Dieting by Starving

Craig Hillier, 46, a Cleveland interior decorator, weighed 341 lbs. and seemed to be adding girth daily. He stopped for hamburgers on his way home, kept a box of candy under his bed for midnight snacks--and watched his blood pressure soar. "I was ready for the basket," says Hillier, who had tried every imaginable weight reduction gimmick, including amphetamines, without success. That was only five months ago. Now the 6 ft. 4 in. Hillier is down to a trim 200 lbs., feels so good he wants to start skiing and, patting his new flat stomach, boasts: "I have the libido of a teen-ager."

Hillier's remarkable weight loss is the result not of some new dieting fad but of the oldest, surest and quickest way to get rid of excess fat: fasting. Along with others afflicted with severe obesity, he had enrolled in a pioneering fasting clinic at Cleveland's Mount Sinai Hospital. Except for a powdery mix of mainly alanine (an amino acid) and glucose that is taken with water or diet drinks, patients at the clinic eat nothing whatsoever for weeks and months at a time, starving off their pounds.

Founded in 1971 by Mount Sinai's chief of medicine, Dr. Victor Vertes, the fasting clinic accepts only people who are at least 50 lbs. overweight and threatened by such ailments as diabetes, kidney problems, hypertension and heart disease. Under the regimen devised by Vertes and his colleague, Dr. Saul M. Genuth, patients who are 100 lbs. overweight or more are kept in the hospital for the first week while their reactions to the fast are observed. Then once a week they return with the others to be weighed, interviewed by the staff--which looks for any possibly harmful bodily changes--and given enough packets of the supplement to last them for the next seven days. The purpose of the supplement (which comes in three flavors and supplies 300 calories a day) is not to provide nutrition but to encourage the body to burn off unnecessary fat rather than necessary protein. Otherwise the fasting might damage the heart, liver, muscles and brain.

This nondiet is clearly not for everyone. About 20% of those who sign up eventually drop out. Others have occasional lapses, like yielding to the temptation of an ice cream sundae, though most seem to lose their appetites entirely. A few complain of dizziness, dry skin and hair loss in the first weeks. But if they can endure, the fasting pays off. Vertes says that of the more than 750 patients who have been treated, some 80% have lost at least 80 lbs.--to say nothing of such benefits as the reduction of blood sugar in diabetics or the lowering of high blood pressure.

Yet even Vertes acknowledges that those who have reduced will have to remain vigilant for the rest of their lives. He cautions that unsupervised starvation is not a proper--or, indeed, safe--tactic for shedding a mere 10 to 20 lbs. But for massively obese people, starvation dieting does offer new hope. As former Superheavyweight Craig Hillier puts it, "It's as if God came down and touched me with a magic wand."

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