Flush with Success
The Spokesman-Review - 6/17/2003
By Heather Lalley, Staff Writer

Nutritionist’s ‘Fat Flush Plan’ is gaining her popularity among dieters.

‘Look how slim and trim she is,” one woman cooed as Ann Louise Gittleman took to the podium at Huckleberry’s on Spokane’s South Hill one recent night.

And she did look slim and trim in her three button, robin’s-egg blue pantsuit.

But, then, slim and trim is Gittleman’s business.

“If I’m not an example of what I talk about, I might as well put down my pen,” she says.

The self-proclaimed First Lady of Nutrition, who moved to Liberty Lake last year, is the author of the bestselling “Fat Flush Plan,” (McGraw-Hill, $21.95) along with nearly two dozen other diet and nutrition books.

Gittleman has won over thousands of Fat Flushers since the book came out in 2001.

She has touted the diet plan on ABC’s “The View” and on the popular women’s lifestyle Web site iVillage.com. She mingled with a few dozen Fat Flushers on a Caribbean cruise last winter. Her followers came from around the country for a recent spa weekend at The Coeur d’Alene Resort. There’s now a Fat Flush journal, a Fat Flush cookbook and Fat Flush nutritional supplements distributed by Uni Key in Hayden Lake, Idaho.

So, why is Gittleman’s plan so popular?

Simple, say her devotees. It works.

“I’ve tried everything else,” says Robyn Dunlap, 48, a spokeswomen for Avista.

Dunlap has been a Fat Flusher since mid-January. She’s lost about 30 pounds so far. She’d like to lose 20-25 more pounds.

“It’s the kind of thing I think I can live with,” Dunlap says.

Gittleman’s three-step Fat Flush plan, laid out in a nearly 300-page book, is quite intricate.

Followers must first stick to a strict, two-week detoxification regimen designed to flush toxins out of the liver and get the body ready to burn fat.

“It’s diet boot camp,” Gittleman says of the 1,200-calorie-a-day phase.

The second phase calls for a few hundred more calories each day. And the final, maintenance phase brings in additional food choices and calories.

The plan details the importance of essential oils, such as flaxseed, as well as “fat-burning” spices, like cayenne. Followers need to drink diluted, unsweetened cranberry juice throughout the day to flush out toxins. It is a low-carb diet that emphasizes “good” fats (not transfats).

Despites the diet’s restrictions, Gittleman says it’s a plan people can follow for a lifetime.

“It jut becomes ingrained,” she says. “People start to feel so good they start to adapt the protocols to real life… I’ve stayed true to it a good 10 years. This is the way I live my life. This is the way I eat.”

Gittleman, who won’t reveal her age (“I would just say that I’m old enough,” she says.), has been paying attention to what she eats since she was a teenager.

Back then, growing up in West Hartford, Conn., she would keep lists of various foods and how they reacted with her sensitive skin. She found that sugar triggered her breakouts and that foods high in zinc cleared up her skin.

“I became hooked on nutrition as a panacea,” she says.

She went on to earn degrees in nutrition, nutrition education and holistic nutrition.

She held several jobs as a nutritionist, but it was when she became director of the Pritikin Longevity Center in Santa Monica, Calif., in the early ‘80s that her career took a turn.

“That definitely was the crossroads of my career,” she says.

She heard concerns from patients at the center, who were living on low-or no-fat diets. She saw people suffering from dry skin, dry hair, allergies, fatigue and other problems.

“When you’re taking away fat, you’re taking away a whole food category,” Gittleman says.

While on the Pritikin diet, Gittleman says she lived on shredded wheat.

“I was starting to become a little skeptical about such a restrictive diet, especially one that kept me hungry most of the time,” she says.

So, Gittleman began investigating healthy fats, like those found in flaxseed oil, and in 1988, she wrote her first book: “Beyond Pritikin” (Bantam Books, $6.99).

The book’s diet plan builds on the Pritikin diet, but it stresses the importance of essential fatty acids.

She never heard from the Pritikin Center about her book.

“I wasn’t their favorite, long-lost cousin at that point,” she says.

Since then, Gittleman has written many health and nutrition books, including “Get the Salt Out” (Crown $11), “Get the Sugar Out” (Crown $12), “Super Nutrition for Menopause” (Publishers’ Group West, $12.95) and “Before the Change” (Harper $14). “Before the Change” is currently on the New York Times’ bestseller list after Gittleman hyped it on a recent episode of “Dr. Phil.”

But it is “The Fat Flush Plan” for which she is most well known.

”It has gotten an enormous amount of media attention,” she says of the plan. “People are ready for the next wave in health- cleansing and detox.”

Not everyone has jumped on the Fat Flush bandwagon, though.

Katherine Tallmadge, a registered dietitian in Washington, D.C., and spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association, calls Gittleman’s plan a “fat diet” filled with “silly unnecessarily complicated approaches to eating.”

“The reason people lose weight on that diet is that it’s very low in calories, not because of any other magical property,” Tallmadge says.

Another ADA spokeswoman, Julie Walsh, calls Fat Flush’s emphasis on detoxifying the liver “gimmicky.”

“The body doesn’t need to detoxify itself,” says Walsh, a registered dietitian in New York City. “It does just fine.”

Walsh does, however, support Gittleman’s use of healthy fats. But a good weight-loss plan should instead incorporate small daily changes, like cutting out cream in your coffee, instead of a major overhaul, she says.

“Usually, the more regimented something is, the quicker the weight will come off, but it will come back just as quickly, Walsh says.

“We’re talking about a lifetime strategy. These diets are not lifetime strategies.”

Gittleman, for her part, pays little attention to her critics. She has seen enough of her clients losing weight and getting healthy on her plan to believe that it works.

Gittleman calls herself “an avid researcher” who pays more attention to her clients’ case studies than to scientific analysis.

“I never use the studies to initially write my books,” she says. “I use the studies to confirm and corroborate what I’m seeing in real life. That’s just the way I work.”

After months spend touring the country in support of her books, Gittleman plans to take the summer off to enjoy her new surroundings. She moved to the Inland Northwest from Bozeman, Mont., because she was attracted by “the pristine quality of the area,” she says.

Gittleman expects to release a Fat Flush fitness book in January as well as updated versions of some of her earlier books later this year.

She says she’s not surprised that her work has caught the public’s attention.

“I’m delighted,” Gittleman says. “I’m thrilled. I’m honored. I feel very blessed. I feel privileged I’ve had the opportunity to change so many peoples’ lives in terms of giving them back their self-esteem and giving them back their health."