lowcarblosers

Take, for instance, the case of the Kimkins Diet fiasco.

Many years ago, I joined an online low carb community. Within only a few days of posting, the community leaders and their devoted followers were evident. One of these ‘leaders’ was Kim Diaz, aka ‘Kimmer’. Kimmer was the go-to girl for desperate low carber who wanted to see results quickly, no matter how hard they had to work for it.

Kimmer had a large following, and for good reason. Her reported results were the stuff fairy tales are made of. She had reportedly lost well over 100 lbs in a very short time. Her honesty about the difficulty of such a feat was very convincing. Many of my fellow forum members were eager to learn her tricks for low carb weight loss success.

It wasn’t long before Kimmer’s followers grew in number and devotion. Kimmer outlined an extremely restrictive diet accompanied by a killer workout that her followers struggled to follow. Some were successful at reproducing Kimmer’s reported results. Many more, however, found the strict and rigorous plan more than they could manage behaviorally or physically. Still, her following continued to grow.

Kimmer probably wouldn’t have had any trouble if she’d limited her advice to an online discussion board. Instead, the popularity of her plan convinced her to develop a diet plan and accompanying website. She turned her home-grown program into a commercial weight loss corporation called “Kimkins”. That’s when everything started to fall apart.

Through her private, pay-for-use website, Kimmer’s devotees grew in number. In fact, her plan was so popular, it drew national attention from national media. A cover article about the Kimkins program even appeared in the June 12, 2007 issue of Woman’s World Magazine. This drew an even larger crowd of desperate dieters to her plan. Her success and bank account were growing at a phenomenal pace. Unfortunately for Kimmer, so was a vocal community of angry former followers.

While Kimkins appeared to be a dream come true for newcomers, those who had been following the plan since its earliest days were getting more than they bargained for. Many Kimkins members were experiencing health problems like fatigue, dizzy spells, hair loss, and more. Some even found themselves hospitalized as a result of following the plan. Even worse for Kim Diaz, people were growing suspicious of her story.

Kim Diaz claimed to have lost a massive amount of weight following her own plan. The absence of credible before and after pictures led many to suspect there was a lot less to her story than she claimed. When images finally appeared on the Kimkins website, they did little to silence her critics. Photos accompanying the Womans World article only fueled the fires of speculation. Many questioned that the woman in the ‘before’ pictures was the same as the woman in the ‘after’ shots. This was not limited to photos of Kim Diaz, but ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots for other Kimkins success stories.

The unraveling began with a private investigator, hired by Kimkins victims. The investigator photographed Kim Diaz returning home one day, looking nothing like the stylish, slender woman whose photo was being used as evidence of Kimmer’s success. Diaz was exposed to be an extremely overweight woman. The images she used were discovered to have been stolen from a Russian website.

Those suffering from the ill-effects of the diet joined forces and filed a class action suit against Diaz in California. The suit is still pending. The court has issued a ruling that Diaz cannot access assets or profits from the Kimkins website after it was shown she was attempting to hide those assets so they could not be used as damages in the law suit.

Medical complications were later dropped from the class action suit to expand the number of victims represented.

The moral of this story is that we must use common sense when we’re talking to people online. If claims seem to be outlandish, they may not be based in fact. Even if 90% of what a person tells you is absolutely true, the suspect 10% can cause serious harm to your body and your low carb lifestyle.

Even if the entire community is on board with a leader, be sure to remain suspicious at all times.

Even though Diaz has been proven a fraud and her diet has led to serious medical problems for her followers, people continue to join her site at an alarming rate.