The New York Times, ABBY ELLIN
October 21, 2009
COOKIES? On a diet? Apparently so.
Just ask Christina Kane, who has tried everything from the grapefruit diet to Atkins, with no success. Then she heard about Dr. Siegal’s Cookie Diet, which involves eating six prepackaged cookies a day, plus one ‘real’ meal — say, skinless chicken and steamed vegetables.
“I thought, ‘That diet looks so incredibly easy,’ ” said Ms. Kane, 43, a legal secretary in Washington, who started paying $56 a week for the prepackaged cookies in June, when she weighed 255 pounds. Three …

FIVE-FOOT-NINE and 184 pounds, Kathryn Griffith, a retired teacher in Oakland, Calif., counted calories for decades, trying everything from the grapefruit diet to a regimen based on cabbage soup. She also did Weight Watchers — 27 times. “I knew it wouldn’t be successful, but I went back anyway,” she said.
So earlier this year, just when Oprah, the nation’s über-dieter, renewed her resolve to snack on flaxseed, Ms. Griffith went the other way, joining a tenacious movement that is scorning the diet industry and what one pair of bloggers labels, “the obesity epidemic booga booga …