"Hey, Are You Rotating?"

By Anastasia Toufexis

In Nashville these days, citizens skip discussions of the weather to ask, "Are you rotating?" Music City, U.S.A., turning on to the latest pop dance fad? Not quite. Instead, Nashville has embraced the newest fat fighters' miracle: the rotation diet. Local restaurants are featuring meals from the plan's menu; grocery stores are posting signs touting approved fruits, vegetables and other foods. So popular has the plan become that an estimated 70,000 residents, about 10% of the city's population, are now rotating feverishly, caught up in a mad whirl to "Melt-a-Million" pounds collectively by mid-May. They are hoping to create a whole new category for the Guinness Book of World Records.

The man who set Nashville spinning is Psychologist Martin Katahn, 57, director of Vanderbilt University's weight-management program. His new plan, detailed in a book to be released in a few weeks, picks up on a method he used to drop 75 lbs. after a heart attack 23 years ago. The key feature: three weeks of dieting followed by a week or two of relatively guilt-free maintenance eating. With exercise, he says, the rotation diet can result in a daily loss of two-thirds of a pound. Exults Katahn: "It's safe and it's quick."

The clamor began in January, after Katahn discussed his program in media interviews. Lectures by the professor, expected to draw 80 registrants, were stampeded by 1,400. At Vanderbilt, telephone operators were swamped. Some 25,000 requests for brochures on the diet arrived by mail within three weeks. A natural salesman, Katahn seized the opportunity to turn personal frenzy into a community mania and launched the "Melt-a-Million" campaign in mid- February.

The Kroger supermarket chain eagerly boosted the effort; it offered to distribute the brochure and agreed to weigh out dieters as well as their vegetables. Some 12,000 hopeful pound shuckers herded through the chain's groceries during the first weekend. Material on the rotation diet may become available soon to supermarkets throughout the country. The plan restricts women to 600 calories for each of the first three days, 900 during the next four, then 1,200 over the following seven. The third week repeats the first. (Men get an additional 600 calories daily.) To soothe hunger pangs, dieters can munch unlimited amounts of certain "free" vegetables, including asparagus, parsley and cucumber, plus up to three daily snacks of "safe" fruits, such as apples, melons and oranges.

The constantly shifting calorie levels, Katahn explains, ease eater boredom and, more important, prevent the body from significantly slowing the rate at which it burns calories, the stumbling block in most diets. Other diet experts endorse the tactic but think losing three or four pounds a week is excessive. Says Dr. George Bray of the University of Southern California: "That's not a sustainable rate of healthy weight loss." Everyone applauds the diet's psychological appeal, however. Declares Katahn: "It motivates us to be as close to perfect as we can for three weeks." Agrees Housewife Pam Kennedy, who has shed 11 lbs. and one size since February: "For three weeks you can do anything."

With reporting by Don Winbush/Nashville