I'm grateful for all the help I can find in my effort to get fit and lose fat. So when a friend loaned me her copy of the Curves diet plan (thanks, Maureen!), even though it's designed for women, I dug right in.

What this plan proposes is simple: eat to alter your metabolic set-point, and exercise at least 90 minutes per week in a careful combination of aerobic and resistance training. The plan is thus intimately coupled to Curves gyms' circuit-training exercise, the "30 minutes, 3 days a week" of the book's cover balloons.

Set-point theory is a debated concept that seems to swing back again in each generation. Simply put, the idea is that your body has a memory of a comfortable metabolism setting—and obese people have this point set in a way that makes them feel hungry sooner, store fat more aggressively, and conserve resources by damping the hormone tags that make us feel good when we exercise. By managing the intake times and carbohydrate content of our diet, set-point proponents argue, we can reset this metabolism tip-point, and lose weight (fat) more easily.

The author of this diet plan, Curves founder Gary Heavin, started with a marketing concept that resonated with overweight, underfit women: package the diet and training for easy access, and open it to women only. The Curves franchise has taken off: there are over 9000 Curves gyms worldwide, according to the franchise's home page. One in every four fitness clubs in the United States is a Curves.

The women-only stricture has come under fire recently, with moves in Wisconsin and California to force the gym to admit men as members. Although Maureen said when I asked about this, "Why would men even want to come to a women's gym?" Times Herald-Record columnist Beth Quinn agrees:

It's a 30-minute exercise program in which equipment is laid out in a circle. There are 10 universals and 10 aerobics pads, and you move from one station to the next every 30 seconds. Three circuits and you're done.
   It's quick. It's painless. There's music. The price is right. Everyone is welcome, regardless of age, size or condition. And it works.
   What could be bad?
   Nothing. At least nothing could be bad if this were Curves for Men.
   But ... this is a group of women we're talking about... in every group of women, it's inevitable that there's going to be at least one person with an issue.
—Beth Quinn, "Men don't throw any curves during workouts at gym"

But I digress. The diet plan that Heavin, a 30-year health and nutrition counselor, incorporates into the membership book for Curves might be predicated on a debated concept, but it does have one thing many previous set-point preachers omitted: a real, honest-to-goodness plan. Complete with shopping list, recipes, substitutions—this is a real plan for controlling your diet. Heavin also accepts the idea that there is more than one possible trigger for obesity, so the diet first explores whether your particular weight issues are triggered by carbohydrates, calories or both.

Once you've determined which trigger is yours, you can easily modify the eating plans and shopping lists to maximize the effect. You still cut calories on each version of the diet—but fat calories are not equal to carbohydrate calories. All the diet plans start with a low-calorie week (to get you into the swing of dieting, I suspect), followed by careful tracking of your weight loss week-by-week, as you add calories to the six meals a day.