Health & Fitness: The Weight Shrinks

Not long ago a dietitian was that underpaid woman in the white smock who decided whether it would be peanut-butter or bologna sandwiches on the school lunch menu. Today, for those students who grew up to be bicoastal investment bankers, a dietitian is likely to be the latest acquisition in personal advisers. Though still usually a woman, she has gone private in a big way, with clients who include not only fitness trendies but the overweight, the pregnant and sufferers from such food-sensitive diseases as diabetes and hypertension. Aiming for permanent eating-pattern changes, the dietitian or nutritionist often holds the client’s hand during extended struggles to give up twelve cups of coffee a day or a five-bag Fritos habit. Says Manhattan TV Producer Roberta Becker, who dropped 20 pounds: “They are almost like weight shrinks.”

And they are almost charging shrinks’ fees. Sessions may cost $40 an hour and up, and a course of nutritionanalysis can run from an hour to a lifetime. In Beverly Hills, Registered Dietitian Hermien Lee charges $550 for a 14- session, 14-week program. “I call myself a food troubleshooter,” says Lee, who asks clients (including Ann-Margret and Robert Wagner) to take note of their troubles by keeping a diary detailing every bit of their daily food intake. At one session with Lee last month, Filmmaker Janna Gelfand, 26, read off the venial sins that had cost her an added pound, notably hors d’oeuvres at two cocktail parties. “You should have had a big bowl of vegetable soup before leaving your house,” said Lee. Gelfand objected, “I had a tight dress on, and soup puffs out my tummy.” Still, she has lost ten pounds and is enthusiastic about Lee’s method; “She tells me to imagine fat cells sticking their tongues out at me when I eat the wrong thing. It works!”

Most professional dietitians favor a program of gradual, moderate changes in eating habits, often recommending “grazing,” or eating many small meals throughout the day. It can take a year “to change people’s ways of thinking and behaving in regard to eating,” says Sherry Siegel, founder of a Chicago weight-consulting firm. There are also those who proffer unorthodox advice, like Oz Garcia, a successful, self-taught New York City nutritionist who decides what clients should eat after he has analyzed their hair. “I was a walking penny,” says Amy Greene, 54, a makeup consultant at the chic Henri Bendel store. Garcia found that her hair had a high copper content; he decreed she must stop drinking her usual 16 cups of tea a day. Now, Greene says, “my skin glows. If a dragon came in, I’d slay it.”

Traditional diet experts think hair analysis, saliva tests and the like are the scientific equivalent of junk food. “There are a lot of way-out quacks who are making a fortune,” warns Dr. Myron Winick, a nutrition expert at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center. Though hundreds of thousands have entered the field, nutrition counseling is largely ungoverned. The unrestricted binge may be ending, however. Before 1982 no states had regulations; now 14 do. The most prestigious organization, the American Dietetic Association, has 43,000 members who have passed a certification exam.

Many doctors are slowly coming to see the need for good nutrition counseling. Winick’s own hospital will open a nutrition clinic early this year. Some seeking nutrition therapy have a serious health problem they cannot correct on their own. Others just fear they are headed for trouble. “I don’t know anybody in my business who eats well,” says Los Angeles Investment Counselor Jay Goldinger, who recently started seeing Hermien Lee to learn how to shop and eat well. He is delighted. “Everybody could use a nutritionist. It gives you discipline.” Or helps if you have too little yourself.