Sweetie, Who's Slimming You This Season?

By KATE BETTS

[Y] ou can stare all day at the stylists, photographers and designers who will be flocking in and out of the Bryant Park tents for the New York fashion shows this week and still miss the accessory of the season. It's not some luscious, tangible object like Marc Jacobs's vintage-looking military jacket with chevrons and pewter buttons. The accessory of the moment is the diet.

In the front row and backstage, count on the chatter to be peppered with talk of points and portions. Text messages will fly with the titles of diet books and "natural" appetite suppressants like Xenadrine and Hydroxycut. The names and numbers of obscure doctors will be scribbled messily inside Smythson leather-bound notebooks. And in some Celine Boogie bags, you might find a stainless-steel thermos of bancha twig tea, a Japanese concoction favored by macrobiotic eaters, who take great pains to explain that they are balancing their acidity with a judicious splash of alkaline. Or something.

Like label groupies devoted slavishly to one designer for a season before moving on to the next hot thing, fashion and Hollywood folk have fallen for fad diets and are enticing friends to join them. They are creating mini-societies, each with a common devotion to one regime, and along with it the giddy sense of being in on something new, of belonging to a group that's cool.

Can there be any news in the fact that fashion and body-obsessed celebrities are chattering about diets? The real stop-the-presses story would be if the fashionistas gathering this week in New York for their semiannual round of designer shows and latte bingeing had renounced their quasi-pathological obsession with weight. Diets have always been woven into the life of the image-conscious, but it used to be something you didn't admit ? like the model "sent away" to drop five pounds before she could work again. Now diets are discussed openly, unashamedly, cheerfully. Having a diet is almost . . . de rigueur.

"Diets had a connotation of shame before," said Brana Wolf, a prominent fashion stylist. "Now it's, like, Hey, who's your doctor? Today it's a swapping of information like never before."

The latest trend among the style-setters and celebrities is to claim membership in a diet tribe ? a group whose individuals happily share their shortcuts, chemical-free protein bars and secret splurges. While Gwyneth Paltrow and Madonna were performing onstage in London last season, they bonded over a macrobiotic regimen featuring the green bancha twig tea. Jennifer Aniston reportedly turned the cast of "Friends" on to her Zone program. The model Amber Valetta and Orlando Pita, a hairstylist, have introduced a bevy of fashion pals, including the designer Narciso Rodriguez and the photographer Steven Meisel, to a New York chiropractor and nutritionist named Charles Passler.

Dr. Marion Nestle, chairwoman of nutrition and food studies at New York University, said that while there was comfort in numbers, hopping onto a diet bandwagon is rarely a formula for successful long-term weight loss.

"Because somebody says it works, other people try it," Dr. Nestle said. "The novelty is fun, and these diets do work for a very limited time.

"Everyone is looking for easy ways to do it, but these diets are difficult to do. It's not a normal eating pattern to exclude whole food groups from what you eat, so you eventually stop and gain the weight back and start all over again."

Unlike the situation in fashion, where innovation is the relentless mantra, the most popular diets aren't necessarily the newest ones. Despite the endless stream of newfangled ways to count calories and cut fat, it's the vintage systems like Weight Watchers, the Atkins program, macrobiotic diets and even Dolly Parton's program of eating many tiny meals that seem to have the strongest pull. Maybe that is because, just like fashion trends, diets slip in and out of vogue. And, just like the Marc Jacobs military jacket, the vintage aspect of a diet can hold a lot of appeal.

"It's funny that these old-school diets keep coming back," said Angela Mariani, a fashion publicist who has done the 20-year-old Herbalife diet twice. "People remember their mothers doing Atkins."

Now, a healthy slice of New York's high society is hooked on Atkins, including the jet-setting sisters Alexandra Von Furstenberg and Marie-Chantal of Greece, who swear by it. Samantha Boardman, a regular on the New York-Palm Beach circuit, was so taken by the whole Atkins lifestyle that she briefly considered dropping out of her psychiatry residency at the New York University Medical School to work as an apprentice to the creator of the diet, Dr. Robert C. Atkins, at the Atkins Center for Complementary Medicine on the East Side.

These days Dr. Atkins, whose protein diet allows the consumption of fat but not carbohydrates, is experiencing a somewhat triumphant revival: the latest edition of his 1972 book, updated and retitled "Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution," has been hovering at or near the top of The New York Times's list of best-selling advice, how-to and miscellaneous paperbacks for 275 weeks.

The Atkins method isn't the only one that has captivated the fashion and Hollywood crowds. Thanks to Rosie O'Donnell and her former publicist Jennifer Glaisek, Weight Watchers has also gripped Hollywood. Over a year ago, Ms. O'Donnell conscripted her entire staff to follow the regime as she did so herself and discussed it on the air. Soon a dozen of Ms. Glaisek's colleagues at the powerful public relations firm of PMK/HBH were also showing up for weekly weigh-ins at the offices of the "Rosie" show.

"It was the visual of Jennifer Glaisek," said Toby Fleischman, a PMK/HBH publicist who joined the group. "Visually, she looked really good. She lost a lot of weight, and that inspired the rest of us. I did Weight Watchers when I was 14, and it was a very humiliating experience, but this time Rosie was often at the meetings, and there was a great sense of camaraderie."

The group, all women, stuck together in the Weight Watchers meetings for only about six months, just long enough to squeeze into Seven low-rider jeans. Like fashion trends, diet tribes often maintain a life span of only that long.

"It died off around the holidays," Ms. Fleischman said. "The career lifestyle of a publicist just isn't that conducive to the points system."

But as with any trend, denim or otherwise, there is always something new to move along to, even if it isn't necessarily so new. The Zone, a diet created by Dr. Barry Sears in the late 1980's and introduced to a wider public in a best-selling book in 1995, has kept a firm grip on a group of Hollywood devotees for seven years. Jennifer Aniston is the most outspoken one, but Cindy Crawford, Kristin Davis and Courtney Love have also been in the Zone tribe, adhering to the diet's allowance of meals with carefully measured proportions of protein and carbohydrate that are prepared and delivered to each participant's home every day in black plastic boxes (at $4.95 each). The only problem is that after a while, some people grow sick of the food.

"It's like hospital food," said Art Luna, a popular Hollywood hairstylist who works with Anjelica Huston and Reese Witherspoon. "Anyway, I hear Sugar Busters is on its way back," he said of a diet that restricts sugar and refined carbohydrates. Mr. Luna, who recently dropped 15 pounds on a diet he concocted himself, swears by the oldest diet trick in the book: eat less.

"It's the Dolly Parton portion control diet," he said. "You just eat fist-size portions of the food you'd normally eat. It's a very 1950's way of eating."

Not everyone following a diet is trying to lose weight. Many fashion professionals and celebrities seek out diet doctors or nutritionists for advice on how they can eliminate stress, stop smoking or generally change an unhealthy lifestyle.

That was the case for Gwyneth Paltrow, who, after five bouts with a nasty flu virus, decided it was time to take steps. Her yoga teacher, Eddie Stern, recommended a nutritionist who prescribed a macrobiotic diet.

"I was working on `Possession' in London at the time," Ms. Paltrow said. "And it's very hard to avoid dairy and meat there, so I had all this stuff brought over, and it happened to be macrobiotic. Everyone laughed at me, but even my brother, who is really a bacon cheeseburger kind of guy, now loves the food."

Fashion people, who tend to like their diets custom tailored like their clothes, often gravitate to diet doctors who give them individually designed programs for losing weight. The designers Michael Kors and Isaac Mizrahi put the name of Dr. Jairo Rodriguez, a chiropractor who also advises patients on nutrition, into circulation along the front row several seasons ago. Dr. Charles Passler is the latest favorite for weight-conscious fashion people like Dylan Lauren, the daughter of Ralph, and the Estée Lauder model Carolyn Murphy.

Dr. Passler said he has a lot of patients from the fashion world mostly because of the professional pressures for them to look good and because many of them are tired of quick-fix diet fads or ephedrine-based appetite suppressants that make them feel unhealthy.

"People are realizing they need to be foundationally well," Dr. Passler said.

"People are tired of just running around after the latest, greatest restaurant, the miracle pill, the therapy of the month. They want something that works for them. I don't know if it's cyclical, or because of the economy or terrorism, but it seems that people are looking to learn how to manage their lifestyle when it comes to food."

So through a mix of biofeedback, nutritional supplements and applied kinesiology ? a technique that supposedly determines a person's affinity for food types by fluctuations in muscle strength ? Dr. Passler tells his patients what he thinks will work for them nutritionally.

"I worry sometimes that he has too many fashion patients," said Ms. Wolf, the stylist, who has been in the Passler tribe for three years. "I warned him, but then I thought, `These are people who will go once and never go again.' " Like all fashion accessories, the diet never lasts more than a season.


http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/15/f....html?tntemail0