About
This is my bio, but if you want to see what I look like talking about the Six Word Diet, SCROLL DOWN TO THE END OF THIS TEXT AND SEE THE LITTLE FILM I MADE!
Meanwhile, welcome to my About the Author page!
I’m Beth, and I invented the Six Word Diet, and then wrote the book. Here’s a little bit of biographical information about me!
I was born in North Carolina, but I grew up in Miami, Florida. I majored in Theater Performance in college, with a minor in English and an obsession with James Joyce.
Later, I moved to New York City and took some composition classes at the Juilliard School with Dr. Stanley Wolfe, writing for piano and violin, and began a successful modeling career, starring in more than 30 national television and radio commercials, including Soft N Dri deodorant, Sprite, Pampers, and others.
Later I moved to Wisconsin and married my beloved husband, Bill, an English Professor. He got me interested in poetry, and I got several poems published, one in the Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy journal. It was about a wasp that someone squashed, which made me very sad at the time. But getting the poem published made me very happy. So I guess in the end, I’m grateful to that wasp for his contributions to my art, but sorry he had to be a martyr.
Having begun, through poetry, to really love words and their shades of meaning, I then got my doctorate in law from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and became an attorney, working almost exclusively for the poor.
Speaking of law school, the only time I ever lost weight on any diet was during law school, when I ran my first experiment with eating lots of meals a day, but I didn’t have the kinks worked out of the diet, so I gained all the weight back beginning 3 days after I reached my goal weight. Oops.
Apart from that one three-day moment of glory 
I have never once been near my correct weight, tubby since I was 14, even though I tried every diet and never cheated, even kept index cards of every bite I ate, AND exercised an hour a day for years.
But back to the bio: In addition to practicing law, I was also a county mediator for 18 years, helping divorcing couples resolve their custody disputes.
I also never gave up my writing and was hugely honored to become a syndicated columnist for the New York Times Syndicate while I lived in Wisconsin. I wrote a slice-of-life humor column, sent it in weekly by email, and had a blast writing once a week, appearing in more than a hundred newspapers, and working with the most brilliant editor I’m sure I’ll ever know.
Around the same time, I also launched a one-year career as an artist, and even had my own one-woman show at the Al. Ringling gallery in Wisconsin. I’ll post some of my art here some day–I use very bright colors and lots of black lines. But then I realized that I was accumulating a lot of framed pictures, and prints, and there was nowhere to store them, so I stopped doing art. It wasn’t that much fun, anyway. I was always nervous that I was going to ruin the picture at the last minute, and I could never really “get into the zone” because of worrying so much. Art is not for me, I guess.
My favorite hobby, however, is music, and I love to sing, especially to sing harmony, write songs, and play a variety of instruments, but mainly piano and guitar, by ear.
But I think I’ve digressed. Ooops.
So when my husband decided to retire from his job as a UW Professor and move to North Carolina, I had to give up all my jobs in Wisconsin. But since one of my main hobbies has always been studying medical journals online, I figured it was okay to move, because I could study about diet, nutrition, medicine and health online anywhere.
Well, about 6 months before we moved, I decided to test out a diet I had been tinkering with in my mind for a long time. I called the diet “The Six-Word Diet” because it was only six words long: Eat 100 calories every 90 minutes.
With all my studying and personal experience, I really believed this diet would work.
So in early January of that year, I started what is now the official Six Word Diet, being my own guinea pig. And I LOOKED like a guinea pig when I started. I’m ashamed to remember how much I weighed!
And even though I thought the diet would work, still, I could hardly believe it when the pounds started falling off so fast! I had always worn big XXL clothes and 18s and such, and I remember the day I went into Walmart just to see what size I was, and I could fit into a 10 and a 12.
I was ecstatic, and never imagined I would be much smaller than that. I bought about 8 things in those sizes and wore them all the time.
But I kept losing weight on the diet! Suddenly my 10’s were too loose!
Nothing, and I mean NOTHING like this had ever happened to me before. Even when I lost weight in law school that one time, I was wearing 10s at my lowest weight, and thought I was so little at the time.
Well, one day I went into a store and tried on some jeans in a size 8 and they FIT! I thought, this isn’t possible. The jeans are marked wrong.
But no. I was wearing an 8!
And I STILL kept losing!
The day I first had the nerve to try on a 6–my husband was waiting outside the dressing room and heard me squeal as I ran out to show him the label, and that the pants FIT! There were other ladies changing, and I don’t know what they thought of my squealing and acting quasi-delirious with happiness. And of course I bought THOSE pants!
But I still kept losing.
And when I could fit into a 4, I could have sworn I was finished shrinking.
But I wasn’t.
And finally, I hit the NEVER-IMAGINED size of TWO!
They say you can’t achieve what you don’t dream, but I did. I did NOT dream that I would ever reach a size 2. I’m still slightly shocked every day when I put on my clothes for the day. Size 2 clothes look like doll clothes. I can’t believe I can wear them!
Anyway, I have finally stopped losing, because I want to be my perfect weight, but no lower. Health is extremely important to me because doctors scare me to death, so I figure I can avoid them by taking good care of myself.
Well, obviously if you lose that much weight, people ask how you did it. so I explained it, one person at a time.
But because SO many people kept on asking me to explain my diet, I finally decided to get it into the written form I wanted, as concisely as possible, but with the most help I could jam into a book, and then I hunted for the least expensive way to print it, so that I could get it into the hands of other people like me, as inexpensively as possible.
After all, it’s not the BOOK people want; it’s the DIET they want, so why should I make a slick, fancy book and charge them $25 when it can be done for a fraction of that!?!
Kinko’s to the rescue! With the help of my dear friend Anita, I got the book ready to go, and shipped it off to Kinko’s, and they shipped it back, and the end of this happy story is that the books are selling like mad.
I thought I would have trouble finding work in this mountainous area of North Carolina where I live, but now the Six Word Diet is keeping me busy from about 6 a.m. till midnight every day, keeping up with orders and trying to get the word out.
It might sound crazy, but I really feel that I’m on a kind of mission, trying every way I can to locate those people for whom regular diets just don’t work.
I UNDERSTAND those people, because that was me.
I know they aren’t lying when they say they try really hard, and still they can’t lose. That was me.
I know their embarrasment, their discouragement, their loss of hope. That was me.
So after all the different kinds of adventures in work and hobbies that I have undertaken in my life–and I’ve done a lot of things–I believe that this is what I am really supposed to do at this time and this place in the world.
Obesity has reached epidemic proportions; obesity-related sickness is skyrocketing. Obesity has now been found to literally CAUSE cancer, by itself! And it is expected that by mid-century, obesity will kill more people than ALL FORMS OF CANCER COMBINED.
It’s a horrible nightmare of unprecedented dimensions.
And I believe I have the cure.
If you’re still reading this far, I must thank you. A paucity of words has never been my problem. But I’m just so excited about the Six Word Diet and its potential to change so many lives.
S0 stick with me, okay?
Together, we can really do this thing.
And if you’re a person who prays, don’t forget to pray for me, but most of all for the people I’m trying to find.
If you’re not the praying type, send up good thoughts.
Love to everyone, whether you made it this far in my ten-billion-word bio or not.
And HAPPY SHRINKING!
NOW LOOK BELOW TO SEE MY CUTE LITTLE FILM! OR CLICK HERE IF THE VIDEO ISN’T WORKING IN YOUR BROWSER.
