July 19, 2022 • 43 mins
The South Beach Diet became an incredible success in the early 2000s, blowing past booksellers’ expectations, dominating the cultural moment and becoming a huge business. In the third episode of Losing It, we fly down to glamorous Miami to tell the story of the South Beach Diet and break down the formula for a hit diet.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Okay, I won't do that many wounds, but you'll get
a sense of one certainly about what my boxing because
I'm not famous boxing. For the record, this is not
a famous boxer still thinks I'm gonna be champion. True,
(00:23):
we're coming the champ anyway. We we're coming from Mike Tyson.
It's a few more years. We're coming from the man
I'm standing with in a makeshift South Florida outdoor jim
with his trainer, surrounded by curious kids. Is Arthur Agatston.
You may not know his name, but you definitely know
(00:47):
his diet, which was everywhere in the early two thousand's
Real weight loss for real people. Go to South Beach
diet dot com today. You'll rev up your metabolism for
even faster weight loss by the doctor behind the rebel
snary South Beach die. I'm a real person. I lost
nine pounds in Arthur is still hard at work on
(01:09):
his beach body. We're on the swanky island off the
coast of Miami, where Arthur lives with his wife Sarah.
His regular boxing lesson is about to kick off. We're
standing outside on a basketball court. Every so often a
ship comes by, blasting it's horn. Arthur's trainer is a
(01:32):
former professional boxer named Juan Arroyo. They start off with
some shadow boxing, then one takes out his boxing mites
for Arthur to hit jack shoulder how wide like this
(01:52):
when you gotta stand right to polo, wait in the
middle to the chair so I can see what the
diet does. Arthur is nimble on his feet. As one
swings admit at him, he quickly ducks. He looks young
(02:14):
and agile. Arthur credits the South Beach diet with at
least some of his endurance. It is also the source
of some pretty immense wealth. The island where he lives,
Fisher Island, is accessible from Miami only by fairy or
(02:37):
private yacht. We got here today on the ferry in
a tesla. Arthur's neighbors include the model Carolina Kurkova, former
New York Knicks player David Lee, and tennis star Carolyn
was Niacki. Oprah owned a condo here at one point.
(02:57):
The police looks like a resort. People even travel around
the island on golf carts. But I'm not here to
rub elbows with the rich and famous or get feedback
on my right hook. In early two thousand's, the South
Beach Diet became a sensation. I was just a kid
(03:20):
at the time, but I know that my mom did
the diet for a little bit. Lots of people did.
It was everywhere, and I wanted to understand why. After all,
it's basically a low carb diet, which means eating lots
of protein and vegetables and not eating much bread, pasta
(03:45):
and dessert. And as we learned in the last episode,
low carb diets are nothing new. They've actually been around
for many, many years. And yet the South Beach Diet
book but Key a major bestseller and spawned a franchise
that has sold more than twenty three million books. It's
(04:09):
hey day. Everyone from former President Bill Clinton to actress
Nicole Kidman were reportedly fans. And the South Beach Diet
wasn't just insanely popular. It was insanely popular during a
time that I like to think of as the Golden
Age of the diet. From the nineties to the two thousand's,
(04:33):
the sheer number of diets was incredible. Wheat Watchers was
also exploding at the time. When you're on a diet hungry,
is there to sabotage you every step of the way.
The Biggest Loser was about to hit our TV screen
just a moment, one player will become this year's biggest Loser.
And when the grand ride a two hifty dollars from
(04:57):
new Visco one. There were even diet cookies you could
eat for breakfast. You want to lose up to fifteen
pounds of months get Smart for Life cookies. Doctors developed
Smart for Life cookies with extracts from natural ingredients like fruits,
vegetable for even the fashion of this time period seem
to require being impossibly skinny, remember low rise pants and
(05:22):
crop tops. In this episode, we're going to dissect the
South Beach diet. It's the prototypical diet in many ways.
It was created by a doctor. It designated certain foods
as good and others as bad, and it became a huge,
(05:43):
huge business. How does the diet become so popular that
decades later there are people who still have a South
Beach Diet cookbook hanging around their kitchen cupboard. How does
a particular diet go viral preaching the same kinds of
things diets have been preaching for many years. I'm going
(06:06):
to break it down and reveal the formula for viral
diet success. Like celebrity endorsements, I'm Bloomberg News health reporter
Emma Court and from the Prognosis podcast, this is Losing It.
(06:34):
The story of the South Beach Diet starts with Arthur
Agatston and a little bit of a belly, specifically his belly.
For most of his life, Arthur was thin and athletic,
so thin that sometimes he would even eat junk food
to try to put on a few pounds. But one
(06:55):
day he realized that he had gained some weight, and
not on purpose. In the mid nineties, Arthur was putting
in long days as a cardiologist at a Miami hospital
and I was sitting around with out cardiology fellows posting
about some athletic exploittant. The fellow starts laughing at me.
Arthur asks this guy, what's up? Said, look at your belly.
(07:17):
Arthur looks down only to find I really I had one.
So Arthur goes on a diet. But the diet wasn't
just the start of a weight loss journey for Arthur.
It was the start of a whole new chapter in
his career. I met Arthur on a bright December Day
in his medical practices office in Miami Beach. In person,
(07:41):
Arthur was really more like your classic doctor than a
diet guru. There were a couple of models of the
human heart in his office and a white coat hung
on the back of his chair. Arthur himself comes off
as kind and straightforward. He's also excited bowl prone to
tangents even while in the middle of telling a completely
(08:05):
different story. But Arthur is also a diet guru. Back
when he invented the South Beach Diet, a different kind
of regimen was all the rage. You probably remember how
supermarkets suddenly started stalking low fat everything, low fat cottage, cheese,
fat free yogurt, even low fat cookies. This became popular
(08:31):
in the eighties as a way of preventing heart disease
and losing weight. At the time, even the American Heart
Association recommended a low fat diet, and Arthur was into
heart health. He was a heart doctor, after all, not
just any heart doctor, a pioneering one. A test named
(08:53):
after him, the Agatstan score, is still used to pick
up people's risk of things like hard attacks. So as
Arthur is trying to figure out how to lose weight, himself.
He's also thinking about how nutrition impacts things like the
risk of heart disease, and he's pretty sure that low
fat diets aren't actually the answer. Low fat diets just
(09:16):
didn't work in clinical practice. It didn't lower your cholesterol,
and it didn't prevent diabetes or anything. Arthur thought low
fat diets were steering people in the wrong direction, people
like him. During late afternoons at work, he would sometimes
start feeling dizzy and shaky, so I would run down
(09:38):
to the doctor's lounge, have a low fat blueberry muffin
which was sugar and junk, and a cup of coffee
brought my blood sugar back up. Instead of low fat,
low carb diets were now becoming popular, led by another cardiologist,
Robert Atkins of Atkins Diet Face. So Arthur starts on
(10:02):
a low carb diet, and as soon as he does this,
he says that the pounds start melting away. He loses
about twelve pounds, the belly is gone, Arthur is back
to feeling like his usual fit self. He also suspects
(10:22):
that he is onto something. He thinks this diet would
be good for his patients too, so he meets up
with his colleague, a dietitian named Marie Almond. Together they
come up with what would eventually become the South Beach Diet,
a three phase plan for weight loss, but at the
(10:45):
time it had a different name, The Modified Carbohydrate Diet.
We eat healthy and did the best shape of your life.
Introducing the brand new Modified Carbohydrate Diet the Effective Weight,
Lose weight and learn the way to maintain a healthy
weight without hunger or deprivation. Catchy right. Arthur and Marie's
(11:06):
new diet was similar to Atkins, but had more of
an emphasis on healthy fats. Here's how it works. Phase
one is intense. That's when you have the most restrictions
on what you can eat. You're eating protein like fish
and meat and lots of vegetables. You can have milk
(11:28):
and cheese so long as they're low fat or non fat,
but you can't have bread, potatoes, pasta, alcohol, desserts. You
can't even eat fruit. In phase one, the point is
to get rid of cravings for foods that the diet
says are bad for you, and during this part of
(11:49):
the diet the pounds are supposed to drop fast. In
Phase two, things relax a little. You can start adding back,
whole grain breads, high fiber cereals, sweet potatoes, some kinds
of fruit, wine, and even chocolate. Sparingly, that is so
(12:10):
we really introduced the concepts of the good fats and
good carbs. You didn't have to be high carb or
low carb, or high fat or low fat. It was
choosing the healthy ones. South Beach became known as a
low carb diet. Anyway, in phase two, you're not restricting
what you eat as much, so the weight loss happens slower,
(12:34):
and you just stay in this phase of the diet
for however long it takes to hit your goal weight.
Another sort of novel idea of the diet emphasizes is
snacking and strategic weights. Because your blood sugars did have
swings and before your blood sugar dropped, if you had
a snack and prevented that dropped, it would prevent you
(12:56):
from being very hungry and in general, blood shook er
is kind of a theme of the South Beach diet.
It tells dieters to eat foods with a low glycemic index,
especially in phase one. The idea is that these foods
should keep you full for longer and less likely to crave,
say mint, chocolate chip ice cream. Once you've lost weight,
(13:20):
you move into phase three. The diet basically says you've
learned how to eat, and you can relax a bit.
There's no list of foods to eat and foods to
avoid anymore like you can eat chocolate sponge cake now.
The book actually says that beyond the chocolate sponge cake,
(13:40):
the diet is honestly a little vague about exactly how
this phase should look. It does say that people can
overdo it and regain weight at this point. If that's
what happens, then the book tells you to start back
at phase one again. In this way, the South Beach
Diet spread a classic diet myth. The myth is this,
(14:05):
you diet for a little while, then get back to
your normal life now with a new slimmer body. Except
that's not really true. You have to keep up these
new habits if you want to keep the weight off.
If you don't, you wind up in a never ending
(14:25):
cycle of losing and gaining weight, which is not good
for your health. The diet I just outlined, by the way,
was the original South Beach Diet. There's also a newer version.
Before it was a book, The South Beach diet was
just a pamphlet, Arthur says. Even calling it a pamphlet
(14:48):
might be over selling it. It was three or four
sheets of Xerox paper stapled together. Arthur and Marie offered
the pamphlets to patients at their hospital who were in
hardiac rehab, which is where people who have had heart
attacks and other heart problems come to get healthy again.
(15:08):
Arthur says he sometimes meets people who still have their
original staple together copies of the diet. Arthur's patients start
losing weight. Soon, a local TV station wants to do
a segment on the diet. Arthur is into it. He
also starts realizing that his diet has commercial potential. He
(15:30):
and his wife end up buying the rights from the
hospital where he works. It's called Mount Sinai Medical Center.
Arthur also realized that his diet probably needs a new name.
Modified Carbohydrate diet just didn't quite roll off the tongue.
(15:53):
He toyed with just calling it the Agatstan diet, in
the model of other doctors turned diet gurus before him,
like Robert Atkins. But Arthur wasn't crazy about this idea.
Arthur is an academic at heart, he didn't want to
become Mr. Diet Doctor. Arthur says, it's his wife, Sarah
(16:15):
who ultimately comes up with the name. They're at dinner
one night, eating al fresco at a Mediterranean spot underneath
a big tree in South Beach, a famous Miami neighborhood
known for its beaches, nightlife, and gorgeous people. Serry thinks
about it and she realizes it's the South Beach Diet.
(16:39):
I love South Beach when my wife said it, because
he we were on South Beach and South Beach was
becoming hot, and what I concluded was unless you went
to the public and marketing, you weren't going to be successful.
The imagery that South Beach conveyed was perfect. It made
you think of beautiful women in teeny bikinis and tan,
(17:04):
muscular men on a glamorous white sand beach, and South
Beach the place was itself having kind of a moment.
Miami had already been a popular place to visit with
its son and sand, but South Beach started becoming really
(17:24):
well known in the eighties thanks to new investments in
hotels and restaurants. There was also a new hit show
called Miami vice. By the time the South Beach Diet
hit the scene, South Beach had become the sort of
(17:47):
place rich and beautiful people like to hang out. The
newly named diet is featured on local TV in South Florida,
which ends up being kind of a turning point for
Arthur and the South Beach Diet. Arthur in the Diet
become pretty well known locally. At least then everybody said,
(18:08):
where you have to write a book, And at that
point no, no, so Arthur did. The book is called
The South Beach Diet. The Delicious Doctor Designed foolproof plan
for fast and healthy weight loss. The Diet hit bookstores
in April two three and spent almost nine months at
(18:32):
number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Eventually,
it would be translated into more than thirty languages, spawn
a whole franchise of South Beach guides and cookbooks, and
sell more than twenty three million books under the South
Beach Diet brand. It was a phenomenon. It's a groundbreaking
(18:54):
phenomenon with a global following. The South Beach Diet and
the South Beach did change the way Americans dieted, but
not forever. Millions of people did the diet back then.
One of them was Jeanette fold Up. She's a freelance
(19:16):
web developer who lives in Indianapolis. At the time she
tried out the diet, she was twenty four and had
been struggling with her weight since middle school. Jeanette was
skeptical of fad diets, but she had been trying to
lose weight on her own for a while and it
hadn't been going so well. She needed a plan, and
(19:39):
the South Beach Diet didn't seem like that much of
a fad diet. For one thing, it had been invented
by a cardiologist. I chose the South Beach Diet because
my brother had lost about sixty pounds on it, and
he wasn't doing anything crazy. You eat lean meats like
turkey and chicken, You eat whole grains stead of like
(20:00):
white bread, eat vegetables and foods, and that all seems
reasonable to me. Jeanette kept a weight loss blog. After all,
this wasn't just the golden age of the diet. This
was also the heyday of internet blogging. Jeanette's blog was
called Pasta Queen. The South Beach Diet cracks down on
(20:20):
pasta by the way, I combed through its archives to
see what she had written about the South Beach Diet
at the time. I could see how some of the
facets of the diet we've been talking about drew her
to it and kept her on it, like the first
phase where Jeanette lost sixteen pounds in two weeks. Here's
Jeanette reading from one of her early posts. You learn
(20:43):
some basic rules about what types of food to eat
and about how much, and then they set your free.
You can do what you want with the permitted foods,
allowing for lots of variety. Plus you're supposed to eat
until you're full. Wow, a diet that didn't expect you
to starve. All of those traits combined to make diet
that I think I can actually follow for a long
period of time, hopefully the rest of my life. Basically,
(21:06):
I've chosen the South Beach Diet because one, you start
losing weight immediately to the regiment isn't difficult to learn.
You just learn the basic principles, what you eat is
flexible within the rules, and three, I should never feel
hungry or deprived. I hope it works. Ah. Yes, a
diet that's flexible as long as you follow all of
(21:29):
the rules. We've heard this from dieters before, like Damie Cologne.
In episode one. Janette also says that in retrospect, the
diet sort of taught her what healthy eating was supposed
to look like. She had some vague ideas, but the
diet really pinned those details down. In the past, I've
kind of tried to eat healthy, but because I didn't
(21:51):
know specifically, like what should I be eating, you know,
that was a little hard. I did, like the South
Beach Diet did have like a list of food where
it was okay, this is okay in phase one, this
is okay, Phase two, this is okay, and phase three,
so I can kind of referred to that just be like, okay,
you know our bananas on the list. For the record,
(22:11):
bananas are not on the list in phase one, but
you can have them specifically medium sized bananas in phase two.
In two years, Jeanette ends up losing nearly two hundred pounds.
Let me just say that again, two hundred pounds. She
(22:32):
lost half of her body weight, and she actually ends
up writing a memoir about all this. Here's Jeanette on
the Today Show and Jeanette Foldy is with us this morning, Janette,
welcome and congratulations. I'm gonna start off with a question
I don't normally start off with guests. How much do
you weigh now? Pounds? Jeanette brings her old pants to
(22:54):
the show and holds them up before the audience. The
chiron reads skinny story Weight Loss two. She's sitting on
a stool in the interview, and she told me that
she thinks they sat her there on purpose, so her
whole body was visible in the shot. We'll come back
to her and what she calls after the after photo
(23:17):
in a bit. Remember our original question, why did the
South Beach Diet take off? Was it the name or
that it was invented by a doctor? Was it that
it seemed easy with only two weeks of really restrictive dieting.
(23:39):
I wanted to get to the bottom of this question,
so I talked to Carol Angstad, who designed the cover
of the original South Beach Diet book. The name obviously
was a big part of what sent The South Beach
Diet to the top of the best seller list, but
the way I see it, Carol's book design is another
(24:00):
key factor. It's publisher, a company called Roedale was banking
on the book taking off. Rodale wanted it to look
like a big book, a publishing term for covers that
are eye catching and look like best sellers. In practice,
that usually means having the title in huge letters, taking
(24:23):
center stage. So Carol pitched exactly that. The background was
a bright turquoise color with a palm tree peeking out
on one corner. It was actually a stock photo. The
words the South Beach Diet are stacked in front of
the beach shot, taking up most of the page, and
then Arthur's name is on the bottom. It reads Arthur
(24:46):
Agatston M d It's really, you know, when you look
at it, very basic and simple. It's just, you know,
the blue and the green kind of flowing together, are
in just a hint of the palm frond. This is
the design the publisher Rodale goes with. They also add
(25:07):
onto the cover the words lose belly fat first. This
is what they call a hook of the diet, a
thing that sets it apart and draws people in. They
also end up printing the cover on shiny foil paper,
which is more often used for things like romance novels.
(25:28):
Carol says that made the book feel sexy, which was
exactly what they were going for. It didn't even really
look like a diet book or even something health related.
Here's Tammy Booth Corwin, who became the editor in chief
and president of Rodale Books. And I remember the day
we were in my office now in Pennsylvania, myself and
(25:50):
our publisher Amy and all really all a big game.
Our deputy editor, Mary South, and we all stood around
and our designer put on the floor of my office
probably forty covers, and then one by one we took
out the ones that just weren't hitting us in some
(26:12):
special way, and and then it came down to the
cover that we that we published with. And one of
the things we loved about it was it looked like
a novel. It looked like something you'd sit down and
read on the beach. Diet publishers like Rodale knew that
standing out was the key to a successful diet book.
They were already tons of diets out there. A book
(26:35):
needed to sound new and fresh to get attention and
especially to sell. The other important piece was the way
the diet was structured. The three phases gave people a
sense of momentum, especially with a strict initial phase that
was likely to shed pounds fast. The fact that South
(26:57):
Beach had three parts to it was a classic move
from the diet playbook. The Acting Diet, for example, has
four phases. Phases help dieters feel like they're progressing and
moving forward even during periods of time when weight loss
slows or even stops, and phases also make dieters feel
(27:18):
like they'll eventually be done with the diet. In other words,
they can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
With the South Beach Diet, that light is phase three.
We've talked a lot so far about what made the
South Beach Diet successful, but we need to also talk
about what the diet overpromised and where it fell short.
(27:40):
These are themes we've looked at earlier in the series.
How with dieting, there's a thin line between information and misinformation.
When scientists evaluated various nutrition facts in Arthur's book in
two thousand and six, they found that only a third
was clearly backed up by published scientific research. For example,
(28:04):
one big draw of the South Beach diet was that
people lose eight to thirteen pounds in their first two weeks,
but the authors of this paper weren't able to find
any research backing that up. I spoke with one of
the studies authors, David cats. He points out that the
South Beach Diet does steer people away from processed foods
(28:27):
and added sugars, which is good, but it also tells
people to make changes that aren't sustainable, like eliminating certain
foods before bringing them back in later phases. The South
Beach Diet was an attempt to improve on Atkins and
say not all carbs are created equal, not all fat
(28:48):
is created equal. The emphasis on how this was a
uniquely effective way to lose weight was distortion. What David
is talking about here is something many weight loss programs
are guilty of, the idea that this diet works way
better than all the other diets out there. David doesn't
(29:09):
approve of health professionals and scientists, in particular giving the
public misleading information. After all, they're supposed to be the
people we can trust. Another questionable fact is the very
one promoted on the book's cover, lose belly fat first,
As if we can't determine where on our body pounds
(29:32):
will disappear from people lose weight in all kinds of ways. Arthur,
by the way, stands by the book, so he acknowledges
they got some things wrong, and the science has evolved
in areas. And when I bring up the criticisms, he
doesn't get defensive or anything. Did they about snacking? But
(29:54):
he says, basically he stands by the diet, that they've
corrected the record where they were wrong. Now the principles
everybody should be eating that way, as far as the
basic principles of avoiding sugars, avoiding bad cards. For all
Arthur's confidence, I still have questions overstating aspects of a
(30:16):
diet or going beyond the scientific evidence at the time.
Those things affect people. And yet none of this kept
the diet from becoming a sensation. It didn't matter whether
it did exactly what it said it would, because word
about the diet spread faster than the criticisms, and the
(30:37):
hype was compelling diet. The book became a bestseller eight
years ago and caused a revolution in the dieting world,
from cutting cards to swearing off sweets, The South Beach
Diet changed the way many Americans slim down, something that
seems to have worked to the South Beach diets advantage
(30:58):
was the reach of its publisher. Rodale was an important
player in the health and fitness world. It owned nine magazines,
including Men's Health, Prevention and Runners World, reaching about seven
million readers altogether. When The South Beach Diet was published,
Prevention ran an eleven page spread. There were pieces in
(31:19):
Runners World and Men's Health. Diet also made the cover
of another well read magazine called Women's World, which wasn't
owned by Rodale. Rodale also sent out five million direct
mailers to get the word out. In other words, Rodale
had some serious resources and it used them to tell
people about the South Beach Diet. And there was another
(31:42):
new way to reach people, the Internet. This is the
two thousand's, the era of Internet businesses, including an early Amazon, Yahoo,
and eBay. People are starting to get smarter phones and
even watch cat videos online, and the Rodale team put
the butting Internet to work. They partnered with a company
(32:06):
now called Everyday Health to offer subscription diet content and
message boards for dieters. Part of that was community, which
we could not offer in the book. For example, that
was Tammy again from Rodale, and it really complimented the book.
All of the branding they did drove book sales. Book
(32:26):
sales drove to the digital product with South Beach Diet
dot com. It's now easier than ever to lose weight
while eating the foods you love. I do. I get
to eat the sweets now with South Beach. And there
was another thing that really helped push the South Beach
Diet to the masses, celebrity endorsements. Former President Bill Clinton
(32:47):
happened to have a new book coming out around the
same time, so he went on a book tour and
he looked great, and people were asking him, you look great,
and he said, I think it was in New York Magazine.
He said, I'm almost stopped me to diet, and from
there sales skyrocketed. Jessica Simpson, who famously wore short shorts
(33:12):
in the two thou five Dukes of Hazard movie, was
also said to have used the diet to fit into
her Daisy dukes. The actress Bette Midler was another South
Speech diet fan. Celebrities are especially effective diet ambassadors because
people already want to look like them. As the diet
was taking off, Tammy and other Rodelle employees would gather
(33:36):
around their publisher's office every week and wait to hear
how well the book had sold. Back then, you had
to wait for the numbers to come in. You couldn't
just check them online. Then the publisher, Amy Rhodes, would
decide whether they needed to print more copies. And literally,
in the first year we went back to press twenty
(33:58):
three times. I think it was. It would be so exciting.
Amy would say, I'm pushing the button for another hundred
thousand copies, And the first time that happened, we we thought,
you know, this isn't another stratosphere. Now. This brings me
to the final and critical piece of all this timing
and context. Remember before the Southweach diet launched, everyone was
(34:22):
talking about a different dietary villain fat. This was the
era of fat free cookies and frozen yogurt. After all,
the cultural tide started to shift with the Atkins diet,
which made carbs into a dirty word. Instead, you walked
in the studio and a collective gas over, how fantastic
(34:44):
you look. I know you're doing Atkins. I'm doing Atkins.
In the first six weeks, I lost twenty three pounds,
then I went to thirty pounds I lost, and then Christmas.
That was Sharon Osborne, who was a celebrity ambassador for
the diet. Atkins was extremely popular, but it was also
criticized because it told people to eat a lot of
(35:07):
fatty foods. Doctor said then that it could be dangerous
for people. Then Robert Atkins, the inventor of the Atkins Diet, died,
He'd been injured, but it started this huge controversy about
whether Robert Atkins himself was in poor health. There was
(35:31):
a discussion around the time of his death about, you know,
did he have a bad heart. You know, people said
he was OBEs. A doctor who worked with Atkins, by
the way, denied a lot of this back then and
said Robert atkins medical issues likely weren't because of his diet.
(35:51):
It was all very sad. However, having a heart healthy
diet to replace it almost at the same time was
just a very odd, odd bit of timing that ended
up being something that helped the book kind of take
that place. It's customary for diet books to come out
(36:11):
in January, but Rodell actually put The South Beach Diet
out in April, wanting to set it apart a little bit. Remember,
Bill Clinton is going on his own book tour around
this time and talking about the diet, and then the
very month the South Beach Diet book comes out, Robert
Atkins dies, the timing couldn't have been predicted, but it
(36:33):
would wind up being very important. And really, this is
one of those stories of a book or a launch
where you do everything right in your mind, you do
everything you can do, and then you send it out
into the world and you don't know what will happen next,
and then there are all of these X factors that
go into it, the timing, you know, in terms of
(36:56):
how people receive it, what else is happening in the marketplace,
in at specific category, in elsewhere, and so on. To
recapt the South Beach Diet succeeded because of its branding,
it's tremendous reach, celebrity endorsements, and timing. That formula worked
for this diet, and it's worked for countless other diets too.
(37:19):
For the people behind the South Beach Diet, it was
a success story. It had blown past expectations, dominated the
cultural moment, and redefined how well a diet and a
diet book could do. But for at least one person
who actually did the diet, it was way more complicated
that person was Jeanette Folda, who we spoke with earlier.
(37:43):
She lost almost two hundred pounds on the South Beach diet.
This is the story of after the after photo. As
she puts it, Jeanette loses all that weight and keeps
it off for about a year and a half. Then
it starts to creep being back. But that was the
least of her problems. I still have that. It's been
(38:06):
fourteen years now. I've had a four fourteen years. Jeanette
started getting these persistent headaches, not because of the diet
or anything. They just started happening, and nothing really helped
to relieve the pain. Dealing with health issues made it
really hard to keep dieting, as you might imagine. So
(38:27):
I was worrying at nine to five job, and I
would just be exhausted at the end of the day
and I would just stopped the grocer staring at something
the ice cream or you know, chocolate covered almonds or something,
and I would eat as soon as I got home,
and that was like the best part of the day.
It's not just Jeanette. Dieting might be manageable in the
(38:47):
day to day when everything is going right, but then
again when does everything go right. Things come up, including
unfortunately illness for Danny Cologne, the calorie counter, who we
talked to in our first episode The road Bump, was
a family member's health crisis. This is incredibly common. For Jeanette,
(39:11):
it was her own health troubles. I can't blame the
headache entirely. I think part of the problem was by then,
I've gotten out of my good habits and I kind
of entered this new normal where it was normal not
to exercise, not to eat healthy, and trying to transition
back to that. I think it's very difficult. She thinks
about losing weight again, but doesn't have the energy. It's
(39:33):
harder to exercise, especially when comparing herself to earlier Jeanette,
who would run a half marathon. Over the course of
nine years, she gains it all back, nearly two hundred pounds.
You don't notice it first because twenty pounds a year
is just one or two, because it's maybe like one
(39:54):
dress size per year, so I'd have to buy new
clothes in the fall, but hey, it's the fall I'm
gonna buy, and it blows anyway that it would just
be another size. It's depressing. I think it's always depressing
when your body is doing something you don't want it
to do, particularly when you're trying to do it for
your good health. You know, I'm not trying to hurt myself,
like I want to be healthy, but for whatever reason,
(40:15):
my body wants me to get fat again. Jeanette's headaches
aren't as bad anymore by the way, she's doing better.
I was impressed that Janet was so open about sharing
her story. We see people on TV all the time
talking about the weight they lost, but gaining weight isn't
exactly celebrated. It's stigmatized. She told me the only reason
(40:40):
she feels comfortable talking about it is because she's been
dieting and losing weight again. Over the course of two years,
she's lost about a hundred and ten pounds. I guess
the thing that really kicks started me was the pandemic,
where suddenly there's this killer virus out there, and I
was like, Oh, obesity isn't gonna kill me twenty years
from now, It's gonna kill a twenty days from now.
(41:02):
I was struck by that number. Hundred and ten pounds.
That's a lot. I remember she had previously lost almost
two hundred pounds all those years ago before regaining the weight.
As I was poking through Jeanette's old blogs, one early
post in particular stuck out to me. Back then, at
(41:23):
the very start of her weight loss efforts, she learned
that the vast majority of people who lose weight regain it,
and this is what she wrote about that stat. I
plan on being one of the five percent. He doesn't.
This idea keeps diets in business. We all want to
be the exception to the rule. I'm going to dig
(41:46):
into exactly what the scientists say about this in our
next episode. I'll be traveling to a sprawling research campus
in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that's home to every gizmo and
gadget that could possibly help research or steady weight loss.
One of my co leagues used to say, it's like
toys as for a kid. Uh, you know, it's toys
(42:08):
as for a scientist. We'll take a look at the
conventional wisdom about dieting, that classic formula of calories in
calories out and explore how researchers know it's true, but
also how they know there's more to it than that.
We'll also dive into the never ending showdown between low
(42:29):
carb and low fat diets to see which one, if any,
is actually better. And last, but not least, we'll dive
into the secrets of successful dieters like and so I
bought the food staves so that I could put the
food that I had trouble controlling myself with those food staves.
(42:52):
Losing It is written and reported by me I'm a
Court and edited by Kristin D. Brown. Magnus Hendrickson is
our senior producer, Stacy Wong our associate producer, and Blake
Maples is our audio engineer. Our theme was composed and
performed by Hannis Brown thanks to Francesco Leavi and Tim Anette.
(43:15):
Be sure to subscribe to Prognosis if you haven't already,
and if you like our show, please leave us a
review that helps others find out about it. Thanks for listening,
See you next time.
Okay, I won't do that many wounds, but you'll get
a sense of one certainly about what my boxing because
I'm not famous boxing. For the record, this is not
a famous boxer still thinks I'm gonna be champion. True,
(00:23):
we're coming the champ anyway. We we're coming from Mike Tyson.
It's a few more years. We're coming from the man
I'm standing with in a makeshift South Florida outdoor jim
with his trainer, surrounded by curious kids. Is Arthur Agatston.
You may not know his name, but you definitely know
(00:47):
his diet, which was everywhere in the early two thousand's
Real weight loss for real people. Go to South Beach
diet dot com today. You'll rev up your metabolism for
even faster weight loss by the doctor behind the rebel
snary South Beach die. I'm a real person. I lost
nine pounds in Arthur is still hard at work on
(01:09):
his beach body. We're on the swanky island off the
coast of Miami, where Arthur lives with his wife Sarah.
His regular boxing lesson is about to kick off. We're
standing outside on a basketball court. Every so often a
ship comes by, blasting it's horn. Arthur's trainer is a
(01:32):
former professional boxer named Juan Arroyo. They start off with
some shadow boxing, then one takes out his boxing mites
for Arthur to hit jack shoulder how wide like this
(01:52):
when you gotta stand right to polo, wait in the
middle to the chair so I can see what the
diet does. Arthur is nimble on his feet. As one
swings admit at him, he quickly ducks. He looks young
(02:14):
and agile. Arthur credits the South Beach diet with at
least some of his endurance. It is also the source
of some pretty immense wealth. The island where he lives,
Fisher Island, is accessible from Miami only by fairy or
(02:37):
private yacht. We got here today on the ferry in
a tesla. Arthur's neighbors include the model Carolina Kurkova, former
New York Knicks player David Lee, and tennis star Carolyn
was Niacki. Oprah owned a condo here at one point.
(02:57):
The police looks like a resort. People even travel around
the island on golf carts. But I'm not here to
rub elbows with the rich and famous or get feedback
on my right hook. In early two thousand's, the South
Beach Diet became a sensation. I was just a kid
(03:20):
at the time, but I know that my mom did
the diet for a little bit. Lots of people did.
It was everywhere, and I wanted to understand why. After all,
it's basically a low carb diet, which means eating lots
of protein and vegetables and not eating much bread, pasta
(03:45):
and dessert. And as we learned in the last episode,
low carb diets are nothing new. They've actually been around
for many, many years. And yet the South Beach Diet
book but Key a major bestseller and spawned a franchise
that has sold more than twenty three million books. It's
(04:09):
hey day. Everyone from former President Bill Clinton to actress
Nicole Kidman were reportedly fans. And the South Beach Diet
wasn't just insanely popular. It was insanely popular during a
time that I like to think of as the Golden
Age of the diet. From the nineties to the two thousand's,
(04:33):
the sheer number of diets was incredible. Wheat Watchers was
also exploding at the time. When you're on a diet hungry,
is there to sabotage you every step of the way.
The Biggest Loser was about to hit our TV screen
just a moment, one player will become this year's biggest Loser.
And when the grand ride a two hifty dollars from
(04:57):
new Visco one. There were even diet cookies you could
eat for breakfast. You want to lose up to fifteen
pounds of months get Smart for Life cookies. Doctors developed
Smart for Life cookies with extracts from natural ingredients like fruits,
vegetable for even the fashion of this time period seem
to require being impossibly skinny, remember low rise pants and
(05:22):
crop tops. In this episode, we're going to dissect the
South Beach diet. It's the prototypical diet in many ways.
It was created by a doctor. It designated certain foods
as good and others as bad, and it became a huge,
(05:43):
huge business. How does the diet become so popular that
decades later there are people who still have a South
Beach Diet cookbook hanging around their kitchen cupboard. How does
a particular diet go viral preaching the same kinds of
things diets have been preaching for many years. I'm going
(06:06):
to break it down and reveal the formula for viral
diet success. Like celebrity endorsements, I'm Bloomberg News health reporter
Emma Court and from the Prognosis podcast, this is Losing It.
(06:34):
The story of the South Beach Diet starts with Arthur
Agatston and a little bit of a belly, specifically his belly.
For most of his life, Arthur was thin and athletic,
so thin that sometimes he would even eat junk food
to try to put on a few pounds. But one
(06:55):
day he realized that he had gained some weight, and
not on purpose. In the mid nineties, Arthur was putting
in long days as a cardiologist at a Miami hospital
and I was sitting around with out cardiology fellows posting
about some athletic exploittant. The fellow starts laughing at me.
Arthur asks this guy, what's up? Said, look at your belly.
(07:17):
Arthur looks down only to find I really I had one.
So Arthur goes on a diet. But the diet wasn't
just the start of a weight loss journey for Arthur.
It was the start of a whole new chapter in
his career. I met Arthur on a bright December Day
in his medical practices office in Miami Beach. In person,
(07:41):
Arthur was really more like your classic doctor than a
diet guru. There were a couple of models of the
human heart in his office and a white coat hung
on the back of his chair. Arthur himself comes off
as kind and straightforward. He's also excited bowl prone to
tangents even while in the middle of telling a completely
(08:05):
different story. But Arthur is also a diet guru. Back
when he invented the South Beach Diet, a different kind
of regimen was all the rage. You probably remember how
supermarkets suddenly started stalking low fat everything, low fat cottage, cheese,
fat free yogurt, even low fat cookies. This became popular
(08:31):
in the eighties as a way of preventing heart disease
and losing weight. At the time, even the American Heart
Association recommended a low fat diet, and Arthur was into
heart health. He was a heart doctor, after all, not
just any heart doctor, a pioneering one. A test named
(08:53):
after him, the Agatstan score, is still used to pick
up people's risk of things like hard attacks. So as
Arthur is trying to figure out how to lose weight, himself.
He's also thinking about how nutrition impacts things like the
risk of heart disease, and he's pretty sure that low
fat diets aren't actually the answer. Low fat diets just
(09:16):
didn't work in clinical practice. It didn't lower your cholesterol,
and it didn't prevent diabetes or anything. Arthur thought low
fat diets were steering people in the wrong direction, people
like him. During late afternoons at work, he would sometimes
start feeling dizzy and shaky, so I would run down
(09:38):
to the doctor's lounge, have a low fat blueberry muffin
which was sugar and junk, and a cup of coffee
brought my blood sugar back up. Instead of low fat,
low carb diets were now becoming popular, led by another cardiologist,
Robert Atkins of Atkins Diet Face. So Arthur starts on
(10:02):
a low carb diet, and as soon as he does this,
he says that the pounds start melting away. He loses
about twelve pounds, the belly is gone, Arthur is back
to feeling like his usual fit self. He also suspects
(10:22):
that he is onto something. He thinks this diet would
be good for his patients too, so he meets up
with his colleague, a dietitian named Marie Almond. Together they
come up with what would eventually become the South Beach Diet,
a three phase plan for weight loss, but at the
(10:45):
time it had a different name, The Modified Carbohydrate Diet.
We eat healthy and did the best shape of your life.
Introducing the brand new Modified Carbohydrate Diet the Effective Weight,
Lose weight and learn the way to maintain a healthy
weight without hunger or deprivation. Catchy right. Arthur and Marie's
(11:06):
new diet was similar to Atkins, but had more of
an emphasis on healthy fats. Here's how it works. Phase
one is intense. That's when you have the most restrictions
on what you can eat. You're eating protein like fish
and meat and lots of vegetables. You can have milk
(11:28):
and cheese so long as they're low fat or non fat,
but you can't have bread, potatoes, pasta, alcohol, desserts. You
can't even eat fruit. In phase one, the point is
to get rid of cravings for foods that the diet
says are bad for you, and during this part of
(11:49):
the diet the pounds are supposed to drop fast. In
Phase two, things relax a little. You can start adding back,
whole grain breads, high fiber cereals, sweet potatoes, some kinds
of fruit, wine, and even chocolate. Sparingly, that is so
(12:10):
we really introduced the concepts of the good fats and
good carbs. You didn't have to be high carb or
low carb, or high fat or low fat. It was
choosing the healthy ones. South Beach became known as a
low carb diet. Anyway, in phase two, you're not restricting
what you eat as much, so the weight loss happens slower,
(12:34):
and you just stay in this phase of the diet
for however long it takes to hit your goal weight.
Another sort of novel idea of the diet emphasizes is
snacking and strategic weights. Because your blood sugars did have
swings and before your blood sugar dropped, if you had
a snack and prevented that dropped, it would prevent you
(12:56):
from being very hungry and in general, blood shook er
is kind of a theme of the South Beach diet.
It tells dieters to eat foods with a low glycemic index,
especially in phase one. The idea is that these foods
should keep you full for longer and less likely to crave,
say mint, chocolate chip ice cream. Once you've lost weight,
(13:20):
you move into phase three. The diet basically says you've
learned how to eat, and you can relax a bit.
There's no list of foods to eat and foods to
avoid anymore like you can eat chocolate sponge cake now.
The book actually says that beyond the chocolate sponge cake,
(13:40):
the diet is honestly a little vague about exactly how
this phase should look. It does say that people can
overdo it and regain weight at this point. If that's
what happens, then the book tells you to start back
at phase one again. In this way, the South Beach
Diet spread a classic diet myth. The myth is this,
(14:05):
you diet for a little while, then get back to
your normal life now with a new slimmer body. Except
that's not really true. You have to keep up these
new habits if you want to keep the weight off.
If you don't, you wind up in a never ending
(14:25):
cycle of losing and gaining weight, which is not good
for your health. The diet I just outlined, by the way,
was the original South Beach Diet. There's also a newer version.
Before it was a book, The South Beach diet was
just a pamphlet, Arthur says. Even calling it a pamphlet
(14:48):
might be over selling it. It was three or four
sheets of Xerox paper stapled together. Arthur and Marie offered
the pamphlets to patients at their hospital who were in
hardiac rehab, which is where people who have had heart
attacks and other heart problems come to get healthy again.
(15:08):
Arthur says he sometimes meets people who still have their
original staple together copies of the diet. Arthur's patients start
losing weight. Soon, a local TV station wants to do
a segment on the diet. Arthur is into it. He
also starts realizing that his diet has commercial potential. He
(15:30):
and his wife end up buying the rights from the
hospital where he works. It's called Mount Sinai Medical Center.
Arthur also realized that his diet probably needs a new name.
Modified Carbohydrate diet just didn't quite roll off the tongue.
(15:53):
He toyed with just calling it the Agatstan diet, in
the model of other doctors turned diet gurus before him,
like Robert Atkins. But Arthur wasn't crazy about this idea.
Arthur is an academic at heart, he didn't want to
become Mr. Diet Doctor. Arthur says, it's his wife, Sarah
(16:15):
who ultimately comes up with the name. They're at dinner
one night, eating al fresco at a Mediterranean spot underneath
a big tree in South Beach, a famous Miami neighborhood
known for its beaches, nightlife, and gorgeous people. Serry thinks
about it and she realizes it's the South Beach Diet.
(16:39):
I love South Beach when my wife said it, because
he we were on South Beach and South Beach was
becoming hot, and what I concluded was unless you went
to the public and marketing, you weren't going to be successful.
The imagery that South Beach conveyed was perfect. It made
you think of beautiful women in teeny bikinis and tan,
(17:04):
muscular men on a glamorous white sand beach, and South
Beach the place was itself having kind of a moment.
Miami had already been a popular place to visit with
its son and sand, but South Beach started becoming really
(17:24):
well known in the eighties thanks to new investments in
hotels and restaurants. There was also a new hit show
called Miami vice. By the time the South Beach Diet
hit the scene, South Beach had become the sort of
(17:47):
place rich and beautiful people like to hang out. The
newly named diet is featured on local TV in South Florida,
which ends up being kind of a turning point for
Arthur and the South Beach Diet. Arthur in the Diet
become pretty well known locally. At least then everybody said,
(18:08):
where you have to write a book, And at that
point no, no, so Arthur did. The book is called
The South Beach Diet. The Delicious Doctor Designed foolproof plan
for fast and healthy weight loss. The Diet hit bookstores
in April two three and spent almost nine months at
(18:32):
number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Eventually,
it would be translated into more than thirty languages, spawn
a whole franchise of South Beach guides and cookbooks, and
sell more than twenty three million books under the South
Beach Diet brand. It was a phenomenon. It's a groundbreaking
(18:54):
phenomenon with a global following. The South Beach Diet and
the South Beach did change the way Americans dieted, but
not forever. Millions of people did the diet back then.
One of them was Jeanette fold Up. She's a freelance
(19:16):
web developer who lives in Indianapolis. At the time she
tried out the diet, she was twenty four and had
been struggling with her weight since middle school. Jeanette was
skeptical of fad diets, but she had been trying to
lose weight on her own for a while and it
hadn't been going so well. She needed a plan, and
(19:39):
the South Beach Diet didn't seem like that much of
a fad diet. For one thing, it had been invented
by a cardiologist. I chose the South Beach Diet because
my brother had lost about sixty pounds on it, and
he wasn't doing anything crazy. You eat lean meats like
turkey and chicken, You eat whole grains stead of like
(20:00):
white bread, eat vegetables and foods, and that all seems
reasonable to me. Jeanette kept a weight loss blog. After all,
this wasn't just the golden age of the diet. This
was also the heyday of internet blogging. Jeanette's blog was
called Pasta Queen. The South Beach Diet cracks down on
(20:20):
pasta by the way, I combed through its archives to
see what she had written about the South Beach Diet
at the time. I could see how some of the
facets of the diet we've been talking about drew her
to it and kept her on it, like the first
phase where Jeanette lost sixteen pounds in two weeks. Here's
Jeanette reading from one of her early posts. You learn
(20:43):
some basic rules about what types of food to eat
and about how much, and then they set your free.
You can do what you want with the permitted foods,
allowing for lots of variety. Plus you're supposed to eat
until you're full. Wow, a diet that didn't expect you
to starve. All of those traits combined to make diet
that I think I can actually follow for a long
period of time, hopefully the rest of my life. Basically,
(21:06):
I've chosen the South Beach Diet because one, you start
losing weight immediately to the regiment isn't difficult to learn.
You just learn the basic principles, what you eat is
flexible within the rules, and three, I should never feel
hungry or deprived. I hope it works. Ah. Yes, a
diet that's flexible as long as you follow all of
(21:29):
the rules. We've heard this from dieters before, like Damie Cologne.
In episode one. Janette also says that in retrospect, the
diet sort of taught her what healthy eating was supposed
to look like. She had some vague ideas, but the
diet really pinned those details down. In the past, I've
kind of tried to eat healthy, but because I didn't
(21:51):
know specifically, like what should I be eating, you know,
that was a little hard. I did, like the South
Beach Diet did have like a list of food where
it was okay, this is okay in phase one, this
is okay, Phase two, this is okay, and phase three,
so I can kind of referred to that just be like, okay,
you know our bananas on the list. For the record,
(22:11):
bananas are not on the list in phase one, but
you can have them specifically medium sized bananas in phase two.
In two years, Jeanette ends up losing nearly two hundred pounds.
Let me just say that again, two hundred pounds. She
(22:32):
lost half of her body weight, and she actually ends
up writing a memoir about all this. Here's Jeanette on
the Today Show and Jeanette Foldy is with us this morning, Janette,
welcome and congratulations. I'm gonna start off with a question
I don't normally start off with guests. How much do
you weigh now? Pounds? Jeanette brings her old pants to
(22:54):
the show and holds them up before the audience. The
chiron reads skinny story Weight Loss two. She's sitting on
a stool in the interview, and she told me that
she thinks they sat her there on purpose, so her
whole body was visible in the shot. We'll come back
to her and what she calls after the after photo
(23:17):
in a bit. Remember our original question, why did the
South Beach Diet take off? Was it the name or
that it was invented by a doctor? Was it that
it seemed easy with only two weeks of really restrictive dieting.
(23:39):
I wanted to get to the bottom of this question,
so I talked to Carol Angstad, who designed the cover
of the original South Beach Diet book. The name obviously
was a big part of what sent The South Beach
Diet to the top of the best seller list, but
the way I see it, Carol's book design is another
(24:00):
key factor. It's publisher, a company called Roedale was banking
on the book taking off. Rodale wanted it to look
like a big book, a publishing term for covers that
are eye catching and look like best sellers. In practice,
that usually means having the title in huge letters, taking
(24:23):
center stage. So Carol pitched exactly that. The background was
a bright turquoise color with a palm tree peeking out
on one corner. It was actually a stock photo. The
words the South Beach Diet are stacked in front of
the beach shot, taking up most of the page, and
then Arthur's name is on the bottom. It reads Arthur
(24:46):
Agatston M d It's really, you know, when you look
at it, very basic and simple. It's just, you know,
the blue and the green kind of flowing together, are
in just a hint of the palm frond. This is
the design the publisher Rodale goes with. They also add
(25:07):
onto the cover the words lose belly fat first. This
is what they call a hook of the diet, a
thing that sets it apart and draws people in. They
also end up printing the cover on shiny foil paper,
which is more often used for things like romance novels.
(25:28):
Carol says that made the book feel sexy, which was
exactly what they were going for. It didn't even really
look like a diet book or even something health related.
Here's Tammy Booth Corwin, who became the editor in chief
and president of Rodale Books. And I remember the day
we were in my office now in Pennsylvania, myself and
(25:50):
our publisher Amy and all really all a big game.
Our deputy editor, Mary South, and we all stood around
and our designer put on the floor of my office
probably forty covers, and then one by one we took
out the ones that just weren't hitting us in some
(26:12):
special way, and and then it came down to the
cover that we that we published with. And one of
the things we loved about it was it looked like
a novel. It looked like something you'd sit down and
read on the beach. Diet publishers like Rodale knew that
standing out was the key to a successful diet book.
They were already tons of diets out there. A book
(26:35):
needed to sound new and fresh to get attention and
especially to sell. The other important piece was the way
the diet was structured. The three phases gave people a
sense of momentum, especially with a strict initial phase that
was likely to shed pounds fast. The fact that South
(26:57):
Beach had three parts to it was a classic move
from the diet playbook. The Acting Diet, for example, has
four phases. Phases help dieters feel like they're progressing and
moving forward even during periods of time when weight loss
slows or even stops, and phases also make dieters feel
(27:18):
like they'll eventually be done with the diet. In other words,
they can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
With the South Beach Diet, that light is phase three.
We've talked a lot so far about what made the
South Beach Diet successful, but we need to also talk
about what the diet overpromised and where it fell short.
(27:40):
These are themes we've looked at earlier in the series.
How with dieting, there's a thin line between information and misinformation.
When scientists evaluated various nutrition facts in Arthur's book in
two thousand and six, they found that only a third
was clearly backed up by published scientific research. For example,
(28:04):
one big draw of the South Beach diet was that
people lose eight to thirteen pounds in their first two weeks,
but the authors of this paper weren't able to find
any research backing that up. I spoke with one of
the studies authors, David cats. He points out that the
South Beach Diet does steer people away from processed foods
(28:27):
and added sugars, which is good, but it also tells
people to make changes that aren't sustainable, like eliminating certain
foods before bringing them back in later phases. The South
Beach Diet was an attempt to improve on Atkins and
say not all carbs are created equal, not all fat
(28:48):
is created equal. The emphasis on how this was a
uniquely effective way to lose weight was distortion. What David
is talking about here is something many weight loss programs
are guilty of, the idea that this diet works way
better than all the other diets out there. David doesn't
(29:09):
approve of health professionals and scientists, in particular giving the
public misleading information. After all, they're supposed to be the
people we can trust. Another questionable fact is the very
one promoted on the book's cover, lose belly fat first,
As if we can't determine where on our body pounds
(29:32):
will disappear from people lose weight in all kinds of ways. Arthur,
by the way, stands by the book, so he acknowledges
they got some things wrong, and the science has evolved
in areas. And when I bring up the criticisms, he
doesn't get defensive or anything. Did they about snacking? But
(29:54):
he says, basically he stands by the diet, that they've
corrected the record where they were wrong. Now the principles
everybody should be eating that way, as far as the
basic principles of avoiding sugars, avoiding bad cards. For all
Arthur's confidence, I still have questions overstating aspects of a
(30:16):
diet or going beyond the scientific evidence at the time.
Those things affect people. And yet none of this kept
the diet from becoming a sensation. It didn't matter whether
it did exactly what it said it would, because word
about the diet spread faster than the criticisms, and the
(30:37):
hype was compelling diet. The book became a bestseller eight
years ago and caused a revolution in the dieting world,
from cutting cards to swearing off sweets, The South Beach
Diet changed the way many Americans slim down, something that
seems to have worked to the South Beach diets advantage
(30:58):
was the reach of its publisher. Rodale was an important
player in the health and fitness world. It owned nine magazines,
including Men's Health, Prevention and Runners World, reaching about seven
million readers altogether. When The South Beach Diet was published,
Prevention ran an eleven page spread. There were pieces in
(31:19):
Runners World and Men's Health. Diet also made the cover
of another well read magazine called Women's World, which wasn't
owned by Rodale. Rodale also sent out five million direct
mailers to get the word out. In other words, Rodale
had some serious resources and it used them to tell
people about the South Beach Diet. And there was another
(31:42):
new way to reach people, the Internet. This is the
two thousand's, the era of Internet businesses, including an early Amazon, Yahoo,
and eBay. People are starting to get smarter phones and
even watch cat videos online, and the Rodale team put
the butting Internet to work. They partnered with a company
(32:06):
now called Everyday Health to offer subscription diet content and
message boards for dieters. Part of that was community, which
we could not offer in the book. For example, that
was Tammy again from Rodale, and it really complimented the book.
All of the branding they did drove book sales. Book
(32:26):
sales drove to the digital product with South Beach Diet
dot com. It's now easier than ever to lose weight
while eating the foods you love. I do. I get
to eat the sweets now with South Beach. And there
was another thing that really helped push the South Beach
Diet to the masses, celebrity endorsements. Former President Bill Clinton
(32:47):
happened to have a new book coming out around the
same time, so he went on a book tour and
he looked great, and people were asking him, you look great,
and he said, I think it was in New York Magazine.
He said, I'm almost stopped me to diet, and from
there sales skyrocketed. Jessica Simpson, who famously wore short shorts
(33:12):
in the two thou five Dukes of Hazard movie, was
also said to have used the diet to fit into
her Daisy dukes. The actress Bette Midler was another South
Speech diet fan. Celebrities are especially effective diet ambassadors because
people already want to look like them. As the diet
was taking off, Tammy and other Rodelle employees would gather
(33:36):
around their publisher's office every week and wait to hear
how well the book had sold. Back then, you had
to wait for the numbers to come in. You couldn't
just check them online. Then the publisher, Amy Rhodes, would
decide whether they needed to print more copies. And literally,
in the first year we went back to press twenty
(33:58):
three times. I think it was. It would be so exciting.
Amy would say, I'm pushing the button for another hundred
thousand copies, And the first time that happened, we we thought,
you know, this isn't another stratosphere. Now. This brings me
to the final and critical piece of all this timing
and context. Remember before the Southweach diet launched, everyone was
(34:22):
talking about a different dietary villain fat. This was the
era of fat free cookies and frozen yogurt. After all,
the cultural tide started to shift with the Atkins diet,
which made carbs into a dirty word. Instead, you walked
in the studio and a collective gas over, how fantastic
(34:44):
you look. I know you're doing Atkins. I'm doing Atkins.
In the first six weeks, I lost twenty three pounds,
then I went to thirty pounds I lost, and then Christmas.
That was Sharon Osborne, who was a celebrity ambassador for
the diet. Atkins was extremely popular, but it was also
criticized because it told people to eat a lot of
(35:07):
fatty foods. Doctor said then that it could be dangerous
for people. Then Robert Atkins, the inventor of the Atkins Diet, died,
He'd been injured, but it started this huge controversy about
whether Robert Atkins himself was in poor health. There was
(35:31):
a discussion around the time of his death about, you know,
did he have a bad heart. You know, people said
he was OBEs. A doctor who worked with Atkins, by
the way, denied a lot of this back then and
said Robert atkins medical issues likely weren't because of his diet.
(35:51):
It was all very sad. However, having a heart healthy
diet to replace it almost at the same time was
just a very odd, odd bit of timing that ended
up being something that helped the book kind of take
that place. It's customary for diet books to come out
(36:11):
in January, but Rodell actually put The South Beach Diet
out in April, wanting to set it apart a little bit. Remember,
Bill Clinton is going on his own book tour around
this time and talking about the diet, and then the
very month the South Beach Diet book comes out, Robert
Atkins dies, the timing couldn't have been predicted, but it
(36:33):
would wind up being very important. And really, this is
one of those stories of a book or a launch
where you do everything right in your mind, you do
everything you can do, and then you send it out
into the world and you don't know what will happen next,
and then there are all of these X factors that
go into it, the timing, you know, in terms of
(36:56):
how people receive it, what else is happening in the marketplace,
in at specific category, in elsewhere, and so on. To
recapt the South Beach Diet succeeded because of its branding,
it's tremendous reach, celebrity endorsements, and timing. That formula worked
for this diet, and it's worked for countless other diets too.
(37:19):
For the people behind the South Beach Diet, it was
a success story. It had blown past expectations, dominated the
cultural moment, and redefined how well a diet and a
diet book could do. But for at least one person
who actually did the diet, it was way more complicated
that person was Jeanette Folda, who we spoke with earlier.
(37:43):
She lost almost two hundred pounds on the South Beach diet.
This is the story of after the after photo. As
she puts it, Jeanette loses all that weight and keeps
it off for about a year and a half. Then
it starts to creep being back. But that was the
least of her problems. I still have that. It's been
(38:06):
fourteen years now. I've had a four fourteen years. Jeanette
started getting these persistent headaches, not because of the diet
or anything. They just started happening, and nothing really helped
to relieve the pain. Dealing with health issues made it
really hard to keep dieting, as you might imagine. So
(38:27):
I was worrying at nine to five job, and I
would just be exhausted at the end of the day
and I would just stopped the grocer staring at something
the ice cream or you know, chocolate covered almonds or something,
and I would eat as soon as I got home,
and that was like the best part of the day.
It's not just Jeanette. Dieting might be manageable in the
(38:47):
day to day when everything is going right, but then
again when does everything go right. Things come up, including
unfortunately illness for Danny Cologne, the calorie counter, who we
talked to in our first episode The road Bump, was
a family member's health crisis. This is incredibly common. For Jeanette,
(39:11):
it was her own health troubles. I can't blame the
headache entirely. I think part of the problem was by then,
I've gotten out of my good habits and I kind
of entered this new normal where it was normal not
to exercise, not to eat healthy, and trying to transition
back to that. I think it's very difficult. She thinks
about losing weight again, but doesn't have the energy. It's
(39:33):
harder to exercise, especially when comparing herself to earlier Jeanette,
who would run a half marathon. Over the course of
nine years, she gains it all back, nearly two hundred pounds.
You don't notice it first because twenty pounds a year
is just one or two, because it's maybe like one
(39:54):
dress size per year, so I'd have to buy new
clothes in the fall, but hey, it's the fall I'm
gonna buy, and it blows anyway that it would just
be another size. It's depressing. I think it's always depressing
when your body is doing something you don't want it
to do, particularly when you're trying to do it for
your good health. You know, I'm not trying to hurt myself,
like I want to be healthy, but for whatever reason,
(40:15):
my body wants me to get fat again. Jeanette's headaches
aren't as bad anymore by the way, she's doing better.
I was impressed that Janet was so open about sharing
her story. We see people on TV all the time
talking about the weight they lost, but gaining weight isn't
exactly celebrated. It's stigmatized. She told me the only reason
(40:40):
she feels comfortable talking about it is because she's been
dieting and losing weight again. Over the course of two years,
she's lost about a hundred and ten pounds. I guess
the thing that really kicks started me was the pandemic,
where suddenly there's this killer virus out there, and I
was like, Oh, obesity isn't gonna kill me twenty years
from now, It's gonna kill a twenty days from now.
(41:02):
I was struck by that number. Hundred and ten pounds.
That's a lot. I remember she had previously lost almost
two hundred pounds all those years ago before regaining the weight.
As I was poking through Jeanette's old blogs, one early
post in particular stuck out to me. Back then, at
(41:23):
the very start of her weight loss efforts, she learned
that the vast majority of people who lose weight regain it,
and this is what she wrote about that stat. I
plan on being one of the five percent. He doesn't.
This idea keeps diets in business. We all want to
be the exception to the rule. I'm going to dig
(41:46):
into exactly what the scientists say about this in our
next episode. I'll be traveling to a sprawling research campus
in Baton Rouge, Louisiana that's home to every gizmo and
gadget that could possibly help research or steady weight loss.
One of my co leagues used to say, it's like
toys as for a kid. Uh, you know, it's toys
(42:08):
as for a scientist. We'll take a look at the
conventional wisdom about dieting, that classic formula of calories in
calories out and explore how researchers know it's true, but
also how they know there's more to it than that.
We'll also dive into the never ending showdown between low
(42:29):
carb and low fat diets to see which one, if any,
is actually better. And last, but not least, we'll dive
into the secrets of successful dieters like and so I
bought the food staves so that I could put the
food that I had trouble controlling myself with those food staves.
(42:52):
Losing It is written and reported by me I'm a
Court and edited by Kristin D. Brown. Magnus Hendrickson is
our senior producer, Stacy Wong our associate producer, and Blake
Maples is our audio engineer. Our theme was composed and
performed by Hannis Brown thanks to Francesco Leavi and Tim Anette.
(43:15):
Be sure to subscribe to Prognosis if you haven't already,
and if you like our show, please leave us a
review that helps others find out about it. Thanks for listening,
See you next time.
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