The ultimate diet challenge: part 2
It’s been six months, how are the six dieters doing?
NBC NEWS
link to article
July 15 — Everyone knows shedding a few of those extra pounds is good for your health. If that’s not enough to get you on a diet, how about your high school reunion? In April, “Dateline” introduced you to six members of the class of ’78 at Quincy High in Massachusetts. Their 25th reunion is coming up this fall and all six are looking to lose weight before the big event. “Dateline” has been helping them, and what they’re learning might help you. Each was assigned a radically different diet plan, everything from marathon training to hypnosis. They started back in January. Six months later, who’s at the head of the class?
WHEN THE CLASS of 2003 graduated from Quincy High School this summer, they no doubt had dreams of college, jobs, and marriage. But how about expanding waistlines? It can happen. Ask the Quincy grads of 1978.
There’s the class secretary. This January she weighed 174. Quincy’s star athlete tipped the scales at 230. A ladies man back in high school was 245 pounds. President of the math club weighed 300. For another, who’s yearbook picture caption reads, ‘Hey you want your face busted?’ weighed in at 328. And the homecoming queen, well, she was not telling.
Dateline had selected six different ways to lose weight, from popular diets like Atkins, Weight Watchers and Slim Fast, to intense exercise, having your own weigh loss guru, and even hypnosis. They had 10 months to slim down, and so it began.
First up was class secretary Lynn Frank, who wants to lose 35 pounds.
Lynn: “I feel like I’ve really taken on a challenge.”
Lynn’s agreed to try what we call the intense exercise diet. How intense? She training for a marathon, the Maui Marathon in Hawaii this September.
John Larson: “Have you ever run in a 20 mile race?”
Lynn: “No, never.”
Larson: “Ever run in a 15?”
Lynn: ” I’ve never run an organized race.
Larson: “Ever?”
Lynn: “No, I only run after kids. That’s it.”
Lynn’s not kidding. She’s the mother of seven, four girls and three boys. To make running easier, she put herself on the low fat USDA food pyramid diet. But after a month of going full tilt, Lynn was down just six pounds.
Lynn: “Not good. I did a lot of exercise this week. I’m surprised it’s not less.”
But that would soon change. Two months later Lynn has reduced her body fat by 12 percent, added muscle and dropped 14 pounds.
Next is the gifted athlete Mark Giordani, who also wants to lose 35 pounds. His daughter says she used to be able to put her arms around him, but couldn’t anymore. “Gio,” as he’s called, never had a weight problem until he injured his back on the job two years ago. While waiting for workman’s comp to approve his surgery, Gio has been homebound and eating. Last fall he topped out at a hefty 250.
Gio chose the Slim Fast diet, which has six daily “eating occasions,” that include shakes, bars and low fat food and snacks. Early on, he was starving. To make matters worse, he’d watch his kids wolf down his favorite foods, while he nibbled on plain popcorn. Two months in, laid up with a bad back and hungry, our Slim Fast dieter couldn’t take it.
Gio: “I went back to the attitude where I’m hungry, I’m going to eat and I don’t really care.”
Homecoming queen Kathy Wynters wants to lose a little more, 40 pounds. Today she is an active mother of two, works two part-time jobs and has a busy weekend social life. She chose Weight Watchers, a diet she tried twice before. Here food is given a point value based on its calorie, fat and fiber content. The goal is to stay within your daily point range and attend meetings. At first Kathy’s miserable. But two months later, she was having success like never before, down 19 pounds.
Kathy: “I feel like a little kid when you dress up in your mom’s clothes and everything is big, just hangs on you. It’s a great feeling!”
Marc Merlis, the one time ladies’ man back in high school wanted to lose 45 pounds. It won’t be easy. He’s a baker by trade with a serious food weakness. He also has another problem: his cholesterol is through the roof, at 322.
We took him to Dr. Tom Nicoli, a hynotherapist outside Boston who gave Marc suggestions on healthy eating and life style — and told him the color red will fortify everything he learned under hypnosis.
Nicoli: “Brake lights, tail lights, lipstick, fingernail polish, clothing. Anytime you see the color red consciously or unconsciously.”
Before he knew it Marc was exercising, eating well and shedding pounds — 25 pounds the first month. And with the help of the hypnotist’s tapes, he stayed on track. Two months in, he was down 34 pounds.
Next, math whiz Eleanor Talbot has an even more daunting goal, to lose 120 pounds. Today Eleanor is a meteorologist and married without children. We decided to give Eleanor her very own weight loss coach. Jorge Cruise is the author of the bestseller, “Eight Minutes in the Morning” and now “Eight Minutes for Real Shapes, Real Sizes.” He believes exercise is crucial for any weight loss.
But more important, he conducts weekly conference call on what he calls “emotional eating,” using food to cope with life’s problems.
Jorge: “It usually comes from people not feeling, as corny as this may sound, loved in one way or another. Or nurtured is probably a better word.”
But instead of reaching for food for comfort, Jorge says, reach out to people.
Jorge: “Call each other and e-mail each other anytime you feel you need a connection.”
It was a breakthrough concept for Eleanor. And Jorge says go slowly. Lose two pounds a week and she did. By March, Eleanor had lost 19 pounds.
Finally, there is tough guy Rick Burnes. His goal is the most ambitious of all, to lose 150 pounds. Rick says the Atkins diet is perfect for him.
Rick: “The meat, the fish the eggs — it’s everything I love.”
Sure enough, one month on the high protein low carbohydrate diet, his weight was falling off, 27 pounds.
Rick: “I’ve had hamburgers for breakfast, lunch and then a steak for dinner.”
His trick was that he’s been exercising with a vengeance and loading up on meat, especially red meat. But his high protein almost “no carbs” approach may have backfired. Five weeks in, Rick developed a painful case of gout, a condition he’d had before, that he suspected was a result of the diet. His future on Atkins was uncertain. But out of the gate, even with some glitches, everyone was motivated and losing weight. But the middle months present much more of a challenge.
Three months into the Dateline Diet Challenge, our marathon woman dropped three more pounds, 17 in all.
Lynn: “It is slower but I am feeling better and better and I am dropping clothing sizes so..”
But by May, the running was sheer torture.
Lynn: “I hate every minute of it, every step is really bothering me.”
Three weeks later, her knee gave out. It was almost the last straw. But quitting this or anything she’s agreed to, was not a message she wanted to send to her children.
Lynn: “You have to finish things in life no matter how hard it is and this is getting hard.”
After a much needed vacation Gio, the injured athlete on Slim Fast, was back on track. Back home in April he was still waiting for workman’s comp to approve his back surgery, but he kept his weight at 220. Now, he can even drive by fast food places without stopping.
Gio: “Before, for some reason my car would just go left [laugher]. Now it just goes straight.”
Then one day in May, Gio was finally approved for surgery. Now, he hoped to reclaim his life and resume his diet.
In April, homecoming queen Kathy threw a Palm Sunday dinner for 20. It was Weight Watchers all around and she was seeing results in the strangest places.
Kathy: “I went down a shoe size — Did I tell you that? Isn’t it bizarre?”
But a vacation for Kathy was a setback.
Kathy: “I had ice cream and I had chocolate and candy apples and all those things.”
After that, she slowed down a bit. Kathy lost just two pounds in May.
In the past she might have thrown in the towel, but Kathy was still plugging away.
Kathy: “I think because the camera’s here it’s keeping me motivated.”
As for the hypnotized baker, things couldn’t be better. By April he had lost almost five inches off his waist. And look who else caught the fever. His wife went to the hypnotist to quit smoking. And guess what? She says she no longer has the desire to smoke anymore. Smoke free, fat free, the Merlis’s are flying. At their son’s bar mitzvah this May, lifting Marc was a piece of cake.
After talking to Eleanor by phone for 12 weeks, her coach, Jorge, sensed something was bothering her. So “Dateline” agreed to get them together for on a weekend retreat to help Eleanor go deeper.
Jorge: “It’ll get her to see why she uses food in the past as a way to heal her hungry heart, if you will.”
Eleanor’s been overweight her whole life and to her credit, she was willing to find out why. It was emotional journey to say the least. And it’s another breakthrough. More committed than ever, her weight keeps going down.
At the onset of Rick’s gout, Dateline put him in touch with the Atkins Foundation who say anyone with a history of gout can be at risk for a reoccurrence on the Atkins diet. They recommended that Rick slow down his weight loss.
They also began sending him Atkins-at-Home meals to insure his diet was properly balanced. By April, his gout was under control. He was back on red meat, focused and smarter And by May, Rick was the thinnest he’d been in 10 years.
So where are we now in Dateline Diet Challenge?
This June we brought our dieters together for a pot luck picnic that wound up indoors at Gio’s, who’s now recovering from surgery. It was a chance to compare notes, sample different foods and weigh in.
Lynn: “I can see going to the Merlis’s house now, the whole place will be painted red.”
With Slim Fast and back surgery, Gio has lost down 19 pounds, halfway to his goal.
On Weight Watchers, Kathy is down 22 pounds, halfway to her goal. The runner Lynn has dropped 23 of the 35 pounds she wants to lose — and after physical therapy, she’s up and running again.
On hypnosis, the baker’s weight loss is now 37 pounds, with just eight to go.
With Jorge Eleanor is cruising a third of the way home, she’s shed 41 pounds.
And Rick takes the cake on Atkins. He’s more than halfway to his goal, having lost 81 pounds.
Six dieters at the start, six dieters minus a good 200 pounds — and there’s still four months until to their high school reunion.
Dateline's Diet Challenge
Linear Mode
