I was cruising around the Tales from the Scales website and happened upon something that broke my heart. While I know that there are a lot of diet scams out there that prey on frustrated weight-afflicted people, when I read this, I was enraged. The ‘diet’ is something called Kimkins. I had never heard of it and just spent the last hour and a bit reading various websites on the topic. Go HERE and take a read. It’s a little long, but I think it’s important to know that there are people out there who consiously decide to take advantage of the frustration that many people feel in regards to weight loss. There are other articles that you will find once you start reading, but the idea is that this woman, Heidi Diaz, claims that she lost a great deal of weight in a really short time period by following her own brand of low carb diet. She then started a website and began charging people for the privilege of starving themselves. It sounds like there are fraud charges coming. She makes this statement “…take a Weight Watcher or Jenny Craig meal and remove the starches. What’s left? Kimkins. There is no health advantage to adding carbs or extra fat, so why is removing them (and having less calories) dangerous? 1200 calories a day is an arbitrary number (like 8 glasses of water).” It becomes very clear that this woman has no earthly clue what she’s talking about. OF COURSE you can lose a lot of weight by severly restricting your calorie intake. You can also lose mental focus, vitamins and minerals, your hair, and ultimately any shred of health that you started out with.
People! By doing these fad diets that are impossible to maintain longterm, you are doing serious damage to your metabolism, not to mention your health. This statement is one of the first lines on the Kimkins website: “They’ve been told their entire lives they should be happy with slow 1-2 lb a week weight loss.”
Dammit! You SHOULD be happy with a 1-2lb loss a week. That is sustainable. And even if you are making healthy food choices and not losing as much as you would like, don’t be discouraged! Your body needs time to make the adjustment if you have been feeding it the wrong things or too much for any length of time. It should be no surprise to any of us how we got fat. Seriously. If you are honest with yourself, you know that you didn’t just wake up one day and go from a svelte size 2 to whatever your current size is. And that realization is the reason that you are smarter than fraudulent claims like that of Kimkins. This woman claims that you should be able to exist on only a chicken breast and a bowl of salad every day for the rest of your life. That is so ridiculous and it breaks my heart that there are people who are desperate enough to do it. A friend of mine said that when he started deciding to lose weight he examined the people around him. What the fit, slender people were eating and what the overweight people tended towards. At no time will you ever, EVER see an athlete or a healthy weighted person exist on a chicken breast and a salad. EVER! Get clear! These don’t work!
My sweet regular readers, I know that you are all smart and healthy and doing so great! SO GREAT! You are all amazing people with brains in your head and a desire to make a lifelong, healthy change. I more wanted to write this for anyone who may happen across my website on their way to a dangerous fad diet. In the hour or two that I spent reading various sites about Kimkins and Heidi Diaz, the resounding thought in my head was that I hope she goes to jail for a very long time (and it sounds as though she may) because it is UNFAIR that people like that can take advantage of the suffering of others. The cost is so much more than financial. The cost is your health!
UPDATE Not only did Heidi Diaz not lose the weight that she claims, she is heavier now than she was when she started. She still insists that the plan works but has posted fraudulent before and after pictures of herself on several websites. Even if you were giving the Kimkins diet one shred of a thought, ask yourself if you are willing to take health, nutritional and medical advice from a liar! Go HERE for a beautifully written article about this.
Lady Shanny Says 
Jimmy Moore said,
September 29, 2007 at 8:12 pm
And it gets even worse. Look at what the Kimkins success cover girl of WOMAN’S WORLD magazine said happened to her health because of this diet:
http://livinlavidalocarb.blogspot.com/2007/09/kimkins-cover-girl-passionately.html
willamina said,
September 30, 2007 at 8:17 am
I’ve heard of this scam and the damage it has done to people’s health. It makes me so mad that those of us who are overweight are often shamed by those around us into trying just about anything to lose weight–in the process sometimes doing more damage to our bodies than simply being overweight would have done.
Lady Shanny said,
September 30, 2007 at 11:26 am
That’s the thing that people don’t realize. Once you teach your body to exist on a ridiculously low amount of calories, you will immediately gain back weight if you increase that. I wish more people understood that.
anticipation. « Stars in the Gutter said,
September 30, 2007 at 11:26 am
[…] we all should when it comes to anyone who financially profits from our desire to lose weight (see Lady Shanny’s post about the scam known as the Kimkins diet for an […]
Jimmy Moore said,
October 4, 2007 at 7:31 am
And now KTLA-TV in Los Angeles is doing a series of investigative reports on the Kimkins scam:
http://livinlavidalocarb.blogspot.com/2007/10/ktla-tv-unmasks-fraudulent-kimkins-diet.html
Lady Shanny said,
October 4, 2007 at 5:42 pm
Holy Mother! This woman is an absolute crackhead!
OhYeahBabe said,
November 30, 2007 at 8:37 am
A really sad thing is that people will read the success stories (most PHONY!) and decide to do it despite the risks. “I played Russian roulette once and didn’t die!” Oh, that makes it safe?
Sherrie said,
November 30, 2007 at 2:27 pm
Hello Lady Shanny
I really enjoyed your post about Kimkins, I agree with you about gaining the weight back, here’s a quote I did on an article I wrote that goes into what happens to fertile women:
Kimkins, rabbit starvation, sudden death and resting metabolism
““PHYSIOLOGICAL PHENOMENA OPPOSING WEIGHT REDUCTION
As we saw, if the energy intake is permanently reduced, body weight also reduces until it produces en energy expenditure equal to the intake, and the size of the reduction is inversely proportional to the consumption of the weight loss, which in turn depends on its composition that is determined by the starting weight. As already mentioned, a drastic diet, either in absolute terms (less than 1,200 Cal/day) or in relative (more than 500 Calories less than the starting TEE), causes the loss of a weight containing a percentage of lean body mass greater than what would be physiological for that definite starting weight. This phenomenon, which was proved in fertile women, while the clinical experience and the results of our studies suggest that it does not occur in postmenopausal women or in men, has two types of negative consequences. On one side, starting from the same body weight, since the weight loss consumes more, for a definite cumulative reduction of energy intake less weight is lost, even if in shorter time, than what would be if the weight loss composition was the physiological one. On the other side, with the weight attained being the same, since more lean than due was lost, body weight contains less lean and more fat, and then it consumes less. This means that to maintain any weight after a drastic diet one has to eat less than another person who has lost the same weight with the physiological composition, or a person with equal body weight who never lost weight. But the worst aspect of this phenomenon is that the alteration of body composition that it causes is permanent. In fact, in the case of weight regain after a drastic diet, the composition of the weight regain is the one physiological for the starting weight. Thus, less lean and more fat are regained in comparison with what was lost, and consequently also the maintenance of a weight equal to that prior to the diet entails an energy intake smaller than that before dieting. And, since the alternative is to go back to the previous energy intake stabilizing at a higher weight than that before dieting, it is easily understood how a series of such ups and downs (which is defined as “weight cycling”) may lead to a progressive weight gain progressively more difficult to control. Many young women with no genetic predisposition to obesity, misled by mass media and not protected by specialized surveillance, vainly pursue unrealistic beauty ideals and eventually condemn themselves to become obese or to stay on a diet all their life.”