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Linda's Biography

Linda Omichinski tenets of HUGS, the Canadian-based advocacy organization founded by Omichinski in 1987. (The HUGS program, as noted on its Web site, is “Health focused, centered on Understanding lifestyle behaviours, Group supported, and Self esteem building.”) Omichinski began her career as a dietician equating body weight with health. “For awhile I had listened uncritically to my clients as they told me how happy they were with the individualized diets I designed for them,” she recalled on the HUGS Web site. “‘I never feel deprived,’ they would claim. Or they’d tell me: ‘I’m really losing weight on this plan.’ But then, one day, it hit me: sooner or later I’d lose contact with them for awhile, only to run into them in the local grocery store—where they were invariably embarrassed because they’d gained the weight back.” Omichinski realized that dieting failed to meet the needs of her patients by forcing them to adhere to unnatural patterns of restriction and indulgence. “Diets don’t work,” she told Johanna Burkhard for the Montreal Gazette (March 24, 1993), “and over 95 percent of all dieters regain the weight they have lost and even more within a two- to five-year period.” Omichinski believed that the key to breaking this cycle was to promote physical and emotional health rather than weight loss; this became the foundation of HUGS International.

Omichinski’s health workshops dispelled health and diet myths and encouraged members to change their lifestyles and attitudes about food and weight loss. “In this culture, we’re trained to think that we have to be thin to be healthy, happy, attractive, and worthwhile,” Omichinski explained on the HUGS Web site. “We’re trained to believe that our success and value are determined by the number that shows up when we stand on the bathroom scale. But that training is wrong! We all have different body shapes, metabolisms, and activity levels. People are not meant to be ‘one size for all.’” At first, people were unsure about her message. “I think that dieticians felt particularly threatened by HUGS at first,” she told Ann Douglas for Radiance magazine (Spring 1998). “After all, diets are what dieticians are trained in and what they know best. . . . It was a hard message to sell.” As the nodiet movement has gained momentum, however, HUGS has tapped into the frustration of lifelong dieters, and Omichinski has been able to expand the programs and products offered by HUGS through the use of trained “facilitators,” who work elsewhere in Canada, the United States, England, South Africa, and New Zealand. In response to recent health trends, she has modified and expanded HUGS’s message to reach teenagers and people living with diabetes. HUGS has met with moderate success, despite limited resources to compete with such diet programs as Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. “We simply don’t have the finances to run the commercials required to combat those diet messages,” Omichinski explained to Douglas, “even though we do have visions of what those commercials will look like!”

The daughter of Romanian immigrants, Linda Omichinski was born on April 8, 1955 in Montreal,
Canada. Her father, Steve, worked for the Canadian Pacific Railway, and her mother, Catherine, was a homemaker. An only child, Omichinski credits her parents with raising her in an atmosphere that nurtured her health and self-esteem. “What was so beautiful was growing up in a supportive environment,” she explained in an interview with Current Biography International, “I was never made to feel inadequate.” Omichinski grew up free from any pressure to strive for perfection, whether in school or in terms of her appearance. As a child, however, she did observe the frustrations of her mother in trying to lose weight at the urging of her doctor.“Not that she was as obsessed as people are today,” Omichinski told Current Biography International, but she added that her mother was an “avid Weight Watchers follower.” While her mother struggled with dieting, Omichinski never had any weight or food-related problems. “I went to Europe with my grandparents when I was 18,” she recalled to Current Biography International, “and I came back having gained some weight—it was maybe five pounds—but my clothes didn’t fit.” Instead of telling her daughter she should lose the weight, Omichinski’s mother helped her alter her clothing. As a result of this upbringing, Linda maintains, her self-esteem and body image never hinged on her weight; food was something to be enjoyed without guilt. “The focus wasn’t on food or the numbers on the scale,” she explained to Current Biography International. “Fun and dancing” were the focal points of family gatherings, not food. In addition to dance, Omichinski also enjoyed playing tennis, but she never tied her exercise to weight loss.

After high school Omichinski spent a brief stint as a chemistry major but eventually decided to purse nutrition at Ryerson University, in Toronto. She spent two years in the Food and Nutrition Program before transferring to McGill University, in Montreal, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in Food Sciences in 1979. She then completed her training as a dietician at the Health Sciences Centre, in Winnipeg, in 1983. Upon being certified, Omichinski began working as a consulting dietician for the Carman Memorial Hospital and Hearth Health Education Centre in Carman, Manitoba. From 1985 to 1989 she was also a consulting diabetes educator for the Carman Education Center. Her work was originally traditional: she tailored diets for people’s weight-loss goals. After a few years of telling people how and what to eat, however, Omichinski began to feel that there was something lacking in her work and in the training she’d received. “Something was wrong,” she told Ann Douglas. “It didn’t feel right. I began searching and listening [to clients] some more. . . . It took a few years of inner searching and talking to more and more people before I realized that the focus on weight needed to be removed all together. I think the turning point for me came when a client said to me, ‘Linda, I am no longer starving and bingeing. I am eating more regularly. I am beginning to enjoy healthier foods and feel the energy those foods bring me. I am enjoying walking for the fun of it. But I am not losing weight. What am I doing wrong?’ That hit me like a ton of bricks. I said, ‘You aren’t doing anything wrong. You may be at the weight your body was meant to be.’” Omichinski’s epiphany became a new mission, and she decided to work to dispel the myth that weight was a reliable measure for health.

The HUGS International Web site states its “vision” as the following: “To challenge the myths of the diet industry by shifting the attitudes and beliefs of the public consciousness from the preoccupation with weight and size to an acceptance and appreciation of healthier living.” Its “mission” is “to deliver the freedom message of the nondiet model for healthy living by establishing a worldwide network of facilitators to offer our program and products.” At its inception in 1987, HUGS was a 10-week program with the rationale that it would be the last program clients would ever need in pursuing their health goals. It began as a series of classes taught by Omichinski in the town of Portage la Prairie, Manitoba. In a group counseling setting, discussions about body image and health and weight myths led to examinations of the reasons people diet in the first place. As the realization sunk in that dieting was not only ineffective, but ultimately counterproductive—dieters who lose weight initially tend to regain the weight, and more, over time—Omichinski was able to attract more clients who were fed up with the demoralizing pattern of dieting to lose weight. Over time, the HUGS classes grew, and Omichinski began receiving positive feedback as well as requests for supplementary material to the workshops. In response Omichinski wrote You Count, Calories Don’t, a book that outlined the philosophy and goals promoted by HUGS; it was published in May of 1992. It began by introducing the reader to the idea that diets don’t work and that “deprogramming a person from the diet mentality is the key to regaining control.” “HUGS,” Omichinski wrote, “counters the pervasive culture of slimness in our society. It helps you recognize that the desirability of a perfectly proportioned, ultra-slim body is an unnatural goal that has been forced on all of us by multimedia advertising. We are conditioned to believe that we must conform and that the illusionary perfection of slimness can be ours if we follow the perfect diet, eat the right way, and allow the pursuit of this false ideal to overtake and control our daily lives. The HUGS program helps people realize that individual differences are important. HUGS will show you how to be the best that you can be, physically and emotionally.” You Count, Calories Don’t was well received. In a review for the Journal of Nutrition Education (May/June 1994), Dr. Ellen Parham noted its accessibility and praised its attempt to unveil the falsehoods promoted by the diet industry. “The honesty about the failures of dieting are so important and the suggested alternatives so valuable that the book should be read by nutrition educators and recommended to their clients and students.” Writing for the Canadian Home Economics Journal (Winter 1994), Margie Keys opined, “The information is excellent and the author’s approach is sensible and realistic. A must for anyone concerned about his or her health and leading a healthy lifestyle.” By February of 1993, You Count, Calories Don’t had sold 1,500 copies; a national book tour that year helped the book become a Canadian best-seller, according to her Web site.

As the HUGS message was being spread in Canada, Omichinski started to develop a network of contacts to act as HUGS “facilitators” across North America, and eventually, abroad. Coupled with the success of You Count, Calories Don’t, HUGS’s expanding reach attracted media attention. But the enthusiasm generated by the book tour and newspaper articles was difficult to maintain. Recalling the “hard times” early on, Omichinski told Ann Douglas, “since the message was still very much ahead of its time, participants didn’t spread the word about HUGS.” Moreover, participants found—and continue to find—that while HUGS helped them reject dieting and focus on their selfesteem and overall health, maintaining that mindset posed a daily challenge, especially at first. “People come away [from HUGS] confident, but society is very much still in the diet culture,” Omichinski told Current Biography International. To support people trying to stick with what they learned in HUGS, Omichinksi developed the idea of having a “buddy”; someone to provide positive reinforcement and encouragement in the face of doubt and the enormous media pressure to be thin. In addition to having a “buddy” to help stave off self-doubt, HUGS also has a bulletin board on its Web sites where clients can communicate and encourage each other. Another key aspect to HUGS, Omichinski explained to Current Biography International, is recognition that success is a process. “It’s not going to happen overnight.”

During the 1990s HUGS continued to grow and Omichinski worked to spread the non-diet message. She spoke out against diet programs that just try to hook people by “repackaging” the diet myth, promoting regimented, restrictive eating as part of a healthy lifestyle and casting exercise as primarily a weight loss tool. (HUGS promotes exercise for fun and energy.) She also continued to stress the fact that diets are ultimately ineffective. “If diets worked, diet companies would have gone out of business a long time ago,” she told Jamie Baxter. “Instead, it’s a billion-dollar industry.” An invitation to speak at a conference in New Zealand sponsored by Agencies for Nutrition Action in 1997 resulted in further international exposure; in addition to being one of the keynote speakers, Omichinski was interviewed by various media outlets and the conference and subsequent contacts brought more facilitators on board. (Today, HUGS has eight facilitators across New Zealand.) Also in 1997 Omichinski published the book Tailoring Your Tastes, which provided recipes geared towards healthy eating. Two years later a new edition of You Count, Calories Don’t was released; it included a new chapter titled “Midlife—a time for empowerment.” In 2000 Omichinski published Staying Off the Diet Roller Coaster, a book geared toward speople who have chosen to remain out of the diet cycle and need support sticking to their decision. It included testimonials and stories from people who were successfully managing to live a diet free life.

Over the past few years Omichinski says the HUGS mission has faced daunting opposition due to the popularity of diets such as the Atkins Diet, which cuts carbohydrates from one’s meals, prompting the body to burn fat for energy. The diet is effective for rapid weight-loss and has become hugely influential (although controversial for its liberal allowance of fatty foods and red meat) and more food companies, ranging from fast-food restaurant chains to makers of bread and pasta, are bowing to the success of the Atkins plan by offering low-carb options. This serves to reinforce the already pervasive—and false, according to Omichinski—message that diets achieve the dual goals of losing weight and becoming a happier person. She points to modern technology, especially the Internet, as simultaneously a great place to build support networks but also a major purveyor of negative messages liable to derail the work involved in remaining diet-free. “Because we now have the Internet, when a new diet comes out, it doesn’t just make a little dent,” Omichinski told Current Biography International. “It definitely affects our business. It affects people who are on a no-diet approach.” Instead of dieters attempting to find the core reason they wish to lose weight, they will join the newest fad. (This is a global phenomenon: a BBC report (October 12, 2000) cited a survey that found 85% of women in the United Kingdom think about their size and shape every day. Another BBC report (May 9, 2001) estimated that 90,000 people in the United Kingdom suffer from some form of eating disorder, such as anorexia or bulimia. These trends are reflective of North America as well.) As Omichinski told Current Biography International,“[technological] forwardness in our world is not necessary forwardness in other crucial areas.” Because Omichinski believes that young people are particularly vulnerable to society’s emphasis on thinness and dieting, HUGS has developed a set of programs called “Teens & Diets: No Weigh,” which are geared towards teenagers. Designed to be fun, interactive, and educational, the program includes activities to be taught in health classes at schools—the ideal setting for the program, according to Omichinski. “It’s harder to market the teen program,” she told Current Biography International. “Teens are so busy . . . it’s also harder to get them to take a program. But in school, the teacher would be capable of teaching [the HUGS program].” Despite the fact that integrating HUGS into schools has been challenging, Omichinski says that working with adolescents is important and rewarding because it’s an opportunity to reach young people before they start dieting. She told Current Biography International, “We are preventing them from getting on the diet roller coaster for the rest of their lives. The sad part is that [teens] are very entrenched in how they look.”

Today there are more than 75 HUGS facilitators in multiple cities across Canada and nearly as many in the Untied States. In addition to the facilitators in New Zealand, HUGS also has outposts in England and South Africa. For people who want to complete a HUGS program but do not have facilitators nearby, there are versions that are offered on-line, through the HUGS Web site. “We have grown slowly,” Omichinski told Ann Douglas, “and use the same philosophy in business as what we do with lifestyle: One step at a time, recognize and appreciate the mini-successes, and don’t judge success simply by external terms (i.e. weight loss when referring to lifestyle or income when referring to business success). Internal gratification is important, too.”

Omichinski lives in Manitoba with her husband, Mitchell. Among the people who have aided and encouraged her work, she feels particularly indebted to her friend and fellow nondiet crusader, Francie Berg, of the Healthy Weight Network in North Dakota, who is also known for having founded the Healthy Weight Journal. “Francie’s work has been very influential in the sense that it consists more of ‘why’ we need to work on a no-diet approach,” Omichinski told Current Biography International. “[HUGS] is more the ‘how-to.’” In her free time, Omichinski enjoys various types of dance, as well as tennis in the summer and crosscountry skiing in the winter. (“It’s interesting,” she observed to Current Biography International, “coming full circle to the loves you had when you were younger. . . . I’m definitely more physical now than I was before.”) “What ends up happening when people focus on dieting is that they put their lives on hold,” she told Current Biography International. “When they are freed, they end up being able to fulfill their potential. A lot of creativity comes out, because they’re not as scared so they can be expressive. And that is a huge outcome that goes beyond food.”
—L.S.