PeriodicLurker
Well-Known Member
Earlier, I was skimming through the blog of my future wife, Joy Nash (although she's not aware of our engagement just yet; in fact, she's not really aware of me existence, either) and she referenced some legal drama surrounding a dubiously-marketed dieting website, Kimkins.
On an internet-surfing lark, I started reading up on the whole sordid tale, and it's both hilarious and fascinating.
Here's a summary of the dieting debacle: during the apex of the low-carb fad in 2006, an extremely popular and provocative poster at a popular low-carb site (LowCarbFriends.com) with the handle "Kimkins" declared that she was going to start up her own dieting site. Part of Kimkins's huge popularity at LCF stemmed from her amazing before & after pics, pics that were as astounding as if you saw Rosanne Barr & Angelina Jolie as before & after pics....and they were also as fraudulent (and obviously fraudulent, which exposes the idiocy of the people who bought into Kimkins).
Anyway, Kimkins.com was soon up and running. It was an immediate success, charging members about $20 for membership dues. The mysterious "Kimkin" was very aggressive in promoting the site with "guerrilla marketing" tactics (including posting fake freebies at FreeCycle.com as an excuse to solicit her own site to people seeking the goods), and she brought a ton of her fans from the previous low-carb site with her. "Kimkin" seemed to revel in deceiving people, almost like she got an emotional boost out of knowing that she tricked somebody. For instance, she claimed that all of her profits were going to be spent on a bunch of orphans she was raising when, in reality, she had only one child, and he was apparently an adult.
"Kimkins" also had some shady dealings with a woman who ran her website and who handled the company's logistics ("Kimkin" focused mostly on marketing). However dubious the web designer was in her own right (and she definitely seems sketchy), she was like Mother Theresa compared with "Kimkins" and, not surprisingly, the two had a falling out (no honor among thieves and all that). In retaliation, the ex-web designer's husband hired a Los Angeles private investigator to find out the truth about "Kimkins" (the web designer and her husband live in the U.K.)
The private investigator soon discovered that (a) she was not the woman in the photographs she claimed were of her, (b) she was actually obese, (c) she was not raising foster children, (d) she was bald (for whatever that's worth), (e) her real name was Heidi Diaz, and (f) she had no formal medical training at all.
But Kimkins.com was still going strong. And in 2007, 'Woman's World' magazine published a large article about the miracle diet (advertising it as a substitute for gastric bypass surgery), and that publicity bumped their membership dues to about $60 and they had (I'm going from memory) $1.3m in revenues in the next few months.
It was Kimkins.com's popularity that was its undoing. 'Cause then there was money to be made from a class action suit! The diet "worked" in the same sense that starvation would "work" as a diet. The various meals that the Kimkins.com diet offered added up to between 500 and 800 calories per day, hardly enough to have the energy to allow you to go online and ask, "Why is my hair falling out?!?", which was one of many side effects suffered by Kimkins.com dieters.
So, the class action lawyers began investigating and they found out that all of the photos of "Kimkin" were actually photos of Russian models and mail-order brides. But that's just the start: dozens of the Kimkins.com "customers" with glowing testimonials were also fake, and their photographs were of Russian models, too! A lot of people involved in the class action suit are exceedingly bitter and pro-active.
Anyway, you have to pity the women who put their time, money, and hopes into this farce, but this is really just an extreme case of the whole scam weight loss industry. Everybody claims that they've got the panacea, when the fact of the matter is is that your metabolism decreases as you age, and gravity is going to take its toll on your body no matter what size you are. This is basic stuff. But the dieting industry is like the the self-help industry, they keep on claiming that they've found the magic answers, but then, a year later, those same people are back again, cynically selling you another answer. Women's (and some men's) self-hatred/vanity is just the gift that keeps on giving for book publishers and daytime talk shows.
Just this once, though, it was great to see one (relatively small) diet con get exposed.
On an internet-surfing lark, I started reading up on the whole sordid tale, and it's both hilarious and fascinating.
Here's a summary of the dieting debacle: during the apex of the low-carb fad in 2006, an extremely popular and provocative poster at a popular low-carb site (LowCarbFriends.com) with the handle "Kimkins" declared that she was going to start up her own dieting site. Part of Kimkins's huge popularity at LCF stemmed from her amazing before & after pics, pics that were as astounding as if you saw Rosanne Barr & Angelina Jolie as before & after pics....and they were also as fraudulent (and obviously fraudulent, which exposes the idiocy of the people who bought into Kimkins).
Anyway, Kimkins.com was soon up and running. It was an immediate success, charging members about $20 for membership dues. The mysterious "Kimkin" was very aggressive in promoting the site with "guerrilla marketing" tactics (including posting fake freebies at FreeCycle.com as an excuse to solicit her own site to people seeking the goods), and she brought a ton of her fans from the previous low-carb site with her. "Kimkin" seemed to revel in deceiving people, almost like she got an emotional boost out of knowing that she tricked somebody. For instance, she claimed that all of her profits were going to be spent on a bunch of orphans she was raising when, in reality, she had only one child, and he was apparently an adult.
"Kimkins" also had some shady dealings with a woman who ran her website and who handled the company's logistics ("Kimkin" focused mostly on marketing). However dubious the web designer was in her own right (and she definitely seems sketchy), she was like Mother Theresa compared with "Kimkins" and, not surprisingly, the two had a falling out (no honor among thieves and all that). In retaliation, the ex-web designer's husband hired a Los Angeles private investigator to find out the truth about "Kimkins" (the web designer and her husband live in the U.K.)
The private investigator soon discovered that (a) she was not the woman in the photographs she claimed were of her, (b) she was actually obese, (c) she was not raising foster children, (d) she was bald (for whatever that's worth), (e) her real name was Heidi Diaz, and (f) she had no formal medical training at all.
But Kimkins.com was still going strong. And in 2007, 'Woman's World' magazine published a large article about the miracle diet (advertising it as a substitute for gastric bypass surgery), and that publicity bumped their membership dues to about $60 and they had (I'm going from memory) $1.3m in revenues in the next few months.
It was Kimkins.com's popularity that was its undoing. 'Cause then there was money to be made from a class action suit! The diet "worked" in the same sense that starvation would "work" as a diet. The various meals that the Kimkins.com diet offered added up to between 500 and 800 calories per day, hardly enough to have the energy to allow you to go online and ask, "Why is my hair falling out?!?", which was one of many side effects suffered by Kimkins.com dieters.
So, the class action lawyers began investigating and they found out that all of the photos of "Kimkin" were actually photos of Russian models and mail-order brides. But that's just the start: dozens of the Kimkins.com "customers" with glowing testimonials were also fake, and their photographs were of Russian models, too! A lot of people involved in the class action suit are exceedingly bitter and pro-active.
Anyway, you have to pity the women who put their time, money, and hopes into this farce, but this is really just an extreme case of the whole scam weight loss industry. Everybody claims that they've got the panacea, when the fact of the matter is is that your metabolism decreases as you age, and gravity is going to take its toll on your body no matter what size you are. This is basic stuff. But the dieting industry is like the the self-help industry, they keep on claiming that they've found the magic answers, but then, a year later, those same people are back again, cynically selling you another answer. Women's (and some men's) self-hatred/vanity is just the gift that keeps on giving for book publishers and daytime talk shows.
Just this once, though, it was great to see one (relatively small) diet con get exposed.
