The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently announced that there is a range of diet pills being sold nationwide, as well as over the internet, that are now considered unsafe.

FDA suggests to consult with your health care professional before taking dietary supplements to treat obesity or other diseases. All consumers should be familiar with the following signs of health fraud:

• Promises of an “easy” fix for problems like excess weight, hair loss, or impotency.
• Claims such as “scientific breakthrough,” “miraculous cure,” “secret ingredient,” and “ancient remedy.”
• Impressive-sounding terms, such as “hunger stimulation point” and “thermogenesis” for a weight loss product.
• Claims that the product is safe because it is “natural.”
• Undocumented case histories or personal testimonials by consumers or doctors claiming amazing results.
• Promises of no-risk, money-back guarantees.

I would like to add “studies suggest” or “extensive research indicates” or “patented.” None of these statements really say that what was studied, researched or patented actually did anything.

But when I first saw this announcement a couple of weeks back, I was under the impression that while these pills / supplements were completely useless, they might not really pose much danger. Not so. Reading closer, I find that  these “natural supplements” may “contain prescription drugs in amounts that greatly exceed their maximum recommended dose.”

The updated (01/08/2009) list includes the following products:

Contains Sibutramine

• 2 Day Diet
• 2 Day Diet Slim Advance
• 2x Powerful Slimming
• 3 Day Diet
• 3 Days Fit
• 3x Slimming Power
• 5x Imelda Perfect Slimming
• 7 Day Herbal Slim
• 7 Days Diet
• 7 Diet
• 7 Diet Day/Night Formula
• 8 Factor Diet
• Eight Factor Diet
• 21 Double Slim
• 24 Hours Diet
• 999 Fitness Essence
• BioEmagrecim
• Body Creator
• Body Shaping
• Body Slimming
• Cosmo Slim
• Extrim Plus
• Extrim Plus 24 Hour Reburn
• Fasting Diet
• Fatloss Slimming
• GMP
• Imelda Fat Reducer
• Imelda Perfect Slim
• JM Fat Reducer
• Lida DaiDaihua
• Meili
• Meizitang
• Miaozi MeiMiaoQianZiJiaoNang
• Miaozi Slim Capsules
• Natural Model
• Perfect Slim
• Perfect Slim 5x
• Perfect Slim Up
• Powerful Slim
• ProSlim Plus
• Reduce Weight
• Royal Slimming Formula
• Sana Plus
• Slim 3 in 1
• Slim 3 in 1 Extra Slim Formula
• Slim 3 in 1 Extra Slim Waist Formula
• Slim 3 in 1 M18 Royal Diet
• Slim 3 in 1 Slim Formula
• Slim Burn
• Slim Express 4 in 1
• Slim Express 360
• Slim Fast
• Slim Tech
• Slim Up
• Slim Waist Formula
• Slim Waistline
• Sliminate
• Slimming Formula
• Somotrim
• Super Fat Burner
• Superslim
• Super Slimming
• Trim 2 Plus
• Triple Slim
• Venom Hyperdrive 3.0
• Waist Strength Formula
• Zhen de Shou

Contains Rimonabant

• Phyto Shape

Contains Phenytoin

• 3x Slimming Power
• Extrim Plus

Contains Phenolphthalein

• 8 Factor Diet
• 24 Hours Diet
• Fatloss Slimming
• Imelda Perfect Slim
• Perfect Slim 5x
• Royal Slimming Formula
• Superslim
• Zhen de Shou

Contains Bumetanide

• Starcaps

FDA details what these ingredients do:

Sibutramine is a Schedule IV controlled substance and the active pharmaceutical ingredient in Meridia, an approved prescription drug to treat obesity. Some of the identified products recommend taking more than 3 times the recommended daily dosage of sibutramine. Because of this, even consumers without a history of health problems that take these high doses of sibutramine may suffer serious adverse effects if they take these products, such as increased blood pressure, tachycardia, palpitations, and seizure.

Rimonabant is the active pharmaceutical ingredient in Zimulti which has not been approved in the United States. In Europe the drug is known as Acomplia. In June 2007, the FDA Endocrinologic and Metabolic Drugs Advisory Committee unanimously voted not to recommend approval of the drug because of increased risk of neurological and psychiatric side effects—seizures, depression, anxiety, insomnia, aggressiveness, and suicidal thoughts among patients. In June of 2008, the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency of the United Kingdom linked rimonabant to 5 deaths and 720 adverse reactions over the past two years. In October, the European Medicines Agency recommended that marketing and sales of Accomplia be suspended due to safety concerns.

Phenolphthalein was an ingredient in some Over-the-Counter laxative products until 1999 when the FDA reclassified the drug as “not generally recognized as safe and effective” after studies indicated that phenolphthalein presented a potential carcinogenic risk. Phenolphthalein has also been found to be genotoxic in that it can damage or cause mutations to DNA.

Phenytoin is the active pharmaceutical ingredient in Dilantin, an approved anti-seizure medication.

Bumetanide is a the active pharmaceutical ingredient in Bumex, a prescription diuretic. Potential risks associated with the use of Bumetanide include serious and significant fluid and electrolyte loss and an elevation in uric acid concentrations.

So what to look for in a weight loss role model? What would I look for?

Would they need to be young and pretty? No, not for me. I’m neither young nor pretty and losing weight would do nothing to change that fact.

Would they have had to lost a significant amount of weight? No, not necessarily. While there may be differences in being 200 pounds overweight as compared to 40, the weight loss strategy does not necessarily need to be different. Any more different than individual adaptions that are always required, of course.

Would they need to be stick thin? Not necessarily very slim, but certainly not morbidly obese. I would like to see that they are following their own advice, and that it results in lasting weight loss.

Would they need to have maintained their weight loss for a long time? Yes, absolutely. Anybody can lose weight with a crash diet, but it’s another thing to keep it off year after year. The suggested diet plan needs to have a way of transitioning into maintenance. There is no point in losing weight if the pounds are going to pile back on again.

Heidi Diaz fails on every point of my requirements. Her make-believe persona met them all, including looking young and pretty. However, the real person does not. Not even close. Why anyone would take diet advice from this woman is beyond my comprehension.

The Kimkins Diet website was launched in June 2006 but had a rather obscure existence until an article in Women’s World magazine caused a large influx of customers one year later.

Many people tried the diet but rightly decided that the diet was not sustainable and disappeared. The $59.95 membership fee was written off as yet another waste of money on a fad diet gimmick. There are plenty of those around, and most of us have tried more than one.

These were the lucky ones. They left before they were harmed; physically or psychologically. The not so lucky ones stayed around a little longer, but eventually most of these abandoned the diet as well. The Kimkins starvation diet can not be followed for a longer period of time and the most natural reaction is binges.

Not surprisingly, the weight comes back on. Often as fast as it came off with starvation level of calories. The months of sacrifice and counting every morsel ended up with no results, or very little lasting weight loss to show for it.

So what do these dieters do? They return to Kimkins for another starvation cycle. Expecting a different result this time. Why? What has changed? The diet is still nutritionally bankrupt and the deprivation will lead to the same binges as last time. Why wouldn’t it?

But, the diet works, they say.

No it doesn’t. A diet you can not stick to does not work. What’s the point in keeping losing the same pounds over and over again?

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein

I do hope that all the exposure the Kimkins Diet is getting on the blogs is brought to the re-starters attention. This information was not available a year ago, and hopefully it will make a difference. Their life might depend on it, or at the minimum, their health.

One consolation is that Kimmer, a.k.a. Heidi Diaz, does not get any more money from the returning dieters. They already paid their “lifetime” membership fee. I’m sure Heidi is kicking herself for not making it a monthly fee instead.

BMR = Basal Metabolic Rate. This is how many calories the body consumes in a “comatose state”. Calories just needed for bodily functions and to stay alive.

To avoid starvation mode, it is recommended to not go below your BMR level.

AMR = Activity Metabolic Rate. These are the additional calories we burn by moving around during the day. Some calculator just provide choices between sedentary, active, and heavy lifestyle. In others, you can plug in the minutes you perform of each activity.

Your daily calorie requirement is BMR + AMR. Theoretically, eating anything less than this should result in weighloss.

Using myself as an example, my BMR is 1252 cals, and if only adding 10 hours of “sitting”, my total calorie requirement goes up to 2092. Exercise days add up to 2400.

Weight loss experts (and I’m not counting Heidi Diaz, the 500 cals starvation guru, among them) generally recommend that you eat 500 cals less than the total calorie requirement so I would eat around 1500 calories to lose weight, 2000 to maintain.

The BMR/AMR counter I used is here: Body for Life

The term addiction is used to describe a recurring compulsion by an individual to engage in some specific activity, despite harmful consequences to the individual’s health, mental state or social life.

Is there such a thing as food addiction? No, not according to the author of Breaking out of Food Jail, Jean Antonello R.N., B.S.N.

People who do not eat enough food on a regular basis tend to get compulsive about food and eat without control at times. This is an adaptive response, not the result of an addiction. There is, however, an addictive process involved; it’s the addiction to dieting.

I agree with Jean. I have never known anybody that could be described as “obsessed” with food unless they were dieting. Diet addicition is a much more fitting term.

I also believe that dieting causes eating disorders, and not the other way around. Severe calorie restriction, like the starvation diet Kimkins, will surely result in an unhealthy relationship with food.

The most natural reaction to excessive food restriction is cheats or binges. Or anorexia. Neither of them is a result you want from a diet, and it will not make you any healthier. Isn’t that the most important with weight loss? Health?

What is strange is that dieters keep on going back again and again to the too restrictive diet after a cheat or binge episod. The diet works. Uh, no, it doesn’t. If you can not stay on it, it doesn’t work.

That the diet doesn’t work is not to blame on the dieters, it’s the fault of the DIET. Look for something else. Less restrictive. Higher calories typically means slower losses, but over time it will surely equal or exceed what can be accomplished on starve/binge yo-yo cycles.

Of course, I point this out as I do not want anyone to start a diet like Kimkins. In no way do I wish that anybody that has followed the Kimkins diet regain their weight.

That this isn’t obvious was made clear to me from a great post on Kimkins Diet Truth: We’re all on the same side, right?

Yes, we are on the same side. I just want people to give up the Kimkins diet not to damage their health. I do not want them to regain any weight lost.

So what to do when leaving Kimkins and realizing that the diet is not a good way to lose weight? Of course, I’m no more expert in diets than Heidi Diaz but I will share my opinions.

First, read the very informative thread Atkins Nutritional Interview (Repairing your metabolism and more) on LCF.

Be prepared to have a lot of patience, and expect a scale increase initially. Don’t panic. It’s most likely water weight and not fat regain. If possible, put away the scale for a while. Use a pair of pants that fit well as your measuring tape. You might be surprised to find that a scale increase does not reflect on your size. Nobody sees your scale number, just your size.

Exercise. I have been at a “maintenance” range in all of my weight loss and every time I stop exercising I regain weight. For me, I don’t think it’s the number of calories I burn (cardio) but building muscle (weight training) that makes a difference. Weight training is known to increase metabolism. Again, patience is needed. I don’t see any effect from starting an exercise regimen until after 4 – 6 weeks.

What about the diet? How to increase calories? In my opinion, there has to be a slow change, and done step by step. I know it must be tempting to go hog wild which is the natural reaction after deprivation on a low calorie diet. Clearly, that will not work.

My suggestion would be to increase by slowly adding one food item at a time. For a week or two. Then one more until a reasonable amount of calories is achieved with no size gain (again, the scale shows water weight and is not a reliable measure of fat loss).

Or to borrow from 2big4mysize’s advice to AmyB:

I’d suggest all Kimkinettes stop weight loss, see their docs and be honest about portion size with copies of your menus for the last month. Saying “I’m eating low glycemic veggies and lean proteins” sounds a lot healthier than those 800 cal Kimkins’ limited menus you have been eating of those lean proteins and veggies.

Repair any and all metabolic issues with more carbs, proteins and fats. Now don’t go nuts and slur a 44 ouncer of bacon grease through a straw while eating refined white foods or HFCS as your carbs, but do drizzle your veggies with EEOV or any other healthy fat you like. Roast or saute them as part of your meal prep and you will be having a healthy transitional meal.

Please remember y’all are going to be adding back lean body tissues too so do not panic if the scale goes up a few pounds. You may even replenish some of your glycogen stores but remember that is about 3 to 1 water by weight which is why it comes off so fast when you jump back to Kimkins or induction.

Please use your tape measure and see that if you switch to Atkins those added pounds are lean tissue and you are still small.

UConn did a study on folk eating Atkins at MAINTENANCE levels vs folk eating USDA high carb diets. Neither group was trying to lose weight. Each group was allowed to eat as much as they wanted. Neither group exercised. The Atkins group lost body fat and added muscle tissues just by eating according to the plan. Just as your body will be replenishing its protein stores when you give it more protein and fat in the diet.

Will you ever be able to eat the way you used to when you were heavier? Nobody can correctly answer that for you. But you will be healtheir growing old with your loved ones if you take the time right now to fix your metabolism and get off the road to an ED kimkins has placed y’all on.

Professional help like Christen is getting would be best but since I know most folk aren’t there is a free repairing your metabolism topic stickied at the top of most LCFS forums. And an excellent discussion on altering Kimkins and how to make it healthy on LCF’s Building a Healthy WOE if possible based on Kimkins

I tried to think of all the possible ways a Kimkinette could misinterpret the facts so all your questions should be answered. Except the one all of us have and that is what limits to place on total amount of carbs y’all should be eating.

I wish y’all would use the DANDR OWL carb ladder as that allows each person to discover what type of carb foods they can and can’t tolerate in a very controlled manner with immediate corrective steps should a food or carb food group have a negative impact on your craving control or weight loss.

Amy I wish you and all the other transitioning kimkinettes much success as you take the first steps on that scary journey to recovery and away from the ED many are heading for.

I, like 2big4mysize, wish ex-Kimkins dieters success with finding a healthy woe that will maintain their weight loss and/or help with continued weight loss.

We are on the same side.

I doubt it but it wouldn’t hurt to try. Kimkins Review has a call-out for how you can help. Only by getting some low carb proponents on the panel can we influence how the new food pyramid will look. At least we can hope for some improvement.

And quoting Dr. Michael Eades who got the question why it matters as nobody follows the USDA recommendations anyway:

I explained that although he may not pay attention to them, plenty of other people do. The law that established the guidelines mandates that every bit of food or money for food that the government doles out has to follow the Nutritional Guidelines. Approximately 54 million people are fed daily by the government, and they all have to be fed according to the guidelines. Who does the government feed? The military, people in the prison system, school lunch programs, numerous people who receive commodities from Uncle Sam, Federally funded daycare centers, the list goes on and on. So the Nutritional Guidelines are not a meaningless, harmless little bit of government doodling – they are of great importance. It would be nice to see them move away from a diet that composed primarily of carbohydrate. The only way this will happen is to get some low-carb advocates on the panel.

I never paid much attention to the food pyramid but looked at it on Dr. Eades blog. It looks a lot more scary when you see it that way than just looking at the numbers above (not that 65% carbs don’t look scary in themselves). No wonder people get fatter and fatter.

Just to amuse myself, I decided to redo the food pyramid for a low carb woe (way of eating). I didn’t add any food items so the “fats” segment ended up pretty empty – just a jar of mayo that is on the top in the USDA version.

It didn’t surprise me that the pyramid is pretty much flipped upside down. But notice that the “oh so important veggie” segment is in the same place and no smaller in the lowcarb variant.

And to further amuse myself, I created a Kimkins food pyramid. This one was simple. Just erase most of the food items. The pyramid ended up a lot smaller too as the typical Kimkins menu is 500 – 600 calories as compared to the 2,000 in the USDA pyramid.

The results from the study are really confusing, but they indicate that weight loss is not indicative of better health, at least not when it comes to mortality rate.

To summarize (numbers adjusted for smoking, alcohol, and other factors):

• Wanting to lose weight and doing so increased mortality by 87%
• Wanting to lose weight but not doing so decreased mortality by 16%
• Wanting to lose weight but gaining weight decreased mortality by 7%
• Not wanting to lose weight and staying stable was used as baseline
• Not wanting to lose weight but doing so increased mortality by 17%
• Not wanting to lose weight and gaining weight increased mortality by 58%

The study provides a lot of details, but the one detail that is lacking is what diet the subjects used. However, considering the time frame (1975 – 1999) I bet that the participants were on low fat, high carb diets.

Not even the researchers could interpret the results and they speculate that loss of lean mass or release of toxins in body fat could play a role. The simple answer is that they don’t really have a clue.

My non-expert interpretation of the results is that changing your lifestyle and eating better will decrease mortality rate. The study subjects who wanted to lose weight but didn’t do so were the ones benefiting the most from their efforts. Even the ones wanting to lose weight but failing to do so decreased their mortality rate!

Eat healthy, live longer! And healthy does not mean low fat!

What is painfully obvious is that being successful on a low fat diet is not beneficial if you want to live a long life.

I really, really hope that people avoid low fat diets like Kimkins that possibly could be the most deadly of them all.

Illustration by Squeakie

Laxatives are not useful for weight loss. They cause loss of water weight. Not fat loss. The drop on the scale is not permanent. As soon as you replace the lost water, your scale will be back where you started. 

You would think that a diet “guru” like Heidi Diaz would know this. And I think she does. Is she also aware that her advice to take laxatives to produce a temporary scale loss might end up killing someone?

Extensive laxative abuse can cause:

• Dehydration.  Dehydration can cause weakness, blurry vision, fainting, kidney damage, and (in cases of severe dehydration) death.
• Electrolyte imbalance.  Electrolytes are minerals (sodium, potassium, calcium, etc.) that are in body fluids in very precise amounts and ratios.  Electrolytes are responsible for proper functioning of nerves and muscles. Laxative abuse can upset a person’s electrolyte balance and cause improper functioning of vital organs, like the heart!
• Laxative dependence.  This is when the colon requires larger and larger doses of laxatives to produce bowel movements.  People often become so dependent on laxatives that their body loses the ability to produce bowel movements on it’s own without the aid of laxatives.

Or listen to the advice of someone that tried it:

Okay, I had a really long reply typed but here’s what I was going to say in a nutshell. I’m only 23 years old, and I have been dealing with this problem for 10 years already. And, don’t do it, seriously, please read this and seriously consider the truth, and hopefully you will realize that it doesn’t help you at all in the long run.

Okay, yes taking laxatives or I should say abusing them will actually help you lose weight. But, the ways that they do it are as follows:

• You realize hey I weigh less today!
• Then, you convince yourself that you don’t want to eat because you don’t want to gain the weight back.
• You find yourself drinking less.
• You get nauseated when you attempt to eat.
• And, you constantly have diarrhea, you can’t control when where or who is in the public restroom at work/school when you have it.

Look, it’s not pretty, but it gets worse. If you still think it’s worth it, listen to the rest. Picture yourself thinner, and then picture yourself smiling, and when you look at that smile, broken and thin brittle teeth. Pretty huh? True though, because laxatives can remove the calcium from your body because it won’t let your body absorb the calcium Hardly no one seems to realize that this is a horrible side effect. Your teeth can practically crumble. And your bones…easily broken.

Also, you can end up in the hospital for any of many many reasons, where they will pump you full of potassium (oh, and that reallllllly hurts!! It causes your arms to swell, and every vein they put the iv in with that crap, collapsed).

And, you can get jaundice (where your skin turns yellow) from your liver enzymes being high because of organs failing, and end up with a not so pretty scar on your stomach.

And, think about your colon, no seriously think about it for a second, think about the alternatives to keeping it healthy.

Okay, so those are the physical problems.

I’ve tried to sum it up for ya, but it’s not a short list. I hope that you realize that this is a baddddddd decision, and not one easily kicked.

The TRUTH recently posted a series of PM’s from Kimmer (aka Heidi Diaz) where laxative abuse is recommended.

The book is not new (published in 1996) but it seems interesting enough that I ordered it. If you don’t want to spend the money, there are several good excerpts on this website: To Eat or Not to Eat, That Is the Obsession

The one excerpt I will quote here is talking about a woman called Paula. I had to read it twice to make sure it didn’t say “Heidi Diaz.” I think the only difference is that Paula did not start a website, defrauding people out of money based on her lies and selling a dangerous starvation diet. Hopefully, there is just one Heidi Diaz in this world.

But where’s all this food avoidance, fat phobia and calorie obsession leading, anyway? For a growing number of people, straight to eating problems.

By the time she was forty-three, Heidi had dieted, one way or another, for twenty-five years. In that time she had joined Weight Watchers over ten times, tried Jenny Craig, gave Weight Loss Center two efforts and Optifast just one (because it was so expensive), and attended seven years of regular Overeaters Anonymous meetings. In addition, she had read dozens of books and magazine articles in her attempts to control her eating.

Heidi was an expert on nutrition. She knew so much about food groups, calories and fat grams that she could have started her own consulting business, Diet Madness, Inc. (Heidi named her diet madness venture: Kimkins.) She knew by heart and in her sleep what she should eat, exactly how much and when, according to the experts. Heidi was queen of portion control and truly gifted at policing fat grams. She had been trying to eat less, eat light, eat low-fat all her adult life. And she had been losing control of her eating for just about as long. Heidi couldn’t remember back to a time when she wasn’t preoccupied with her eating and her weight. Over the years she learned multitudes of diet skills and tips, hints and tricks. And now Heidi was heavier and more desperate than she had ever been in her life.

Diet “Guru” Heidi Diaz

[I took the liberty of substituting Paula for Heidi in the quote.]