After reading about the ******* diet and website my question is, "Why haven't they shut it down?" Does is just take a long time to prove all the accusations being made? Thanks.
Who would shut it down? Unfortunately, the internet isn't regulated that way, and unless it's something like child porn, anyone can run virtually any kind of website and get away with it. It takes a lot of effort to get the right people involved. The only recourse at the moment is to spread the word and hopefully their reputation will be enough to keep more people from joining.
I get the impression they are gradually making some changes based on advice of an attorney to cover up some of the more serious issues, but it doesn't change what has happened to all of those people that were scammed, and it doesn't change what it still is - a dangerous scam.
Now their biggest success story, Christin, has been diagnosed with damage to her heart related to the diet
I posted this in the Atkins forum but I am also gonna post this here:
But its not the good news ******* thought it would be. The controversy and ensuring homegrown investagations from former members have made it to the airwaves. KTLA ran 1 installment last night that gives a glimpse of ******* and Kimmer herself. Installment 2 (tonight and I will post a follow up link to it tommorrow) discusses the impeding class action lawsuit and the many health issues people got from doing this diet. Some of these included irreversable thyroid problems and heart problems.
If you are doing this diet, know someone doing this diet or thinking of doing this diet watch this clip. Do your research before you start this. Its dangerous. We all want to lose our weight but do we want lifelong health problems from losing in an unhealthy way?
From what I've read there are many ways that she has broken the law. However, I think internet crimes just take a lot longer to come to the attention of authorities, and then they must determine jurisdiction. Even then it may take more effort and time to investigate and build their case, but as the last poster mentions, it seems they're on her trail.
You know, I was unaware of this deathly diet controversy, had only vaguely noticed the "*******" diet references for awhile, never knew what it entailed. When I started seeing references to the controversy only yesterday, I tried today to go to the original ******* site but my computer only makes a popping sound (?) and doesn't move or open the google link OR any of the blogs listed in the search. It opened an "About" page that warned people off the diet.
A thread I read somewhere mentioned that this ******* person (can't believe I missed all this as I read about every diet around) is perhaps NOT a loser of 198 pounds but weighs something that appears to be 300?
Are there any real news stories out there about this, as opposed to blogs and message boards? Is this woman being prosecuted for something?
How sad that people are so desperate to lose weight that they also lose their ability to discern the difference between a healthy approach and a dangerous fad.
Suzanne, dangerous or fraudulent web sites CAN be shut down by legal authorities. Maybe that's why I can't get in?
As for real news stories, check out the two-part series aired on KTLA in Los Angeles: http://ktla.trb.com/news/health/ Look on the right hand side for the 10/2 and 10/3 broadcasts.
Amarantha, they can be shut down, but as I noted it takes a lot of effort by the right people before anything is done. What i meant was that there isn't some overseer out there ready to flip a switch based on accusations without a proper investigation and order from legal authorities. Even then, it can take a long time. Consider diet pills that make outrageous claims. They usually make millions of dollars before the FTC steps in and sends them a warning letter and a list of changes they are required to make. They usually comply within deadline, and often pay a fine, then they are back in business. If they don't comply, then they are shut down. In the case of *******, there will be other considerations since it's not the same thing as a diet pill and there isn't a tangible product. It's just membership to a website that's being sold, and it may be more difficult to shut them down. However, I'm hoping a class action lawsuit will be more fruitful.
Here's an interesting twist - Almost all of the success stories featured on the ******* website have been traced to photos from Russian bride websites, completely fabricated. Out of the small handful of real success stories, most have abandoned ******* and now warn of the serious dangers of the plan.
Suzanne, I see what you mean and you are right and it's such a shame that people are allowed to continue preying on people with health and obesity problems despite everyone's efforts to point out the fallacies.
That horrible man with the so-called book is still doing infomercials on Sunday afternoons and in the middle of the night (I sleep with the TV on) and it really irritates me, but I digress.
Thanks for the link. Weird about the Russian bride sites being a source of the pics.
Meg, thank you for the links also. I still can't get on to the ******* site.
Wow! Well since I don't know who the owner of the site is, or if that is her, what she weighed before losing the 198 lbs?? Definitely she's pretty fat for making a living off of a cure for being fat.
If you go on youtube you'll see some very nice (if gullible) people doing video blogs starting this diet. When people comment that it's a scam the people answer that that's "a negative attitude" and "please be positive." This is why it's so easy to scam us fat people. We so badly want to write someone a check and have our weight problems "melt away" as they say in the mags.
What is wrong with Woman's World, to promote something this extreme? Although I'm pretty skeptical at this point about ALL commercial diets this one seems pretty bad.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Meg
As of this moment, the ******* site is still open and taking money from gullible new members.
As for real news stories, check out the two-part series aired on KTLA in Los Angeles: http://ktla.trb.com/news/health/ Look on the right hand side for the 10/2 and 10/3 broadcasts.
What is wrong with Woman's World, to promote something this extreme?
The problem as far as I can see with WW and this diet is they never did any fact checking. They never met the woman behind the diet. The woman only sent her pictures. The before as far as anyone can tell are real but not the afters. The lepard print one is a russian woman (been found) the onein the red dress as fake (another russian woman been found). They never saw her they just took what she wrote to them and took it as the golden truth.
What is wrong with Woman's World, to promote something this extreme? Although I'm pretty skeptical at this point about ALL commercial diets this one seems pretty bad.
While WW has been known to promote some crazy and unsafe diet tactics, I think this particular diet that Kimmer promoted to Women's World is not the diet that was promoted within the ******* membership area once you paid for your subscription.
I'm not sure I'd refer to it as a commercial diet. It's just some wacky ideas that some woman dreamed up that had no medical basis and the woman literally made it all up as she went along. She inserted false claims here and there to convince people that medical research backed it up, when that was a blatant lie.
I remember that Women's World article (and reread it after I had heard the controversy). They weren't so much featuring the ******* diet directly, as they (as they usually do) were doing a feature on a woman who lost a lot of weight and explained how she did it (which happened to be *******).
That being said, Women's World is ultimately a "tabloid" publication and has to be considered as such. I'm not bashing it, by using the word, as I am a fan of the magazine, but I do consider it "fast food" jounalism. I read it for the entertainment not the factual content. Their tone is more "gossipy," and I figure they have to be taken as such, so it doesn't surprise me that their fact checking isn't on par with magazines known for their hard journalism.
Still, it does surprise me that so many people have taken her story at face value when the many "after" shots she has used (both for herself and "clients") bore so little resemblance to the before shots. Wishful thinking can cloud judgement, but I have never thought that losing 200 lbs might change my nose or complexion.
Kaploid, I agree with you re WW, it's for fun and entertainment, but no one should expect it to do fact checking. It is what it is; it seems surprising to me that anyone would expect WW to do fact checking.
The diet sections are fun to read (for me, anyway) and they often do mini versions of popular and rational diets like Weight Watchers, South Beach, Sonoma, etc., that could possibly inform people who may be frustrated by their weight but are not into buying books or talking to their doctors or looking things up on the internet.
If WW hadn't popularized *******, someone else would have. The internet alone would have been more than enough. And the internet runs rampant with so-called "journalists" that blather on without checking anything at all and many people believe everything they see on the net or they look up a lot of links and think they've adequately researched topics such as medical advice, etc., and think it's as good as going to medical school and serving an internship for X number of years or they ask for medical advice on message boards instead of seeing a doctor for things that are potentially life threatening.
So it doesn't surprise me that someone called Kimmer could convince a lot of people to starve themselves in a diet called ******* (cute name, not cute diet).
Suzanne, I found the 3FC write-up on this and appreciated the synthesis of all the info. Thanks.
Last edited by Amarantha2; 10-08-2007 at 12:16 AM.
*******
