Lose weight by acting thin (Act your way to the new you.)

Act your way to the new you.  Welcome you the Actors Diet Studio (where the fat get thin through the magic of theatre).

Unfortunately the studios have all been closed mostly for legal reasons, practicing a form of therapy without a license.

There are many paths to getting fat staying that way. Lots of diet plans are also available and most of them are touted to be easy and fun. Losing weight is hard and keeping weight off even harder. It doesn’t seem to make much of a difference that we have knowledge about calories, food groups, portion control. From a cognitive perspective we have learned the lesson well, how to become fat. The overweight among us are often experts at eating (like when no one is watching). Much of our eating is automatic (an aspect of emotional eating) and we also often lack control (impulse control) in the presence of the sights and smells of what we like to eat. The obese don’t inhibit further eating when full and are don’t discriminate on the basis of how much they eat between gourmet foods and mediocre hamburgers. We know many of the facts about losing weight but not how to effectively implement what we know about losing weight and staying thin.  We have heard that we need to relearn how to eat and make our new eating lifestyle a habit (automatic) which takes a long time. As to pills, none of them seem to be magic potions. So there you have it. All the answers are right there for the taking.

Lucky Jim (LJ), like many of us, always had a weight problem. Like the rest of us he noticed bold faced ads, books and TV promotionals that told the story of how to get thin, stay slim and love the process of getting there.

LJ and I were sitting together eating breakfast at an outdoor café outside my office building. I was reading a report from my accountant and he was reading the Washington Post newspaper. He suddenly stopped chewing, sat up, put the paper down in front of me and pointed to page 15. In small letters at the top of the page it said ‘advertisement’ and this was followed by the title of an article, in bold lettering, ‘Sales are booming for clinical strength diet pill’.  Underneath the title were lots of details including the name of the product, Apatrim, described as made from a natural edible plant, statements about how safe and very effective it was and references to clinical studies proving effectiveness, along with testimonials to back up the dramatic claims. There was lots more information along with a 24 hour hotline telephone number that when called can guarantee that you get the product before supplies ran out.

LJ was practically choking with excitement, “You see Charlie, my diet scheme would have worked and I didn’t get a chance to prove it, while these bimbos pedal their bull in large print”.

His friends called him ‘Lucky Jim’ mostly because of his history of bad luck. He also happened to be well liked, talented, creative, with loads of energy. LJ was a good ideas generator who invested his time and money (along with that of others) in developing a concept to the point that failure was assured.

The ad in the paper was obviously a painful reminder of one of LJ’s last ventures, a unique approach to dieting by teaching overweight clients to act thin by role playing their way through diets and changes in eating lifestyles.  Neither I nor any of his friends knew much about the details of how Actors Diet Studios (ADS) worked but we did know that there were once a dozen studios along the north east cost between Washington and Boston. Now they are all gone.

Here is what I do know. The basic idea was to have clients choose roles, someone they wanted to be their diet self. They could choose a character from a play or story or someone created by the client and one of the staff of ADS.  Obese clients were provided with scripts of that character in real situations involving eating, dieting, along with all kinds of other daily activities. Clients were given rudimentary lessons in acting, emphasizing scenes in which they could play a thin person. They learned to act the part of someone who was in control of their eating lives. In effect they were taught to incorporate a character, a role, of someone they wanted to be into their lives, to become ‘the you that you always wanted to be’.  I thought it was an interesting idea than on execution, failed miserably or perhaps more accurately it never got a chance to be developed properly.

Here are just two of the problems that the ADS ran into. The first was that clients would sometimes be carried away by their acting roles. Clients learned to image their new thin selves in all kinds of imagined settings from going to a dinner party to trying on and buying new clothes. However some clients went overboard in acting their role at work or with their spouse. I remember reading about one client acting out a role that was so inappropriate at his law firm that he was finally fired. Turns out that some of his women co-workers were afraid to work with him and especially fearful of being in a room alone with him. When he threatened the head of the law firm the police were informed and then a reporter wrote up the story of the lawyer who became an actor playing the role of a carefree playboy. I gather he did lose weight in the program and also sued ADS. There were also some other legal issues that proved to be a problem. The same article mentioned that at least in Maryland the ADS had to shut down because they offered a product that involved a version of talking therapy by unlicensed practioners.

The program is no more but I think Lucky Jim had an idea, and not just about changing how the overweight eat. Why not change behavior through acting methods. If you can’t diet why not invent someone who can, act like them, and after awhile they can become you, or better yet, who you want to be. Poor Lucky Jim.