Celebrity Fad or For Real: Songstress Marsha Ambrosius

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Marsha Ambrosius, former member of the poetry-meets-soul duo, Floetry, has taken on a brand new image with the recent release of her debut solo album, Late Nights and Early Mornings, losing upwards of 70 pounds. While the set has hit #2 on the Billboard 200 Album charts, the question in everyone's minds is how she lost the pounds.

The group's 2007 break up was not Marsha's doing and some speculate the pressures of her solo career as her motivation to drop the weight.  However, Marsha attributes the loss of her grandmother for the push to get healthy.  By the end of 2003, she began the Weight Watchers program with her Mom.  She credits the simplicity of the points system for her gradual weight loss and says that she had lost 30 pounds by the release of Floetry's third and final album, Flo'ology, released in 2005.

Verdict: For Real
Marsha and Jennifer Hudson are not the only ones singing the praises of Weight Watchers. Two studies from the Medical Research Council(MRC), led by one of Britain's leading nutrition scientists, say that Weight Watchers really does work. Susan Jebb, PhD, head of nutrition and health research at the MRC's human nutrition research center, was interested in studying Weight Watchers because of its attempt to effect behavior change in addition to offering a diet plan. While Marsha did not mention an exercise plan, the discipline of the points system seems to have worked for her on diet alone. It seems her story is not unusual. ConsumerSearch.com, an independent consumer review website, cites it as "the most proven commercial diet." They also reveal that both the Journal of the American Medical Association and the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), found that Weight Watchers' members stuck to their diet plans and continued losing weight longer than dieters who were on the Atkins, South Beach or Slim-Fast plan.