Nidetch, Jean

Jean Slutsky (1927–) was born in Brooklyn, New York. In 1947 she married Marty Nidetch, and in 1952 they settled in Queens, New York. Both Jean and Marty Nidetch had been overweight since childhood, and by 1961 Jean, who was five-foot-seven, tipped the scales at 214 pounds; her husband, at five-foot-ten, weighed 265 pounds. Jean Nidetch had tried all kinds of diets, consulted myriad diet doctors, and taken weight-loss drugs, but nothing worked for her. In 1961, desperate to lose weight, she enrolled in the obesity clinic run by New York City’s Department of Health and was put on a diet championed by Dr. Norman Jolliffe. Strict adherence to the food plan was mandatory, and after losing twenty-one pounds, she began to doubt that she could stick with it.