Weight Reduction Programs

Heidi BARAJAS was active as a child, despite weighing more than her peers. She loved sports in high school, but her fitness regimen got derailed in college, a combination of working and a knee injury. Her weight crept up, leading her to try "every diet in the world," which usually worked to take the pounds off but not to maintain the weight loss.

A basketball injury sidelined 39-year-old pastor Kerwin Manning in fall 2004. At 210 pounds, he had a less than ideal diet heavy on fatty and fast foods. Instead of packing on more pounds, he decided to take some off, via a 40-day, water-only fast. Although a fast is radical and potentially risky (it should be undertaken only while in a physician's care), the extreme measure was just the impetus Manning needed.

Most dieters gain back the weight -- and then some -- after losing it. So what's the secret of the few who have kept it off? For starters, they didn't diet. Instead, they changed how they ate -- long-term, wholesale changes, not just cutting back for a limited time and then returning to their old ways of snacking on Doritos and Haagen-Dazs. And they exercised -- consistently and in copious amounts, incorporating it into their daily routine.

Weight loss requires an overhaul of diet, exercise, essentially your entire life. But putting off these changes is a national pastime. Eating right and exercising is better done next week because today -- just isn't the right time. To lose weight, say experts in nutrition and weight loss, you have to be ready to make changes, even small ones.

Bonnie SHERIFF, 26, left Kansas for California to attend Caltech in 2003. In the process, she chucked her typical Midwestern meat-and-potatoes diet and decided to slim down, going from about 180 pounds in high school to 127 now. The doctoral candidate, who lives in Pasadena, exercises about three to four times a week and sticks to a diet heavy on whole grains, fruits and vegetables. Once an asthma sufferer, she says she now has "virtually no symptoms" and has increased energy and stamina.

A car accident in her freshman year of college forced Janelle Webb to put the brakes on an active lifestyle. A serious leg injury put her on crutches for five months, and her weight ballooned, eventually topping off at 254 pounds. Three years later she had a weight loss epiphany, eventually slimming down to 132.

Mary ANN Wertenberger started her first diet at the age of 13; she describes herself as "never the fattest kid around," but she carried an extra 20 pounds as a young teenager. Throughout her life, more diets ensued (including a stint on the appetite suppressant drug phentermine), but exercise was rarely in the picture. Now, exercise is an integral part of how this 50-year-old veterinarian from Chatsworth maintains her weight of 172, down from a high of 275.

"I've ALWAYS had the propensity to pork up," says L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, 59, who was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes seven years ago. That was his wake-up call to take a cold, hard look at his diet and transform it. He went from a high of 215 pounds to his current 185. Yaroslavsky often can be seen running around the Fairfax District and Hancock Park, an activity that he sticks to religiously, along with a low-fat diet.

This just in: The high-protein Atkins diet tops the charts as far as weight loss is concerned, according to a yearlong study from Stanford University School of Medicine. The study, published last week in the Journal of the American Medical Assn., compared the Atkins program with three others (Zone, Ornish and the LEARN diet, which follows the government's food pyramid) that are heavier on carbs. After one year, those on Atkins lost an average of 10.4 pounds, compared with 5.7 pounds on LEARN, 4.

I've been hearing about a treatment called LipoZap. Does it work? I have a problem with fat around my midsection. JOHN M. \o7Tujunga \f7The product: Imagine the uproar if someone discovered a treatment that quickly removed large amounts of fat without effort, sacrifice or surgery of any sort. You'd expect dancing in the streets. Fireworks. And a few billion dollars in sales.