So who wouldn’t lose weight eating just 500 calories? Why would you need to pay for expensive HCG injections when the calorie limitation will cause you to lose just as much weight in itself?

The HCG proponents (sock puppets) share their wisdom. The tiny HCG amount supposedly enables you to draw from your fat stores, and the HCG makes you not being hungry.

How funny then that the Kimkins starvation diet produced the same results, without the HCG. Kimmer suggested 500 calories or less. Lean protein, just as the HCG protocol does. People following Kimkins did lose a huge amount of weight, quickly. But they also suffered health complications due to it.

There is no reason to think that HCG would work any different, in my opinion. The dieters starting out on Kimkins didn’t feel hunger initially either. Ketosis does that to you.

Here is a study that shows no difference in weight loss or hunger with or without the HCG:

Our investigation was designed to retest the hypothesis of the efficacy of human chorionic gonadotropin (HCG) on weight reduction in obese women in a clinic setting. We sought to duplicate the Asher-Harper study (1973) which had found that the combination of 500 cal diet and HCG had a statistically significant benefit over the diet and placebo combination as evidenced by greater weight loss and decrease in hunger. Fifty-one women between the ages of 18 and 60 participated in our 32-day prospective, randomized, double-blind comparison of HCG versus placebo. Each patient was given the same diet (the one prescribed in the Asher-Harper study), was weighed daily Monday through Saturday and was counseled by one of the investigators who administered the injections. Laboratory studies were performed at the time of initial physical examinations and at the end of the study. Twenty of 25 in the HCG and 21 of 26 patients in the placebo groups completed 28 injections. There was no statistically significant difference in the means of the two groups in number of injections received, weight loss, percent of weight loss, hip and waist circumference, weight loss per injections, or in hunger ratings. HCG does not appear to enhance the effectiveness of a rigidly imposed regimen for weight reduction.

[Am J Clin Nutr. 1976 Sep;29(9):940-8. Ineffectiveness of human chorionic gonadotropin in weight reduction: a double-blind study. Stein MR, Julis RE, Peck CC, Hinshaw W, Sawicki JE, Deller JJ Jr.]

Getting calories from body fat doesn’t mean that you get ALL nutrition your body needs. The body fat doesn’t contain vitamins or essential fatty acids. And don’t fool yourself that a vitamin pill will provide what should be gotten from food.

Coincidentally, many Kimkins dieters complained about “excessive” hunger around week 4 – 5. The HCG protocol is following the 500 calorie diet for 3 weeks, when food is added.

But how many of the HCG dieters stop at 3 weeks? Perhaps they, just as the Kimkins dieters, decide to fight the hunger by filling up on non-calorie food such as broth and diet soda? After all, they all want to get to goal as quickly as possible.

And how many of the HCG dieters regain the weight like most of the Kimkins dieters did? A 500 calorie diet teaches you nothing about how to eat to maintain weight loss.

HCG is just another quick fix, in my opinion. A magic pill for a desperate dieter that wants to find an easy way to get the weight off. And of course, HCG is a big money maker for the companies selling it. They most likely use sockpuppets to help promote the product. As with other fad products, support threads on diet boards are populated by people new to the board, that post on that thread only, that have “fantastic success” with the product, and encourage other board members to buy it.

I don’t know the answers to these questions but would like to share parts of a post by Sam Redman from 1999. (Click on the link for the full text. I took the liberty to cut out most of the ramblings and inserted paragraph breaks for readability.)

His musings were in response to the question:

What do you like to do when you play hooky?

……….I could earn money as a writer, but I always felt dishonest about it because i was never writing anything I believed in or in any kind of style that I knew as my own, but I was always willing to prostitute the ability which came from some internal fount that I have never understood, just so I could continue to be, to exist to, always in my mind, do nothing.

I was just about to run out of my last stash of money, which I had gotten by my usual method of journalistic deception……….

…….I spent the next afternoon studying the various geography texts so that I was completely familiar with one particular area.

Then I sat in my apartment……..I began to recount the dishonest adventure stories of my personal experiences………..or any other wild and crazy adventure that caught my mind’s eye, often stimulated by studying the massive catalog which I had gotten from the Image Bank or other such photography service.

I would look until I found a photo or especially a series of photos and then I would escape to flights of fancy and perhaps an hour later a finished manuscript would emerge, written by one of my alter egos………

So work for me has always been something I have done on a lark, in a spurt of prostituted inspiration in order to survive, and has really been what I do on my time off, my “day off” in the terminology of the workaday world. And so as my money ran out I looked for yet another writing scam……..

– Sam Redman (sam @ samredman . com), October 05, 1999

While this is supposed to be fiction, doesn’t it look as if it describes Kimmer’s method to create sockpuppets?

Prudentia has an ongoing discussion about who and what Sam Redman is.

Heidi Diaz, aka Kimmer of Kimkins, is causing a lot of turbulence in the online lowcarb community. Is Kimmer a troll herself? For sure she has appeared as a troll under different names on LCF on numerous occasions. Even on Kimkins, as we well remember Wonderwoman and Melt’s rants.

Wikipedia:
Trolling is a game about identity deception, albeit one that is played without the consent of most of the players. The troll attempts to pass as a legitimate participant, sharing the group’s common interests and concerns; the newsgroups members, if they are cognizant of trolls and other identity deceptions, attempt to both distinguish real from trolling postings, and upon judging a poster a troll, make the offending poster leave the group. Their success at the former depends on how well they — and the troll — understand identity cues; their success at the latter depends on whether the troll’s enjoyment is sufficiently diminished or outweighed by the costs imposed by the group.

The Ducks on the Fascination with Kimmer thread are repeatedly accused of being unwelcoming to newbies and labeling any not previously known person as a troll. Prudentia calls it Friendly Fire.

So why would the Ducks react this way? It is all Heidi’s doing! Kimmer is to blame!

MissMerize said:
I have come across other people getting scammed on the web, but the difference was that it was just a financial scamming. When a thing affects your physical and mental health I think it is in a whole other category. Heidi came in like an odorless poisonous gas. She used pictures and words to describe herself as a breath of fresh air. It wasn’t until we all inhaled it for a while that we got sick. We were lured into a false sense of security. We appeared to be getting healthier at first and that led us to inhale more and more of the noxious fumes. Fumes like these can change the brain chemistry.

Most of us that have been touched by Kimmer’s scam, whether we did the Kimkins Diet or not, have gotten a rude awakening with regards to trusting internet posters on bulletin boards. It was so easy for Kimmer to convince us that she was who she pretended to be. Hardly anybody questioned her as a person, or questioned her success as a dieter during the 6 years she posted on LCF. Why would we? There didn’t seem to be any reason for her to be dishonest. Now, we know better. Heidi is a Lying Liar that Lies.

Wikipedia:
A troll can disrupt the discussion on a newsgroup, disseminate bad advice, and damage the feeling of trust in the newsgroup community. Furthermore, in a group that has become sensitized to trolling — where the rate of deception is high — many honestly naïve questions may be quickly rejected as trollings. This can be quite off-putting to the new user who upon venturing a first posting is immediately bombarded with angry accusations.

Is it strange then that the hackles come up when a new poster appears on the scene? Especially if this poster has an opposing opinion or is using confusing language? How would we know that it’s not a troll? While the common advice is “do not feed the troll” I personally think this is necessary in order to find out if it’s a troll or not.

And one final quote from Wikipedia:
Godwin’s Law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”

Hmm. Didn’t Tippy Toes refer to the Ducks as “terrorists”?

A sockpuppet is an online identity used for purposes of deception within an Internet community. In its earliest usage, a sockpuppet was a false identity through which a member of an Internet community speaks while pretending not to, like a puppeteer manipulating a hand puppet.

In current usage, the perception of the term has been extended beyond second identities of people who already post in a forum to include other uses of misleading online identities. For example, a NY Times article claims that “sock-puppeting” is defined as “the act of creating a fake online identity to praise, defend or create the illusion of support for one’s self, allies or company.”

The key difference between a sockpuppet and a regular pseudonym is the active exploitation of the pretense that the puppet is a third party who is not affiliated with the puppeteer.

I was an early member of Kimkins (June 2006) but soon lost interest and didn’t return to the board until the controversy started in July 2007. I immediately was surprised by the large number of “success in progress” stories that seemed unbelievable. The more I read, the more unbelievable it became.

Unbelievable is really the keyword here. Yes, I know that you see huge, quick losses on a low carb diet in the beginning, especially if the starting weight is high. But these people were happily posting for weeks while they survived on 400 – 500 calories, never had a stall, never had any problems sticking to the diet, never had craving, never were hungry, never complained about not feeling well. Unbelievable. I have been posting daily on lowcarb boards for 4 years, and I have never seen anything like it.

These posters also lacked personality. They were just reporting on their menu, their weight loss and how happy they were with the diet. Again, a characteristic I did not recognize from other boards where you get to know your fellow posters pretty quickly, or at least get some sense of the person behind the keyboard.

I’m sure the majority of these successful posters were Kimmer sockpuppets. Her admins at the time of the big inrush of new members when the WW magazine came out report that Kimmer hardly posted at the time. I think she did, just not using the name Kimmer. She was busy inventing fictional characters and posting as all these sockpuppets that created a happy and positive atmosphere.

I can just imagine how the members felt about themselves when they read those posts with their shiny lies — “Other people are doing so well, what’s wrong with me? I need to try harder, I need to eat less, I must be the only one who’s failing, or the only one who’s feeling so ill…”

I’m not sure the use of sockpuppets constitute fraud in the legal sense, but it is certainly unethical. Kimmer is using sockpuppets to promote her business, for her own gain.

In addition to the success stories, there recently has been a large number of a different type of sockpuppets. These are “newbies”, not all new members but all with few posts. They seem to be used as “fillers” to promote the sense of more active members on the site. They are characterized by either having a generic avatar or a distorted one, similar to this:

Now, this could be due to technical difficulties, similar to what Tippy Toes once had:
Well we are having some kind of tech problem. Don’t laugh but I had changed my avitor from the bikini pic to one in a black dress. This morning when I logged on the pic was all stretched out like a fun mirror at the circus. I looked like I gained all 112 lbs back overnight, RFLMAO! Now I have this flower till I figure out what happened. Still laughing!

This is a weight loss board. Would you post a picture that shows you a lot heavier than you are? Tippy didn’t. She replaced the picture until tech support had helped her post it so it showed up in right proportions. So why are these distorted avatars so common on Kimkins? It’s obvious that they originally were 3×5 pictures that got posted as 5×5. Here is the original of the above picture:

Is Kimmer starting to be sloppy? Doesn’t care anymore to keep up appearances? The remaining members don’t care, or all they all sockpuppets? I think it’s a combination of all of these.