatin’.” A person on a low-calorie diet often will lose 33% fatty tissue, she said. A person on a balanced diet who also exercises may drop as much as 99% fatty tissue (a figure others corroborate).

The 15-year-old Diet Center says it’s the leading weight-loss program in the world (with outlets in Canada and South America). Again, more contradiction. Weight Watchers, in its 20th year, bills itself “the most successful program the world has ever known,” in the words of Joy Meyer, its local representative.

Meyer says it’s better than short-term programs because those “never put you in control. Everybody wants the easy answers,” she said from a desk in the Weight Watchers office, located in Clairemont next to a pizza parlor. “Weight Watchers puts you in control.”

It’s better than such programs as Forever Thin, she said, which treat only moderate cases (those needing a loss of 30 pounds or less). Scripps refers more serious cases to a clinical program that uses a protein-sparing fast.

“That isn’t reality,” Meyer said. “The world is full of food. And you have to deal with food no matter what you weigh. It’s an ugly, inescapable truth.”

Weight Watchers uses an “exchange” in which foods are weighed (controlling portion size) and given balance. For instance, a woman on a “full exchange” may have three fruits, two vegetables, six to eight proteins and three fats a day. A woman may consume no more than 1,200 calories a day, a man no more than 1,600 (standard limits on many diets). The cost is affordably low--$20 to join, $7 a week thereafter.

Classes and lectures are included. These, like those in most programs, are dominated by women. Meyer, a smooth, easygoing woman who would seem to intimidate no one, says some men somehow are intimidated nevertheless.

“Maybe this is sexist,” she said, “but men are less likely to ask for help than women.”

And yet many thrive on Weight Watchers. Meyer knows of one man in Chino who lost 250 pounds. She lost 50, following the method of 58% complex carbohydrates, 32% fat, 10% protein. She’s counseled clients (as many programs claim) from “8 to 80.” (However, the average client is a woman, 35 to 40.)

No matter what the age, or the gender, or the disposition, the secret, Meyer said, is the same.

The elusive truth.

“It isn’t magic. There is none,” she said. “The only way to take it off and keep it off is to change your eating habits. I’m afraid it’s as simple as that.”

Wednesday: The role exercise plays in the weight-loss equation.