The Jenny Craig Diet
and Kirstie Alley part ways

So Kirstie Alley and the Jenny Craig diet are splitting!

Well, frankly I’m not sorry... I just can't get excited about celebrity endorsements. One disgruntled Jenny Craiger put it this way: “Restructure your glorified grocery stores …stop making us pay for your expensive commercials…we don’t care who’s fat in Hollywood! Make it work for US Jenny!!!!

The reason I’m anti celebrity endorsements, like this one by Kirstie Alley, is because very often their results “aren’t typical” as the fine print (or speeded up voice-over) tell you. And part of the reason it isn’t typical is because:

*they get extra special treatment that the (wo)man in the street doesn’t

*the have the luxury of stylists and personal dressers and professional photographers all being handsomely paid to make sure those before and after progress shots look impressive.

*and who knows how much photo-shopping gets done of the images we’re presented with.

Another problem with celebrity endorsements results not being typical is that quite often behind the scenes they have a contract that dictates all kinds of things that we, the general public, aren't privvy to. So they get free food, a free trainer and so on. In other words the playing fields aren't level.

Jenny Craig Diet looks good...
at least on the surface

Their plan of action (at least the way it’s presented) doesn't just revolve around food and eating. It has three parts to it: Eating less, exercising more and changing your attitude around food. That sounds pretty much like what we'd expect to hear in theory.

But dig a little deeper and it’s interesting to see what crawls out:

Eat less on the Jenny Craig Diet

“…(the counselor) said I wasn't losing weight because I was buying the cheaper boil-bags instead of the incredibly expensive (35% more) frozen meals…. Jenny Craig is more about selling food than losing weight.”

“…it quickly became obvious that Jenny Craig was just a diet food retailer. They’re not really about counseling or classes or tapes, because the quality is way too low. I think it’s just a front.”

And I do think that eating needs to be a part of the plan, but not the pivotal point.

Exercise more on the
Jenny Craig Diet

But other than that reference it’s interesting that even in the forums exercise is a seldom spoken about component of the Jenny Craig Program. So I can’t help wonder how much emphasis this is really given.

Besides, it's easy to say: "Exercise more" but to do this we need the right exercise information in order to change our habits and attitudes around exercise and nothing I heard relative to Jenny Craig did this.

Create a healthy mindset around food.

Having bought the latter I have to say I found them neither inspirational, motivational nor anything new.

And having spent some time reading forum posts I'm not so sure about the counseling classes either. Now if you’re Kirstie Alley, Valerie or Queen Latifah you probably do get a knowlegable and dedicated Jenny Craig counselor at your beck and call.

However if disgruntled Jenny Craig diet clients are to be believed they would only call Jenny to tell her this about her counselors’: *….. about as “supportive as a tree”

*…make sure your counselors are qualified to make a correct decision regarding our weight loss management

*“…(she) got totally flustered and angry and burst out with the truth: She couldn't afford to have me cluttering up her waiting room each week and not losing weight, because it made the program look bad to the other customers.

In fact, other than the over-priced food complaints, the next most common complaint I saw was that most counselors appear to have never had weight issues and thus are unable to relate to the challengers dieters face with food and eating. And that, although they wear white lab coats and give nutritional advice very few actually have training in nutrition.

Why I wouldn't go on the
Jenny Craig Diet

And while prepackaged --and thus presized portions-- do have the advantage of giving you an idea of what a reasonable portion looks like – they really can't teach you portion control because that’s an internal job.

The other problem with simply ordering the Jenny Craig food is that it doesn’t teach you how to read food labels, make healthy food choices from an ordinary grocery shelf (or restaurant menu) or actually cook healthy for yourself.

And unless you put your entire family onto the Jenny Craig prepackaged food – it makes it doubly difficult for you to stick to it.

My problem with Scales

But research shows that the scale isn’t the benign measure we might think it is. When the numbers of good you can feel elated (sadly that can trigger, “I’ve been good so let me reward myself actions’ for many) or if the numbers are bad you can feel down (with then can easily trigger comfort eating).

Whatever, dieters have strong feelings about numbers on a scale. It can change the way a dieter feels about themselves in an instant. I call this number-itis because it can take a perfectly good day and turn it into a perfectly bad day the spreads to a whole week or more.

The other problem with scales is that what you weight depends on so many factors such as how many times the scale has been moved or bumped, where your body is hormonally, how much water you’re retaining and so on and weighing is actually not a very reliable measure.

A person who is thin but over fat can still be within normal limits on a scale and a person who is big can have a healthy proportion of fat and yet weigh too much. So, personally I’m not a great fan of scales.

And even though they do have a ‘back to normal food transition plan’ and mindset changes part of the program obviously don’t work that well if the relapse rate is anything to go by. So the word is that Kirstie Alley plans to first gain weight so she can show how well her weight loss plan works.

Frankly, having been a dieter myself for 20 years, I can’t imagine anyone purposefully gaining weight. However, I can well imagine that this might be a statement leaked from a weight loss program who fears that their very visible ex-spokesman might well gain back what she’s lost as a natural course of diets not working.