"See You Lighter"

Time was when Norris Bostwick, a 39-year-old New York restaurant cashier, liked to polish off ten hot dogs before dinner. He weighed 399 lbs. and was rejected by every girl he met, as well as by the U.S. Army. Walking up one flight of stairs, he recalls, was a major effort, exiting from a cab became a three-minute ordeal. Now life is considerably lighter and brighter for Bostwick: in ten months he has shed 170 lbs. How? By belonging to Weight Watchers Inc., an organization that is making such dramatic reductions commonplace.

Weight Watchers pay $3 for initiation and $2 weekly for dues. In return, they receive a fairly conventional list of recommended foods (high on proteins, low on carbohydrates, nothing fried), along with a stern admonition to eat only three reasonable meals a day and keep a careful watch on between-meal snacking. What makes Weight Watchers different from most other dieters is that they usually follow the prescribed regimen faithfully. The secret: frequent meetings, similar to the sessions of Alcoholics Anonymous, at which a lecture is followed by statements by each member on how much weight he has gained or lost that week.

No Jolly Fat People. Members who have lost ten pounds receive "graduation" brooches or tie clips after 16 weeks in the program, thereafter earn a little diamond chip for every additional ten pounds lost. Since friendships develop at the meetings, members often see each other between sessions, urge each other on with the catch phrase "See you lighter."

Founder of Weight Watchers Inc. is Jean Nidetch, 43, a New York City housewife who in 1963 weighed 214 lbs., but still found herself cheating on her reducing diet. She invited six fat friends over to talk about it, came out of the gathering convinced that group therapy was the answer. She has since slimmed down to 142 lbs. (her husband Marty has gone from 265 lbs. to 196 lbs.), and she estimates that 500,000 members in 16 states have lost more than 10 million lbs. since she established Weight Watchers Inc.

The group-therapy approach seems to work simply because it gives dieters a chance to air their problems and share their mutual unhappiness (people who are not fat are known as "civilians"). Says Jean Nidetch: "There's no such thing as a jolly fat person." Adds Jerry Pozner, a Long Island University junior who has reduced from 238 lbs. to 137 lbs.: "People eat because they're lonely. When you come to Weight Watchers, you're not lonely any more."

Fairest of Them All. For Weight Watchers, the rewards are touchingly simple. Says Walter Jenson, 23, a Queens office clerk who went from 425 Ibs. to 191 lbs. and from size 60 pants to size 36 in one year: "I can get on my knees and pray better." Brooklyn Bookkeeper Alex Galietti, 29, finds that after losing 106 lbs., "I'm doing things I could never do as a teen-ager--skating and bike riding."

The greatest reward of all, of course, is that Weight Watchers look better to members of the opposite sex, and know it. Singer Sylvia Syms, 43, dropped 30 lbs. in eleven weeks, as a result dared to wear a bathing suit for the first time in her life on a recent Caribbean vacation. And when New Jersey Housewife Fran Jaffe, 38, took off 50 Ibs., her pleased husband presented her with a full-length mirror, to which he lovingly attached a note: "You are the fairest of them all."

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