Reprinted with the permission of
THE HARTFORD COURANT
Copyright (c) 1999, The Hartford Courant Company
DATE: Wednesday, August 26, 1999
By Claudia Van Nes
Courant Staff Writer

 Pam Oliver was a popular teenager with plenty of friends, but that didn’t guarantee her a date to the junior prom. No one asked Pam to the prom because she was fat.
I’ve noticed, since starting to write his weekly saga of my weight-loss efforts, that people in the fat business like to say they were once plump, too. "I’ve been there. I understand," they’re eager to tell clients.

When pressed, though, some of these folks’ stories of a former chubby life are as thin as they are.
Not Pam. Hanging on the walls of her office, where she counsels the overweight, are photographs of her so tubby as a child that your heart goes out to the kid in the pictures.
She was heading toward 250 pounds when Pam took the matter of her fat into her own hands — sometimes literally —and devised a personalized plan to get lean.

Pam lost 100 pounds and has kept it off for 11 years. She opened her one-on-one counseling service called Body Transformers in Rocky Hill, her hometown, several years ago.

She’s got real fans out there who’ve called and written to say Pam’s been their ticket to weight loss.
While diet counselors don’t charge what a shrink does, they are — outside of checking into a spa for six months —probably the most expensive way to go to war with your fat.
But it seems to me that if you find a counselor whom you click with and who makes you a weight-loss plan you can live with, the money is probably well spent.

Leeanne Batchelder, whom Pam Oliver calls her "toughest client," considers the money she’s paid Pam to help her lose 50 pounds an investment in her health. Leeanne, who lives in Meriden, had high blood pressure, was menopausal, addicted to pasta and reluctant to give up her glass of scotch at night.

Pam listened to her needs, analyzed her body and life and made Leeanne a weekly meal plan with some flexibility, catering to her likes,
Marcy Poppel of Cromwell, another Pam fan, sounds like the client from hell. "I can’t go a day without chocolate," Marcy says. "I can’t eat fruit, and the only vegetables I’ll eat are cooked carrots and french-style green beans—canned."

Plus, she’s 4-foot-10 and had high blood pressure. On the plan Pam made for her, Marcy’s lost 23 of the 30 pounds she wants to shed and hasn’t had to eat any broccoli yet.
She doesn’t weigh people; she doesn’t give them handouts or books to read. She simply measures them— with their clothes on — every week with a measuring tape that "is not made of elastic and doesn’t lie," she says,
ach week, Pam gives clients tailor-made meal plan.

Pam's programs educate people about food, nutrition and themselves.

For instance, just by accompanying Leeanne to one of her appointments with Pam, I finally began to pick up on what "listening to your body" may really mean.
"Listen to your body" is one of those euphemistic phrases used often in magazine articles and weight-loss books.

I never knew what this actually meant. For one thing, when you’re overweight, you don’t like your body, and if you’re like me, you try not to have much of a relationship with it. Covering our bodies in floppy clothes, not looking at ourselves when we pass mirrors and trying to trick our bodies by stuffing them with food after everyone else has gone to bed — that’s how we chubbettes relate to our bodies.

But, you know, Pam made this listening business seem possible.

I’ve actually begun a bit of a dialogue with my body, which I think, despite its predilections toward fat, has been sending out helpful signals that I’d ignored. For example, I tend to eat dinner at 9 p.m. or so, and I think in many ways my body has been trying to tell me this is not healthful or smart.
So I’ve stopped doing it. The change doesn’t work so well in my life, but if I don’t make weight loss a top priority, how am I ever going to succeed?

I suppose that might be a good argument for spending money on a weight-loss counselor as well, come to think of it.