A visit with Richard Simmons

Simmons preached a sweet and manic form of self-acceptance, as long as you desired to make that self thin

In 1997, I published Losing It: America’s Obsession with Weight and the Industry that Feeds on It (Dutton), and included a section on diet gurus. Among the gurus I interviewed (Susan Powter, Dean Ornish, and others), I visited Richard Simmons at his studio and home in Beverly Hills. At the time he was nearly at the top of his fame, a formerly fat kid from New Orleans who devoted himself to getting people to lose weight through exercise and positive vibes. I loved how he provided a space for fat people to exercise, at a time when many felt shunned at the gym. And I liked his authentic kindness. But success and happiness in his mind was always tied to becoming thin, not being active in the body you had.

Simmons died on July 13th, after he had been a recluse since 2014. He said he was just done with performing, and still emailed people his support every day. But other reports say that after a knee surgery he gained a lot of weight and didn’t want to be seen in public. No one who knows is talking, but if he did get heavy, I hope he didn’t feel like a failure. He was a sweet man, truly himself in his sparkly disco shorts, a cheerleader for ordinary people who wanted to get in shape.

From Losing It:

Richard Simmons, a curly-headed dynamo who has been in the diet business for more than a decade, is America’s favorite diet guru. He has inexhaustible energy; he runs an exercise studio in Beverly Hills, produces his own fitness videos, sells his Deal-A-Meal diet plan on infomercials, checks in regularly on daytime TV talk shows, makes three hundred personal appearances at malls and conventions a year, and calls hundreds of fat people a week. Like Jack LaLanne, Simmons is on a personal crusade to transform every fat person in America, and he truly believes that if there were only enough hours in the day, he could do it.

For millions of Americans, Simmons, who was once a 260-pound teenager, has become an emblem of the hope that they can lose weight and change their lives. They feel that he personally can help them lose weight, and they write to him as a last-ditch effort. “I’d say every overweight person has written to me at least once,” Simmons tells me. “I’m the last hotel on Weight Loss Boulevard.  You have to have been living under a rock not to have seen me on a talk show or infomercial.”

Indeed. With his frantic schedule, Simmons almost succeeds in keeping pace with the growing number of fat people in the country. “Every day, CNN or somebody is telling us how many more fat people there are,” he says, breaking into a TV anchorman voice. “Four out of five people are short and fat! Five out of eight have had a divorce and are fat!” He laughs, but humor is his way of dispelling the pain he believes comes with being fat. He laughs with fat people, and cries with them; he opens his arms to them in order to save them. “I want to take care of these people. I don’t judge them because they're fat, I love them unconditionally. I just want them to come to class.”

Like so many of his fans, Simmons has been fat, he’s dieted, he’s starved, and he’s thrown up. He understands: even though he has succeeded in losing weight, he still has the desire every day, he says, to lick his finger and get the remaining greasy potato chip crumbs at the bottom of the bag. To overcome that desire, he has transformed his compulsion to eat into a compulsion to help others. “I’m Richard O. Simmons!” he chirps. “The O is for ‘obsession.’”

Like Jack LaLanne, Simmons started out with an exercise studio, and it’s in his studio that he really shines. His exercise class at his shiny pink and white “Slimmons” Studio in Beverly Hills is high-energy fun for people who might otherwise feel out of place in an aerobics class. Simmons prances up to the front of the room, his fuchsia tank top and nylon shorts sparkling in the mirror. “The disco’s open all night!” ye yells, throwing a record onto the stereo. Most of the people in the room are women in the 200-pound range, wearing bright makeup, neon leggings, and oversized T-shirts. A few people are larger; a man and a woman in the back of the room, discreetly furnished with ample chairs, are closer to 500 pounds. Simmons leads the group in slow stretching warm-ups before heating things up with grapevine steps, shuffles, and Saturday Night Fever moves. Soon, everyone is not only moving but panting and sweating. Between routines, Simmons keeps up a comedy patter on the theme of weight loss. “If you have a problem, a baloney sandwich is not going to solve it,” he says. “Anyone here starving themselves?” he asks. “If so, you have to do the class naked. Those are the rules.”

In the back, I’m step-kicking and shimmying along with the rest. Simmons’s routine is slower-paced than the aerobics classes I’m used to, which are geared toward hard-bodied gym rats, and where I’m usually the chubbiest one there. But it’s still a good workout, and the large women in the class can really move. They not only throw their bodies into the steps with grace and gusto, but complete every set of stomach crunches, leg lifts, and bicycle kicks.

By providing an atmosphere where people of all sizes and shapes can exercise comfortably and have a great time, Simmons gives them an opportunity to transform themselves in the present, instead of in the distant after-picture future when they might become thin. Exercise lifts people’s moods right now, and gives them the sense that their bodies are not just a source of shame but of pleasure. “I see people blossom,” says Simmons.

But that isn’t enough for Simmons — or for many of his students. They’re here, primarily, to get thin. If they didn’t think exercise helped them lose weight faster, they might not show up for class. At Slimmons, thinness is the fantasy, the motivation, and the ultimate goal. “Debbie lost sixty-seven pounds,” Simmons tells the group, pointing to a blonde in her forties. “She had her bellybutton redone. She picked Cher’s.”

Simmons promises fat people they’ll really start living when they lose weight. No matter how much fun you have jumping around an exercise studio, feeling good about your body for a change, life really won’t be exciting unless you become thin. Until then, he feels sorry for you. He doesn’t think it’s possible to come to class, exercise, and be fit if you don’t lose the weight — even though he acknowledges that most people, in the end, don’t keep the pounds off.

“Fat kills,” he tells me later, sitting on the lavender carpet of his Gone With the Wind-style mansion up in the hills above the studio. “You go from being chubby to fat, to obese, to morbidly obese. And then there’s death.” Simmons likes to tell Cinderella stories of people he’s saved from that fate, who have lost 100 pounds or more on his program and gone on to lead glamorous lives. But he can’t help everyone. His brown eyes redden. “I’ve lost so many people.”

Simmons, to his credit, doesn’t sell faddish diet products to help people lose weight. “I’ve never jumped on the bandwagon for the liquid diets — and I could’ve made a lot of money—or for the pills, or for the little frozen foods that don’t look like much.” Instead, he advocates a moderate low-calorie, low-fat, semi-starvation diet (about the same as most commercial weight-loss programs), along with exercise, and relies on his charm and willpower to inspire people to stick with it. He’s well aware of the formula for his success: “Being approachable, being my TV persona, and looking the same —as long as I can fit into these Dolphin shorts, my weight’s okay,” he says. He isn’t a stickler about getting super-thin; with a little potbelly himself, he’s more realistic. “And I eyeball 400,000 people a year like this.” He stares into my eyes with his liquid brown ones, in a well-practiced gaze that registers compassion, love, and heartfelt sympathy. “I don’t know why I keep it up. I just keep going. I love it. I have a passion for what I do.”

“Debbie lost sixty-seven pounds,” Simmons tells the group, pointing to a blonde in her forties. “She had her bellybutton redone. She picked Cher’s.”

Leaning back against a large, lime sherbet-colored armchair, Simmons tells me he doesn’t think of himself as a guru. “I’m a struggling guy who’s lost weight, and through humor is helping a lot of people. People think of me as a cousin they grew up with who made them laugh.” If people look to him for inspiration and motivation, though, he’s happy. “They do write to me and say, without you, I couldn’t have done this. I never could’ve lost this two hundred pounds. And I figure, that’s great. I’m glad I was there to help.” His eyes redden again for a moment, and he looks away, surveying the living room with its many ornate dolls perched on display shelves and marble pedestals. “I never put myself on a pedestal with these people,” he says. “They’ve followed me like a Pied Piper, but I’ve never led them down the wrong path.”

It’s not surprising that people follow Richard Simmons; he’s honest, direct, sensitive, and a lot of fun to be around. I wanted to stay all afternoon, chatting away, and it seemed like he might have let me. He gave me a tour of his doll collection, his blown-glass plates, his cow-patterned kitchen (the stools had udders), and his Victorian Easter egg collection. He introduced me to his six Dalmations, and showed me the dogs’ future memorial park, complete with cypress trees, cala lilies, and marble walkways, which he had built right outside the house so that when the dogs need a final place to rest, they can be near him. He broke out alternately into tears and Broadway songs as we talked, and his humor was quick, spontaneous, and never mean. Before I left, he introduced me to his family of household assistants and a friend, telling them how I’d attended his exercise class that day.  “She took the class, and she was the thinnest one there,” he said. That actually wasn’t true, but to Richard Simmons, it was the highest form of flattery.

Simmons doesn’t believe that it’s possible to be heavy and still feel fine about yourself. “I don’t find fat pretty,” he says. “I don’t look at a fat woman and say, “Oh my gosh, she’s beautiful the way she is!” He is adamant that fat people need help, and those who think they’re all right—a view endorsed by fat activists, such as members of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA)—are just fooling themselves. “I get a lot of letters saying, ‘I belonged to this fat organization, and they told me they were happy and fat, and they had a career and a man who loved them, but I couldn’t buy it. I got out of it, and Richard, I need some help.’” He says he’s puzzled why people at NAAFA didn’t like him. He wishes they did, he says; he’d like to help them lose weight, too.

Simmons is a frequent guest on daytime TV talk shows, where the story always involves a depressed fat person who — surprise!—gets to meet Richard Simmons, and is inspired to start on that diet and lose the weight once and for all. They are chubby Cinderellas, and he is the fairy godmother who swoops down and, with a wave of the wand, gives them the inspiration and willpower they need. “It’s a great story, the Cinderella syndrome,” Simmons tells me. “She’s scrubbing the floor, can’t go to the ball, and the fairy godmother comes. She gets the dress, the Tiffany jewelry, she goes to the party. We’re raised on these stories. We all have this thing about happy endings. So, if Sally has a story about a fat woman, those get big ratings, because we want this big transformation. It’s still hot, and it will never change. Never.”

In his book Richard Simmons’ Never Give Up (1993), every story is a story of miracles that happen when someone meets Richard Simmons and loses weight. Nancy dropped 112 pounds and saved her marriage. Charmi met Simmons and achieved the goal of her life, to become an aerobics instructor. One man was so fat it drove him to drug abuse and theft; he went to Simmons’s class, lost 110 pounds, turned himself in to the police, and was sentenced to continue the class. A woman whose daughter got run over by a car ate to deal with her grief; she got Simmons’s Deal-A-Meal, lost weight, and was able to adopt a new baby.

In real life, though, losing weight doesn’t have much to do with adopting a baby, rehabilitating a criminal life, finding love, or saving your marriage. Losing weight is not likely to solve all your problems, heal the emotional scars of your childhood, or make you rich (unless you become a diet guru). Many people, in fact, have found the opposite to be true: giving up the dream that dieting will transform them has let them get on with their lives, rather than putting everything off until that fantasy day when they’re finally thin. 

But for those who follow Richard Simmons, hope springs eternal. In spite of the many people who have failed repeatedly on his—like every—diet, Simmons is always there with an encouraging word. Michael Hebranko, who once lost 700 pounds and became a 200-pound television spokesman for Simmons, made the news in May 1996, when, at about 1,000 pounds, unable to stand for more than half a minute or breathe on his own, he was removed from his home with a forklift and transported to a hospital. Simmons, though saddened and worried about Hebranko, nevertheless told reporters he was sure that with his help, the man would get back on his diet and lose the weight again.