Except for an occasional few hours, she and three other women in the experiment were confined to a silent, dead-end wing of the hospital. The monotony was broken by visits and telephone calls from family and friends... the long days were unnerving.
"I thought I was starving. I thought the doctors didn't know what they were doing," she said. She wept. Some days she sulked in her room. On others she ranted and raved and several times threatened to leave.

"Pineapple with whipped cream was the preferred dessert back then, so I thought, 'My god, I can have as much pineapple as I want for two days,' and that sounded splendid."

[Miller] came upon the idea for the appetite-inhibiting lenses, he said, in one of his supermarkets. He noted that customers were attracted to shelves by certain colors. "If people could be controlled by one color," he thought, "they could be decontrolled by another."

Perhaps tinted eyeglasses could reverse the attraction to food by affecting the subconscious, Miller hypothesized. And he went to work.

The experiments began with employees of one of his enterprises, the Miller Vision Centers. Soon the research was extended to his patients.

At first, the results were mixed. He had chosen the wrong colors. Then he hit upon crimson brown and royal blue.

"It's crazy. I can't tell you exactly how, but it works," Miller said.

Soon testimonial letters were coming into Miller's office by the dozens. In virtually every case, people who wore the glasses said they weren't eating as much. He conducted control experiments with the help of a psychologist and claimed a 97 percent success rate.