Delivery service brings Zone meals to dieters' doorsteps

Would you sign up for a diet program run by a woman who admits she's been a size 8 all of her adult life?

As president of Zone Seattle, Arlene Sherman dispatches her "food fairies" daily to roughly 150 clients of Zone Seattle, the home meal-delivery program she founded 19 months ago with her son, Jeff, based on the principles of the Zone diet developed by Dr. Barry Sears and first introduced in his 1995 book "The Zone."

A fast-talking, Brooklyn-accented food fairy godmother, Sherman set her sights on health-conscious Seattle after working for a similar company in the New York metropolitan area.

Few among us could resist a sales pitch that promises you'll lose between 1 and 3 pounds a week eating three meals a day plus two snacks, prepared by professional chefs and delivered to your door fresh daily. But many might balk at the cost: $39.99 per person per day.

"Forty dollars a day may seem expensive; certainly it is for me as a retired person," says Jo Ann Bourque, a former secretary who lives in West Seattle. But when she calculated what she was spending on food before she joined Zone Seattle, she was shocked to realize that it was close to $40 a day. Because she doesn't really like to cook or shop, she would rely on pricier prepared food, or junk food. She was, she admits, eating more than she should have been. "People pay for housecleaning, they pay for gardening, so why not pay for something that's good for you?" she asks.

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