Fat-busters!

High over the city, the view from Taipan grazes over the green tree cover and the rolling vistas of the Delhi Golf Course.

With dimsums on our plates and glasses of watermelon juice and bowls of Chinese tea to wash them down with, the last thing on the menu should be dark circles under the eyes, double chin, flabby skin, tummy tuck and body correction programmes.

But when you are lunching with the current diva of the nation's slimming and beauty biz, you can't stay away from the subject of the daily one tonne of excess weight she unloads off her clients, considerably lightening their burdens.

Sighing reluctantly, you also pass over second helpings "" you're here to ask Vandana Luthra questions, not sign up for her weightloss sessions.

In the wake of the popular Jassi Jaisi Koi Nahin soap where she had a walk-on role, playing herself, Vandana Luthra has reinvented herself.

The hard curls had gone earlier, giving way to straightened hair (just the right shade of auburn), but following Jassi's makeover in the serial, gone is the nudge-wink factor from her eponymously named Vandana Luthra Curls and Curves (VLCC) centres (88 at last count).

"The business now appears more legit," says an observer.

Actually, it's been legit for a long while. It was in 1989 that Vandana started her garage-style weightloss and skincare centre in the city's Safdarjang Enclave, a one-off that took even her by surprise when it hit paydirt immediately.

More centres followed soon after (formulaically "launched" by striving or has-been actors who put in a five-minute appearances for the ribbon-cutting).

"I was always inclined towards both skin and nutrition, and worked a lot with dermatologists," says Vandana, softer and gentler than the media has made her out to be.

(It's one reason the Luthras don't socialise much, she admits, because Delhi treats its new entrepreneur millionaires with scant respect.)

By the time she had 20 centres running, business had become so hectic, husband Mukesh took a rain-cheque on his own export business and got down to giving VLCC a corporate identity and a business plan for the future.

At Rs 120-crore, VLCC is in the big league of the beauty business, but if growth continues along its current trajectory, it might well touch Rs 1,000 crore by 2010, says Mukesh Luthra.

The major thrust for this is likely to come from the personal care business that has grown from Rs 6 crore in 2002-03 to Rs 12 crore in 2003-04, to Rs 50 crore in 2004-05.

Future growth is pegged at 30 per cent. And with the slimming and beauty factories poised to grow by 40 per cent, the VLCC "superbrand" is hoping to go in for an IPO in September 2007.

Currently, the weightloss centres contribute to 85 per cent of the VLCC kitty, the beauty business takes up another 12 per cent, while 3 per cent comes from its educational programmes.

"Already, 35 more centres are planned in India, and 15 overseas," says Mukesh. Two of its first international VLCC centres will open in Dubai by September; another five will open in the Middle East in 2006-7; while 2006 should also see it debut in Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Bangladesh.

"A further 15 per cent thrust to the business will come from our spas," says Mukesh.

Even though there's just one VLCC day spa (in Delhi's Vasant Vihar), a 25-acre resident spa in Sohna (Haryana) with 45 cottages aimed at promoting health tourism, and day spa centres in all cities, are on the anvil.

All centres in India are owned and managed by VLCC without resorting to franchising.

For now, 100 per cent of the equity is held by the husband and wife team, but with Credit Lyonaise tying up a $10 million funding venture in VLCC (reportedly its first foray in the beauty business), the Luthras aren't overtly concerned about investments in their business.

Their line-up of formulations and beauty treatment products are created with the technical help of an R&D team of chemists and biotechnologists at factories in Dehra Dun and Haridwar, while that at Gurgaon will soon go online.

If anything, Mukesh is keen to explode the myth of VLCC being a mom-and-pop company. "We have a very professional board of which Vandana was not a part till recently. We've worked with management consultants from the start, and all powers are decentralised with independent managers in all 46 cities where we have operations."

While the Rs 1 crore-plus endorsement for VLCC (and Vandana Luthra personally) in Jassi may have put them on the A-list of entrepreneur-celebrities (pan-India business surged by 15 per cent in its aftermath), the VLCC empire isn't without its share of critics who harp about the dangers of Vandana Luthra's "diets" and passive weightloss programmes.

"I don't recommend appetite suppressants," insists Vandana, who targets a minimum loss of 4-5 kg monthly, "and technology has made it possible for people to lose weight with passive exercising machines."

She insists, too, that weight maintenance is part of the entire programme, and boasts of a 89-90 per cent success rate (from the 32,500 kilos her clients lose on an average every month).

"Obesity is an epidemic," she says, "but nobody wants to be sick. We work very closely with doctors on our cases, and plan treatments keeping their medical reports in mind. Soon, customers themselves turn into food and weight counsellors, and because they keep returning for their beauty treatments, we're able to monitor their weight loss on a regular basis."

Oh, and just for the record, "Men lose weight more easily than women," says Vandana. Perhaps I'll have another helping of those dimsums after all, thank you.