So what do the Kimkins survivors have to say about the diet and the founder, Heidi Diaz?

A few snippets from Kimkins Survivors:

I began to feel more tired, more worn out then ever. . . I was told this was normal. I wondered when my legs began cramping until I couldn’t even walk or move hardly at all. . . but again this was normal. When I began getting heart palpitations and a serious choking feeling, I began to get worried that something was seriously wrong.

I stayed on the plan for 2 months. After a few weeks, my emotions went flat. I didn’t feel happy, sad, anything. It was really bad. I stopped the plan as I felt I was choosing between being fat or being clinically depressed. After about 2 weeks, my hair began falling out by the hands full.

I was dizzy and my life became sedentary due to the lack of food. My hair also started to fall out.

People go from “strict” to “even stricter” when they are highly encouraged to go as low in calories as possible…many of the “big” losers hang out around 300-500 calories daily. Also, because the plans don’t have much in the way of fiber to “push things through”…it’s encouraged to take laxatives daily. The owner of the site, Kimmer, even goes as far as to say that people shouldn’t be afraid to do this since recent studies show that they’re perfectly safe and not addictive after all. (omg)

The weight loss made it easy to ignore the dizziness, nausea, and exhaustion. I brushed off the concerns of friends and family about the amount of food I was eating and for my health. I had read many accounts of other members experiencing the same side effects that I was having and the responses explaining them away as normal, signs they were doing the diet correctly.

In no time at all, I became weak, fainting, angry, shakey, dizzy. My hair fell out. I was still overweight but was sick as hell. I stopped low carb all together. I have been seeing Drs ever since with complications with blood sugar and kidneys ect…

Within 15 minutes of my ER admission, I was rapidly being set up to check for a stroke or a brain tumor. I was so sick and I simply couldnt believe this was happening. At NO time did I suspect the KK diet. I still feel so stupid. MRI’s, Neurologists, CAT scans, IV medication to try to stop the spinning. 5 days of laying on my side with a wet towel over my eyes, they finally got the vertigo under control enough that I could walk slowly. They did find my electrolytes were all out of whack and my liver enzymes a little elevated….

While I did lose weight, I also began to experience significant hair loss, nausea, bouts of dizziness and was freezing all the time.

…some days my calorie intake was lower then 500 calories. My hair thinned out too…but I am older and thought that was due to age, dizzyness or light headed sometimes too. I lost fast, lost alot, and gained it back just as fast too.

I can only hope that some day I’ll find my metabolism again.

I joined in July hoping to put my low carb lifestyle back on the right track. All I accomplished was further derailment. I got off the train when the dizzy spells crept up on me. One call to the Dr. and he said STOP! Healthy lower carb is ok, but this isn’t healthy. This is disordered eating.

I am losing hair in clumps, awful joint pains and dizzy/nauseous frequently.

I was one of those who kimmer told to take a full dose (laxatives) the first day and then take 1/2 dose everyday after.

I have lost tons of weight. But guess what…at a price. I went to the DR not feeling well. My blood levels are all off . My thyroid is shot . Know what the DR asked me…..She said..you are not starving yourself are you? I have such bad blood work that I need to have some injections to fix it..such as Vit . I also have to have scans to see if my thryiod can even be saved. This all got started because I was having dizzy spells and bad pain in my bones.

My hair was falling out, I couldn’t potty, I couldn’t stay awake, I had no energy, I felt waves of nausea and dizziness every time I changed positions…and worst of all, I was becoming completely obsessed b/c I was trying to keep up with everything on there–you know–low, low calories, very small portions, etc.

…..losing handfuls of hair, having heart palpitations, a strange tingling down my left arm, a total loss of energy, I went and got blood test because I had lost my short term memory, I could not remember my sons birthday even and it was scary, I was suffering from insomnia and all kinds of different things. When I got my blood test back, everything was screwed up, all my female hormones, it put me into early menopause, I am 37 years old, my human growth hormone was at the age of a 97 yr old woman…

These testimonials for the Kimkins Diet are just from the first few pages on the Survivor blog. There are a lot more. Over 100 “survivors” have shared their experiences.

Who in their right mind would try the Kimkins Diet after reading these?

After all, there are other low calorie diets out there. Just look at the latest issue of Women’s World or some other women’s magazine and I can guarantee that the recommended diet is low calorie. It may not be announced as such but adding up the suggested foods end up with 1000 cals or less. For example, egg white omelet for breakfast, 3 oz chicken for lunch, 6 oz salmon for dinner plus the rest fat free or low fat. Salads (with fat free dressing of course), a slice of whole wheat bread and half a cup of brown rice will not increase the calorie count by much.

So why is the Kimkins Diet so much worse? Especially now when there supposedly is no calorie limit on it any longer? Not that the recommended 70-90 gram protein, 3 cups salad veggies, with minimal fat easily add up to more than 500-600 cals.

What I see as the main danger with the kimkins diet is not the diet in itself. It’s the cult-like atmosphere on Kimkins “support” forum. Where people are encouraged to starve themselves. Where feeling icky is applauded.

Other crazy, fad, diets might produce the same physical ill effects (and quick weight loss), but there is nothing to motivate you to keep on doing them. You just abandon them as not doable. Another failed diet attempt.

Not so with Kimkins. When struggling to stick to the diet (and who wouldn’t?) you just log on to Kimkins.con to get support for why you shouldn’t give in to your body’s demand for nutrition. Hear people saying KUTGW (keep up the good work). Look at you! You have lost so much! Keep going! Don’t be weak!

You get inspired by the success stories on the site. Big losers. Real or not, who cares? They have pictures! They look pretty and skinny in the “after” photos.

No negativity at all on the site. Just upbeat posts. Friendly challenges where you get to know people. Checking in daily to say hello and read about your friends’ overnight whooshes. How many pounds they dropped. Hoping to do the same.

To me, that is really the danger with Kimkins. Not the diet, but the website. Without the brainwashing that goes on there, nobody could stick to the diet long enough for it to do much harm. Without the forum and people posting there (even if they are mostly sockpuppets by now) there wouldn’t be a Kimkins.con.

I have great hope that Kimkins.con will soon be gone from the internet. The site was funded by members that signed up based on fraudulent weight loss claims (Kimmer’s 198 pounds) and an article in Women’s World that had fake pictures (Kimmer’s Russian bride photo). The Class Action Lawsuit may force the shut down. Or, Heidi Diaz might decide to shut it down due to lack of new members. Sockpuppets don’t bring in any money.

The Kimkins Diet gained its fame, and a large number of paying members, from having the diet advertised on the front cover of Woman’s World magazine in June 2007.

The front page focused on “Better than Gastric Bypass” and “No exercise required” and what better way is there to sell a diet? Oh, yes, the claims were also backed up by 3 success stories; Christin, Deni and a Russian Bride as a stand in for Kimmer.

We all now know how that turned out. Christin has maintained most of her weightloss, but it’s been a constant struggle for a long year. Deni has regained some in her efforts of finding a diet that is sustainable long term. And Kimmer of course had never lost any weight and is just as obese as she always was.

Women’s World eventually came out with a retraction and apology for their mistake in not verifying the pictures they used for the article. That mistake obviously did little to change the marketing practices for Women’s World magazine.

The June 30, 2008 issue again used the term “Better than Gastric Bypass” on the front page. They probably determined that it was a selling phrase and why would one little mistake prevent them from re-using it? The purpose is to sell magazines after all.

Thankfully, the diet du jour this time does not seem dangerous to your health as the Kimkins Starvation Diet was. This one is just silly. The one “success” story was an already slim woman that lost 6 pounds in 7 days. The menu looked low fat and low calorie to me.

The resistant starch diet is based on a theory developed by a “study” at Colorado Univeristy.

Fat burning was 23% higher in those who ate 5 grams of resistant starch in the meal than in those who didn’t: More fat was burned for fuel and less was available to store away. The subjects in this study were of normal weight and they ate the starch once. Longer studies of intake in overweight people would be needed to see if weight loss would occur.

The study was performed on normal weight people and the “results” were measured at ONE occasion. ONCE. And how will this provide a weight loss solution for obese people? They don’t say. Just that longer studies would be needed to see if “weight loss would occur”. Which basically means that they are asking for money to fund the studies.

Resistant starch is an indigestible fiber that can be found in green bananas, beans and grain products.

The highest concentration is found in green bananas. Who eats green bananas? I don’t. Beans and grains yes, but it wouldn’t be practical to eat enough to get the “projected benefit” of resistant starch. Of course, this fact doesn’t bother the food industry as they are already developing resistant starch supplements and adding it to various products.

No, no, NO!

Please do not add any more fiber to food. I already have problems with the artificially added straws, sticks and seeds to the food I eat. I don’t need 20 – 30 grams of fiber. My digestive system doesn’t like fiber. Just causes bloating and gas. I keep regular by limiting carbs and eating generous amounts of fat.

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.

Kimmer, the founder of the Kimkins Diet, has always insisted that starvation mode does not exist as long as there is body fat to burn for energy. Her diet suggested a daily calorie limit of 500 or less, later adjusted upwards to 710. The rest of the body’s needs would be taken from body fat.

For example:

“I don’t believe in starvation mode. I cannot and will not say anything about minimum calories. A grilled chicken breast and a 1 cup USDA serving of mixed greens is 200 calories. It just is. Adding fats or starches isn’t “healthier” to up the calories.”

“Don’t panic about low calories. . . . Bottom line, as long as you have sufficient body fat you don’t need to eat calories — you’re carrying them with you.”

“I don’t think we can fight the “1200 calorie a day mentality”. Some people cannot understand that your body takes the calories it needs from body fat if the calories you eat are too low to sustain current weight. If you need 2500 calories (250 lb person) and eat 500 (number picked for easy math), the other 2000 are taken from body fat.”

Why is it then that so many of the Kimkins Dieters experience starvation symptoms, such as:

• Feeling cold and having a lower-than-normal body temperature.
• Hair loss, brittle nails, and dry skin.
• Muscle weakness and muscle wasting.
• Constipation, slow emptying of the stomach, and belly pain.
• Sleep problems, hyperactivity, or extreme fatigue.
• Difficulty concentrating and solving problems or poor judgment.
• Dizziness, fainting spells, low blood pressure, slow heartbeat, heart palpitations.
• Frequent colds and other infections.
• Bruising.

You can find the individual accounts on Kimkins Survivors.

All these people were told to take a daily multivitamin, as if that would solve the problem. Obviously, it didn’t. Neither did the excess body fat they had. All of them were still overweight.

There are other obvious problems with a starvation diet. While ketosis initially may curb appetite, eventually hunger will reappear. Kimmer always claimed that hunger is not present as long as carbs are low enough. How she knew this, I have no idea. Certainly not from her own experience, considering that she is still obese.

I know for a fact that you can be in deep ketosis and still be hungry, and I am not alone to have experienced this. I read many accounts on Kimkins where people complained about hunger and cravings appearing around week 4 – 5 of the diet. Some of them followed K/E at the time; just eggs and meat.

Of course, the advice was to curb hunger by ignoring it, drinking water, soda or fat free broth. I am sure many people fell off the diet at this point (luckily for them) and never returned.

A diet you can not stick to is not a good diet. Your body is trying to tell you something. Listen to it.

Another issue is how to maintain the weight loss. If the above problems do not make the dieter stop the diet, eventually calories need to be increased. Nobody can live on 500 calories for life. The previous successful dieter now finds that she can not add anything without gaining weight. Even an extra cup of salad will cause the scale to go up.

The typical result is the start of a yo-yo diet. Eat more a few days and then back to starvation for a week or two. The lucky ones put in a lot of hard work to slowly increase their calories, ignoring the scale for a while, to raise their metabolism and have thus managed, with difficulty, to transition to a healthy weight loss regimen.

Why would anyone even consider starting a diet where there is a blog dedicated to SURVIVORS of the diet? With some 100 accounts of severe problems from it.

I do hope that anyone that happens to find the now year old article in the Woman’s World magazine takes a minute to google Kimkins before they go to the Kimkins.con website where Kimmer a.k.a. Heidi Diaz promises “Join today for only $79.95. That’s it. Not another penny.” That one time membership fee doesn’t include ER costs, medical bills or any compensation for long term health problems.

Edited to add: After I wrote this article, I came across this comment by a survivor that was made just two days ago:

KK has left me bald, wounded, sick and recovering from surgery and fear of food……no please don’t try Heidi’s Diet of Death!

Please take her advice. She knows what she is talking about. Unfortunately.

Read it and see if it isn’t a description of Kimmer. I think so.

The Cult of the Narcissist
By Sam Vaknin
Author of “Malignant Self Love – Narcissism Revisited”

The narcissist is the guru at the center of a cult. Like other gurus, she demands complete obedience from her flock: her spouse, her offspring, other family members, friends, and colleagues. She feels entitled to adulation and special treatment by her followers. She punishes the wayward and the straying lambs. She enforces discipline, adherence to her teachings, and common goals. The less accomplished she is in reality – the more stringent her mastery and the more pervasive the brainwashing.

The – often involuntary – members of the narcissist’s mini-cult inhabit a twilight zone of her own construction. She imposes on them a shared psychosis, replete with persecutory delusions, “enemies”, mythical narratives, and apocalyptic scenarios if she is flouted.

The narcissist’s control is based on ambiguity, unpredictability, fuzziness, and ambient abuse. Her ever-shifting whims exclusively define right versus wrong, desirable and unwanted, what is to be pursued and what to be avoided. She alone determines the rights and obligations of her disciples and alters them at will.

The narcissist is a micro-manager. She exerts control over the minutest details and behaviors. She punishes severely and abuses withholders of information and those who fail to conform to her wishes and goals.

The narcissist does not respect the boundaries and privacy of her reluctant adherents. She ignores their wishes and treats them as objects or instruments of gratification. She seeks to control both situations and people compulsively.

She strongly disapproves of others’ personal autonomy and independence. Even innocuous activities, such as meeting a friend or visiting one’s family require her permission. Gradually, she isolates her nearest and dearest until they are fully dependent on her emotionally, sexually, financially, and socially.

She acts in a patronizing and condescending manner and criticizes often. She alternates between emphasizing the minutest faults (devalues) and exaggerating the talents, traits, and skills (idealizes) of the members of her cult. She is wildly unrealistic in her expectations – which legitimizes her subsequent abusive conduct.

The narcissist claims to be infallible, superior, talented, skillful, omnipotent, and omniscient. She often lies and confabulates to support these unfounded claims. Within her cult, she expects awe, admiration, adulation, and constant attention commensurate with her outlandish stories and assertions. She reinterprets reality to fit her fantasies.

Her thinking is dogmatic, rigid, and doctrinaire. She does not countenance free thought, pluralism, or free speech and doesn’t brook criticism and disagreement. She demands – and often gets – complete trust and the relegation to her capable hands of all decision-making.

She forces the participants in her cult to be hostile to critics, the authorities, institutions, her personal enemies, or the media – if they try to uncover her actions and reveal the truth. She closely monitors and censors information from the outside, exposing her captive audience only to selective data and analysis.

The narcissist’s cult is “missionary” and “imperialistic”. She is always on the lookout for new recruits – her spouse’s friends, her daughter’s girlfriends, her neighbors, new colleagues at work. She immediately attempts to “convert” them to her “creed” – to convince them how wonderful and admirable she is. In other words, she tries to render them Sources of Narcissistic Supply.

Often, her behavior on these “recruiting missions” is different to her conduct within the “cult”. In the first phases of wooing new admirers and proselytizing to potential “conscripts” – the narcissist is attentive, compassionate, empathic, flexible, self-effacing, and helpful. At home, among the “veterans” she is tyrannical, demanding, willful, opinionated, aggressive, and exploitative.

As the leader of her congregation, the narcissist feels entitled to special amenities and benefits not accorded the “rank and file”. She expects to be waited on hand and foot, to make free use of everyone’s money and dispose of their assets liberally, and to be cynically exempt from the rules that she herself established (if such violation is pleasurable or gainful).

In extreme cases, the narcissist feels above the law – any kind of law. This grandiose and haughty conviction leads to criminal acts, incestuous or polygamous relationships, and recurrent friction with the authorities.

Hence the narcissist’s panicky and sometimes violent reactions to “dropouts” from her cult. There’s a lot going on that the narcissist wants kept under wraps. Moreover, the narcissist stabilizes her fluctuating sense of self-worth by deriving Narcissistic Supply from her victims. Abandonment threatens the narcissist’s precariously balanced personality.

Add to that the narcissist’s paranoid and schizoid tendencies, her lack of introspective self-awareness, and her stunted sense of humor (lack of self-deprecation) and the risks to the grudging members of her cult are clear.

The narcissist sees enemies and conspiracies everywhere. She often casts herself as the heroic victim (martyr) of dark and stupendous forces. In every deviation from her tenets she espies malevolent and ominous subversion. She, therefore, is bent on dis-empowering her devotees. By any and all means.

The narcissist is dangerous.

Emphasis mine, and the changes from he/his to she/hers.