Sip ’n starve: Dangerous diets in disguise

Life-threatening consequences
Without a doctor’s surveillance (and possibly even with it), extreme plans that radically restrict calories or ban vital foods such as carbohydrates altogether could have life-threatening consequences. Take the case of Aimee Popovich, a 39-year-old Los Angeles homemaker and mother who went on a raw-food diet, eating only uncooked fruits, vegetables and nuts and started drinking a lot of water. At first, she says she believed it delivered all sorts of health benefits, including a stronger immune system and less difficult childbirth. “I felt fantastic for a year and a half, and it was easy — I didn’t have to spend time standing over the stove; I could just grab something raw and go,” Popovich says. “But then I realized something was wrong: I had too much anxiety and a nagging problem with urgent urination.” Yet she stuck with the diet for five months more, until one day, while laid up in bed feeling sick and dizzy, she had a seizure and passed out. Her husband called 911. Popovich seized again, vomited and stopped breathing. Fortunately, her husband knew CPR and was able to get her breathing again by the time the paramedics arrived. Still in and out of consciousness, Popovich had a third seizure on the ride to the hospital.

When she fully came to two days later, doctors told Popovich she was undernourished, devoid of vital minerals and suffering from kidney failure and brain swelling due to a severe electrolyte imbalance and hyponatremia, a condition caused by excess water in the blood, which can result in dangerously low blood levels of sodium. She spent a week in the hospital receiving saline and antidiuretic hormones and following a diet high in protein and salt and low in water. She has been consulting with a nutritionist ever since and, after nearly a year, finally feels healthy. “I’m not eating exclusively raw anymore, but it still makes up 40 to 60 percent of my diet,” Popovich says. “I think there are a lot of benefits to it. Some people have been very successful on the raw diet for years and years, so it can work.”

What cleanse dieters lack in food they often try to make up for with supplements, herbs, teas and other products in the hopes of maximizing their slim-down. According to Hollywood trainers and nutritionists, the most popular natural weight loss supplements include L-carnitine, an amino acid that allegedly speeds fat metabolism, and CM3 Alginate, a seaweed formulation manufactured in Europe that supposedly expands in the stomach to make you feel full and thus eat less. And women throughout Los Angeles are stocking up on detox teas (mild herbal laxatives) and plant extracts like Hoodia (believed to be an appetite suppressant), whose benefits remain unproven — but they’re attracted to the word natural that’s slapped on the package. “In the past, people were looking for something that made them not eat at all, like fen-phen; now they’re looking for something that naturally assists them in making dietary changes without the jitters of ephedra,” says Valerie Waters, a personal trainer in L.A., who has worked with Jennifer Garner and Jessica Biel and endorses the CUUR Weight Loss System, a diet and exercise program that includes taking an herbal supplement that purportedly revs up metabolism.

Before you hightail it to your local supplement store for any slimming products, consider the fact that many trainers and nutritionists who recommend supplements lack the R.D. that qualifies them to do so, warns Arthur Frank, M.D., medical director of the George Washington University Weight Management Program in Washington, D.C. “These supplements probably have no value — the best you can hope for is that they won’t harm you,” he says. Alarmingly, the FDA recently discovered that dozens of common weight loss supplements are full of hidden prescription drugs that can have serious side effects. For instance, Pro-Slim Plus, Perfect Slim and 66 others were found to contain sibutramine, the appetite-suppressing ingredient in the Rx diet drug Meridia, which in high doses can raise blood pressure and cause heart palpitations and seizures. “Even if a supplement has some potentially useful botanical product in it, it has probably not been formally evaluated or undergone clinical trials, and no one knows about proper dosage or side effects,” Dr. Frank explains. “The fact that it’s natural doesn’t mean it’s useful or safe.”

Safe or not, the healthy-skinny movement is fueled by women no longer feeling they have to tell their friends that they’re on a diet; instead, they’re simply following a “health plan.” This goes down particularly well in Hollywood, a town where celebrities profess their love for french fries while secretly purging to stay wafer-thin, where everyone pretends to be inherently slim — and where half the women interviewed for this article begged to remain anonymous because they didn’t want anyone to think they had weight issues. Admitting you’re on a diet these days somehow means you’re weak.

“It’s totally uncool in L.A. to talk about your diet — that makes you a bitchy, bratty, vain woman,” says Julie, a 33-year-old television writer. “It’s an impossible standard: We’re not supposed to think, talk or worry about it, but we’re still supposed to look perfect all the time.” After trying low-carb diets, South Beach and “anything Oprah told me to do,” Julie (who is 5 feet 7 inches and weighs 138 pounds) finally settled on veganism after reading the diet bible “Skinny Bitch,” which advocates veganism as an eco-friendly way to shed pounds. “In television writing, which is such a male-dominated industry, women have to be liked and respected by men in order to get and keep jobs,” she says. “So you can’t seem like a frivolous, stupid, typical girl, the kind who’s obsessed with her weight.”

Packaging a new restrictive diet as a health regime also keeps concerned friends from meddling. As Carly Milne, a 33-year-old journalist in L.A. and former master cleanser, puts it, “If I were to tell my girlfriends I was going on a diet to lose weight, they’d all say, ‘Love yourself for who you are; you look fabulous!’ But if I say I’m on a quest to get healthy, everyone is really supportive. It’s like you’re taking care of yourself, instead of beating up on yourself for not being perfect.”

The disconnect between this New Age rhetoric and the truth of what many women are really doing — often, using socially acceptable quasi-anorexia to starve themselves skinny — can wreak psychological havoc. “My outside message was ‘I’m cleansing; I’m detoxing; I’m getting healthy,’” Milne says. “Inside it was, ‘I’m fat; I need to be prettier and fit into a smaller size.’ At the time, I was totally able to self-justify. I was working in PR and dealing with a lot of media, and I felt I had to have a particular look in order to be accepted or listened to. So I made it all about work, that I wouldn’t be successful unless I was skinnier, and that I had to do the cleanse. Looking back, I realize how destructive I was being.”

After enduring multiple cleanses and restrictive diets and watching her figure go from overweight to thin and back again, Milne had a wake-up call during a cleanse when she tried to stand up from her couch and fainted. Recognizing her body wasn’t functioning the way it should, she finally settled into a healthy diet — a logical mix of lean proteins, whole grains, fruit and veggies, easy on the bad carbs and sugar — and a slender size 8 or 10. “I’m not perfect. Sometimes nothing quite beats the blues like a Big Mac,” Milne laughs. “But I’ve been that skinny size 4, and I hated myself more than when I was more than 200 pounds. I was so wrapped up in self-image, but now I recognize a huge part of being happy is accepting my body the way it is.”

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