Longtime Deceiver readers may remember the whole Kirstie Alley debacle from about a year ago — how Jenny Craig fired her for regaining all the weight she lost (and then some) because their diet doesn’t work as a lifestyle change.
Yesterday, two and a half years after she appeared on the show in a bikini, she went on Oprah again to talk about how she plans to take off 85 pounds by November — just in time to launch her own weight loss plan.
But even Oprah, the poster child of yo-yo dieters, wasn’t buying it:
KA: For the last year and a half, the one thing I’ve been doing that is good is I’ve been researching and developing my own weight-loss plan. And so I’ve actually lost twenty pounds in the last five weeks doing that.
Oprah: [skeptical] Really.
KA: Yes. Thank you very much. [applause]
Oprah: Twenty pounds in five weeks?
KA: Twenty pounds in five weeks.
Oprah: [eyebrow raise] How do you lose twenty pounds in five weeks?
KA: I’ll tell you later.
I’m headbutting my keyboard. First of all, anyone who’s ever tried to lose weight safely before (i.e. not following the Lindsay Lohan diet of Red Bull and coke) knows it doesn’t come off that fast. Maybe on The Biggest Loser where they’re eating nothing but Mrs. Dash seasoning and exercising eight hours a day you can see those kind of results, but at least they’re under the care of qualified dietitians, personal trainers, and medical professionals.
Losing 85 pounds in six months just ain’t gonna happen. And if it does, there’s serious Scientologist voodoo involved that should not be taken as sound advice from someone who, by my count, has gained and lost the equivalent of a small armored car over the years.
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I think its possible for a approximately 300 lb person like Alley to lose twenty lbs in five weeks.
That’s only seven percent of her bodyweight, which is theoretically not too difficult, though it would take exercising hours per day to do it though.
Kirstie is one of the last people on earth who’s dieting advice or book I would consult, should my girth continue unfettered.
Statistics don’t lie. Anything greater than 2 pounds a week, and you will regain the weight. In addition, you must committ to lifestyle changes. Kirstie obviously has not made those changes.
In stead of promoting a weight loss program, she should promote lifestyle changes and show that by following these changes you can loose weight and keep it off. But again, then numbers are against her.
By the by, gastric bypass is not the solution. 40% of patients do not succeed with their surgery. They gain even more weight, and must live with the consequences of the surgery for the rest of their life. In addition, of the 60% that are considered success, half of those people put back on an additional 100 pound after 5 years.
As I am reading this there is an ad flashing on the site ‘lose 25 lbs of stomach fat in 3 weeks’.
I agree with Fortunate Son – someone very heavy like Kirstie probably can lose 25 lbs in five weeks. But can she keep it off?
If she can’t keep it off, though, she has no business giving diet advice.
Even if she can keep it off, she still does not have any business giving diet advice because she is not a professional. Look at Oprah.
KA looks like the queen of of Oompa Loompa’s and she just steped out of Wonkaland for a quick deep fried turkey or three.
Diet advice from her? Sign me up, I love deep fat fried turkey!
Maybe her diet plan will be, “Do the exact opposite of what I have done every time I’m off Jenny Craig.”
If that’s the case, then yeah, it’s believable.
How much of a BS diet does it have to be if even OPRAH doesn’t believe you?
Ah ha! There is the rub: if you want to know the secret of rapid weight loss, join the cult of Scientology.
Guys, even the morbidly obese do not loose that much weight in a week if they are following the correct plan. IT DOESN’T STAY OFF! If you loose 2lbs tops 3lbs a week, you have a great chance of success.
The only way people loose that much is by following fads, and fads do not work.
Just before I rechecked the comments I read an article about Hydroxicut (sp) which is now being recalled nationally.
P.S. If the obese did loose that much weight that quickly there would not be so many gimmicks.
Unless you starve yourself on Hydroxicutt then you could lose the weight. I have tried it and did nothing. Same with a lot of other pills. I just need to hit the gym more and lay off of the sweets. Fads do not work and if they do, they are extremely unhealthy for you.
She is just preparing us for the inevitable gastric bypass surgery, is all.
With her past lack of success Kirstie would be one of the 40%.
A.A.W. – worst thing you can do is take “pills” like that. I am glad to see you are no longer using.
We all know what a great physical specimen L Ron was so it should be of no surprise for Shamu to be able to lose weight so quickly. It’s a long walk across that bridge….
A recall of Hydroxycut? OH NOOOO! I took that stuff religiously in Kuwait, along with eating nothing but chicken breast and cucumbers and going to the gym twice a day, every day. How am I going to lose the baby weight now? Guess I’ll have to go back to the boring old ‘eat less, exercise more’ schtick.
Ahhhh, me think’s I see where you’re going wrong guys:
The word diet doesn’t necessarily involve weight loss.
Word on the street is that George Lucas is casting Episode 7: Matriarch of the Hutt.
Minnow,
That was not fair. I was enjoying a nice sip of wine, which I almost lost due to laughing.
I kind of feel sorry for Kirstie. She strikes me as one of those people that is in denial about what she really needs to do in order to lose the weight and keep it off.
Atleast Oprah was skeptical about it. Or she is jealous that Kirstie beat her to the punch in introducing another fad diet before she could tout it on her show as “her” discovery.
It’s all about balance…..you’ve got to reduce caloric/fat intake if your diet is high in those 2, and you’ve got to increase your excercise. And you can’t leave out protein or your body will simply refuse to lose weight because it will go into “survival” mode and you will plateau. A magic pill doesn’t exist, nor a magic smoothie either, that is good for long term wieght loss. They may make you lose weight for a very short span, but then your body says “hey, wait a minute…I’m getting no fuel to burn for energy” and you stop losing weight.
I once a significant amount of weight in two weeks by eating nothing but nonfat yogurt, bananas, oatmeal and eggwhites… after the first couple days of bland, it really wasn’t that hard.
Of course, unless you’re the most boring mf’er in the world, you can’t hack that diet forever.
“Matriarch of the Hutt.” Heh heh. I wouldn’t be surprised if Kirstie’s wondrous new diet involves praying to space aliens and blaming psychiatrists for the extra weight.
Every diet ad and product should come with a government-regulated label: “WARNING: spending your money on this product may cause loss of confidence and severe disappointment.”
Actually, crash-dieting works for me. Takes 5 days – on day 1 you eat nothing but fruit, on day 2 you drink fruit juice, on day 3 you eat yogurt and cottage cheese, day 4 – nothing but vegetables, day 5 – drink vegetable juice. I know it’s not healthy, but it works and you really lose a lot of weight fast, and, most importantly, don’t gain it back. But you have to exercise as well.
i was thinking as i was reading this holly (but you beat me to it) “this has gotta be some weird scientology crap right?” lolll
I feel so sorry for Kirstie Alley, which is weird, because I do not like her. AT ALL. And never have. But think about it: In Hollywood, you can have substance-abuse issues, you can screw up one marriage after another, you can sleep with anything that isn’t currently dead, you can do whatever you want, but you CANNOT be fat. And here she is, with her own gravitational field, talking about it on TV to Oprah “Mocha Mountain” Winfrey, who laughs in her face. I’d go home and shoot myself.
My husband insisted, about three days ago, that I throw away my prescription weight-loss medication. It was an epilepsy drug (I’m not epileptic) whose side effects included severe depression and suicidal thoughts (and hopefully, tangentially, loss of appetite due to the depression). No joke. I’ve never known anyone who successfully lost weight using pills, or even gastric bypass, without some sort of horrid side effects: Massive hair loss, heart damage, suicide, the list goes on and on.
The most effective weight loss plan is heartbreak by getting jilted, but who really wants to go through that?
I’m with you Beige as far as feeling bad for her; everything else in Hollywood goes except letting your weight get out of hand, even a little.
And now they are pulling Hydroxycut from the shelves. It’s a shame people are judged solely on their looks. Some of the most beautiful, slim people are nasty slugs on the inside.
Beige, I think Hollywood encourages the idea that it’s somehow morally wrong to be large or gain weight. It used to be more of a subtext, but now it’s practically said straight out: “Kirstie Alley gained 75 pounds…the total degenerate.”
And that kinda attitude is especially sad when you consider that weight gain or being overweight and unable to lose weight is not just due to the lack of self-control. If you have certain health problems, sometimes it’s difficult to lose weight or keep it off even when you eat right and exercise. Someone had mentioned an underactive thyroid in one of the other threads, also could be low hormone levels, or kidney or liver disease – they usually cause water retention, other health issues. I ballooned after I had my gall bladder removed. Now I have to work twice as hard as I used to before the surgery to stay fit.
It is a pretty horrible attitude, isn’t it? What’s sad is that people buy into it. You get the eco-tards out there blaming fat people for contributing to global warming by eating so much. You get the utterly hateful people who just like to make fun of fat people, because for some reason, it’s okay to call people “ham beasts” and make assumptions about their lifestyle. Then there are the vain and shallow types that aren’t hateful so much as they are incapable of seeing a real person behind appearances. It’s becoming more and more acceptable to be any of these people, and even the mainstream media got in on it on Earth Day with special reports about fat people hurting the environment. I think CNN headlined with that on Earth Day, but it might have been MSNBC as well. The Hollywood attitude toward fat people used to be a “Hollywood thing”, but it’s become more than that these days.
I’ve never been “fat”. The most overweight I’ve been was by about ten pounds and I lost it pretty easily. A petite frame and fast metabolism do not make me a better person than someone who is obese, for whatever reason. And that’s another thing… why do people feel the need to criticize based on the reason a person is fat? If you want to eat your own weight in chocolate every day, that is your body and your business. If it’s a thyroid problem, that too is your business, and you do not have to justify yourself to anyone, or reveal medical problems to strangers so that they don’t judge you as a being a pig. If they are judging you that way, then they are the ones with the problem.
I caught myself about to post that “Don’t get me wrong, I’m nowhere NEAR the size of Kirstie Alley”. ‘Cause I am apparently not free of hypocrisy, myself.
I am an overweight person who has dealt with various degrees of obesity, the worst time being 100 lbs overweight. I’ve probably lost many hundreds of pounds in my lifetime.
Most obese people retain large amounts fluid in their body tissues (see Kirstie’s ankles, for example) and in their colons. Starting a restrictive diet will often trigger the body to rebalance its fluid content, and people can lose weight (water weight) very quickly.
Unfortunately, while loss of excess fluids is a healthy situation (as long as vitamin and mineral depletion needs are being met), many dieters soon become discouraged when the early rapid weight loss fizzles to a half a pound or a pound a week.
Kirstie could easily lose 25 pounds in 5 weeks, but I bet most of it was in the first couple of weeks.
Very well put, Chronic. It doesn’t matter if someone’s being overweight is due to health problems or certain lifestyle choices – criticizing, shunning or ridiculing someone because they are overweight is wrong and (IMO) is a form of discrimination. I loved how Monique once said (in one of her movies) “We don’t have a weight problem, YOU have a problem with our weight”. However, I think that healthy lifestyle choices should still be promoted, I’m not okay with the “Just love yourself the way you are” message – you can’t tell people to give up. If someone’s overweight, they should be encouraged to try to lose some weight, but for the right reasons – because it might lead to various health problems in the future, not because they supposedly don’t measure up to some questionable Hollywood “beauty” standards.
And when I say “encouraged” I mean encouraged by health professionals, who are in a postion to determine if a person would indeed benefit from losing some weight.
I agree, Nati. I’m not saying that healthy eating shouldn’t be encouraged, or that health professionals should turn a blind eye to the health problems that can come with obesity. I just don’t think that people who aren’t a close friend or relative, or an actual doctor, have any business adressing it, whether their intentions are good or not. It’s just rude, otherwise.
One of my uncles was a professional body builder when he was younger. A lovely guy for the most part, but he, like many professional body builders, is in love with his physique, and even now at 54 years old, he is in great shape. But I cringe when he starts talking about so and so being fat, and how he can’t stand fat women. His mother is fat. His sister has struggled with her weight since childhood. The way he talks is insulting to me because he is including two people I love very much in a lot of his criticisms.
And now, it seems that everyone feels it’s okay to have that sort of attitude when it’s just not okay.
I lost a lot of weight using one kind of diet pill that a doctor prescribed to me. After having to take steroids soon after to fight a nasty skin disease, I gained all of it back. I have decided to throw out all of my pills and just really starting to work out more.
Besides, the only pill acknowledged by the FDA, ALLI, tells you not to wear white pants and it gives you the runs. I think I will pass on that one
I did lose about 15 pounds in five weeks, with a balanced diet and a lot of supervision from my doctor-nutritionist. But then, she explained to me that I had a lot of water retention and that I had to focus more on the slower loss of fat. I haven’t regained them even after two years…
First, for those who are responding here and saying that if you lose more than 2lbs per week it will not stay off…you are wrong. If you lose the weight and make the right changes in your life…it will stay off. Why will it stay off? BECAUSE IF YOU HAD LIVED THAT KIND OF LIFE YOU WOULDN’T BE FAT TO BEGIN WITH. I lost 80 lbs between July 17th of 2008 and October 31st of 2008. You do the math. Not only is it still off, I have lost another 5 lbs. Second, I have made exercise, which I now can do, a part of my routine. Third, I also have changed many of my awful eating habits. You get thin by making it a priority in your life. If you don’t do that…stop wishing and find a way to live fatly…while you are doing that, you can ponder the many illnesses and discomforts you are going to experience along the way. You can lose the weight. The real battle is staying thin. For those of you who are done lying to yourself, I truly wish you the best. If you would like to see my chronicle of my journey..go to my website. Good luck.
Chronic, I know you weren’t saying that a healthy diet and a healthy way of life shouldn’t be encouraged, only my two first sentences were addressed directly to you, and then my train of thought derailed. I started to reply to your post, then remembered that I had said before in other threads that I’m not okay with the “love yourself the way you are and do nothing” message (like the one that Dove is sending to women, for example) but never explained why. So I was just trying to explain why I think it’s not a very good message to be sending to people. So the rest of my post wasn’t directed at you
I should’ve separated the paragraphs, but I rarely do that 
Sorry ’bout the confusion.
Oh, no worries, Nati. I was just clarifying my point in case it was taken in the wrong way, because I fully agree with you. I’m not coming from a post-hippie,sensitive 70’s “I Love You Just the Way You Are” place either. And hell, it’s not even confusion, Nati. I just like responding sometimes and go off on my own tangents.
I probably should have been more clear.
I think that it’s important for an individual to take care of themselves in the best way that they can, and that goes from watching ones weight to putting your best foot forward when you leave the house. And by the latter, I’m not saying that you need to put on the CFM heels and a bunch of slap on your face to pick up some milk at the local grocery store, but going in pajamas when it’s not nearly closing time and you are in a hurry is not good either. If a person is putting their best foot forward whenever possible, they will be paying closer attention to their weight because they will want to look their best. In turn, when you make the effort to look your best and lose weight the right way if needed, you will feel better.
I gained weight, strangely enough, when I was stupid and went vegetarian for two years. I wasn’t a total chunk, but I wasn’t comfortable with myself because I’m small and it shows more on my frame. I found that when I didn’t feel good about my weight, all that stuff I was saying in the paragraph above broke down because I didn’t want to dress up for anything and that made me start losing confidence. I began to eat right again (i.e. stopped depriving my body of meat, and skipped out on wine at Sunday dinner), doubled up on the exercise, and little by little, I fit myself back into the positive cycle described above, as well as my clothes.
It was easy for me, and I recognize that it’s not easy for everyone. I can’t call being ten pounds overweight a “weight problem”, but when nothing fits right and you don’t feel good, then you have to make the change for your own sake. I’m sure I could have kept gaining if I had not done something about it.
Dove, quite frankly, aside from their obvious hypocrisies, is full of it.
And there we go. Another Chronic tangent. I will shush now.
even with gastric bypass surgery she could only barely lose that much. I know, I’ve had the surgery. Then you have to take care of yourself, so a bypass would not be her best option, she’s not got a track record of taking care of herself.