In the six months the firm was given to make Americans aware of Ms. Bridges and her online weight-loss program, 12 Week Body Transformation (12WBT), its conference room was home to the following interactions: a strategy meeting with Blue State Digital, the marketing firm that worked for President Obama’s campaign; discussions about which photos made Ms. Bridges look younger, and how maybe the ones in which she had bangs made her look too severe; analysis of focus groups; invocations of a technology in which Internet ads would follow users around other websites until they signed up for the program, all because they had clicked on Ms. Bridges’s ad once; a conversation that was supposed to be light but turned a little tense about the fact that the American firms seem to keep saying “12-Week Body” as an abbreviation for the program; many debates over American vernacular; conversations over transferring recipes to an American audience, most notably finding substitutes for kangaroo as a protein source; and crinkly conference calls during the one or two hours when parties in California and Australia are both reasonably awake for passionate negotiations of Ms. Bridges’s time.
At any given point there are more than 100 people working on Ms. Bridges’s brand, but there is only one Michelle Bridges.
In Australia, Ms. Bridges is best known for her role as the trainer on that country’s edition of the TV show “The Biggest Loser.” She has lines of housewares and workout clothes sold through discount department stores. She is also the personality behind 12WBT, an interactive online diet and fitness program in a country for which obesity rates have grown to 63 percent in recent years. Since 12WBT was introduced in January 2010 in Australia, more than 250,000 people have joined at $199 Australian ($176) or 12 weekly payments of $19.99.
Now she’s bringing 12WBT to the United States, along with the rest of her brand, in an attempt to gain a share of the lucrative diet industry. It remains to be seen, though, if there’s room for another diet guru in a saturated field.
“Losing weight is a science,” Ms. Bridges said recently over breakfast at Mr. C in Los Angeles, where she ordered an egg white omelet and black coffee. “Keeping weight off is a psychology.”
It is this distinction between psychology and science (though psychologists might debate the notion that their field isn’t a science) that Ms. Bridges believes gives her an edge. She said 12WBT attacks “problematic thinking” with a full month of “preseason,” in which dieters clean out their refrigerators, have important conversations with their families, prepare their schedules and, most importantly, practice the fine art of “getting real,” Ms. Bridges’s favorite term for overcoming the thinking that led them to becoming overweight in the first place.
“Science and psychology are separate,” she said, every word punctuated with a pleading intensity that never let up. “I can get weight off anyone. I can get weight off anyone. Keeping it off, that’s a different ballgame. That’s your head.” (How well they keep it off is anyone’s guess, though. Like other diet companies, 12WBT says it does not keep track of how their clients do long-term, but that some are so successful that they keep signing up.)
Ms. Bridges, 43, has bright blue eyes, a deep orangy tan and shoulders that seem more like a diagram of the muscular system. She leaned back, mock exhausted from having to explain her philosophy yet again. She took a bite of toast. “Yes,” she said, shaking the bread, “I eat carbs.”
When Ms. Bridges was a fitness trainer at a gym, said her ex-husband, Bill Moore (who owned that gym and is now her business partner), “she had this very empathetic way about her. Instead of saying, ‘I’m super fit and you’re not,’ she would be going: ‘This class is killing me, but I’m going to go harder. Come with me, come with me.’ ”
He and Ms. Bridges would sit on the couch at home, he said, and watch the first season of Australia’s “Biggest Loser,” which featured Bob Harper and Jillian Michaels, the trainers from the American version of the show. Ms. Bridges would say to Mr. Moore, “I could do that job.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/02/fashion/Weight-Loss-Program-Personal-Fitness-Trainer-Michelle-Bridges-.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
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