Hi,
Been Keto for almost 5 months.
I was invited to a Herbalife body scan examination. And I want to share my experiance and hear some thoughts about herbalife. I will mention that I went there and pretended I am totaly ignorant in nutrition and I do not follow any diet. Did not combat him on any point and not told him about my weight loss.
I was prior to this, 5 years ago to them and I was a mess, now with Keto I had better numbers than the dude attempting to sell me products.
My shock is that all they told me was counter to the keto principles… avoid all fats… eat fiber. Common ground was restrict sugar and fruits. The dude even told me that I should eat 3 meals and 2 snacks because otherwise I actually store fat… Yet I do OMAD and prolonged fasts and when eating I eat over 2500 calories and I still loose fat at a high pass.
As I thought about their ideas they basically just do a fancy calorie restriction with a powder drink to blot the stomach and replace one meal.
Any thoughts ?
Keto vs Herbalife
Doesn’t surprise me.
Herbalife is essentially a marketing led pyramid oriented sales scheme that JUST about stays legal, I know a couple of people who’ve worked for them, the targets the sales consultants are given are ridiculous and the products are no better than the crap you’d get on Amazon, or Slimfast.
I was in the sauna once and a Herbalife sales consultant guy tried to give me a his card and boasted about having a “Mercedes parked outside” - from what I understand, most of them barely scrape a yearly salary.
Told him to F@ck off!
There’s been numerous investigations and legal battles against Herbalife all over Europe and America, I would imagine the sheer weight of their finances mean no one really has a chance of beating them.
Yes I agree.
I do believe that a normal person can become very knowledge in nutrition through self learning, self searching and self experimenting. Yet this people are so much mislead, they become interested in nutrition yet they are ridiculous and all they know is wrong.
yep exactly that, the whole thing needs a big legal intervention, Herbalife only succeeds because of it’s false exponential sales growth process.
I have a few friends who sold Herbalife for a while… it’s a pyramid scheme of unbelievably expensive products! Their marketing is very clever and they’ve managed to survive a lot of bad publicity. I’ve seen how it works and what a mess it leaves… thanks, but no thanks 
Herbalife is crap. I got tricked into being a rep some years ago and after using their products for a few months developed a horrible rash which turned out to be caused by something in their products as it went as soon as I stopped using them. It’s all based on CICO rather than nutrition and the whole organisation is like a massive cult.
could help myself but have a quick browse of their current product line… cant think of anything worse than having to live on this crap.
“Underpinned by science and developed by experts in nutrition”
I notice as well there are absolutely no prices mentioned up front… cant find anything online on their website, so so whiffy!!!
Contains 24 esential vitamins and minerals… Wonder what they are and if they are naturaly obtained
“Drink me” might have helped Alice in Wonderland shrink, but, really, a life time of shakes for meals? I’ll happily pass.
That’s OK for you, because you have TIME. And WILLPOWER. You are not a NORMAL HUMAN.
the thing is, there is a genuine case for going super low calorie when someone needs to quickly get the visceral fat reduced to help with weight/illness or pre-op - I’ve done Lipotrim here in the UK, it’s a similar format (2 shakes a day @ 800 cals total) before and lost loads…
BUT I can’t see why you would choose liquids, over proper food? You could easily make up the same amount of Herbalife level calories with healthy balanced low carbohydrate meals, and its probably going to be cheaper.
Maybe it’s a control thing.
If I put money-scheme aside… herbalife is marketed to people as meal replacements for those who are truly busy and those who like to say they’re busy. Shake here, meal-replacement bar there, take these supplements, drink this green-tea powder in the morning, drink this aloe vera instead of juice, etc. It’s like a religion, it offers simple answers to everyone’s nutritional question-just like we all have and had. However, they suck you in and you have to buy more and more, always new things to try and it does cost a lot of money. People decide to trust the method and think they’re getting the balanced diet they didnt think they had before. Maybe it is a better option for someone who’s eating junk…
I saw how it works, I watched my friends use it, I even tried it (I like to try things and really see how they work, so I can have an opinion and I wanted to support my friend and give it a try), I saw my friend struggle with their business model, I saw friends arguing and avoiding each other… And I never want to be a part of it, ever again…
Been there tried that … hated every minute of it and as soon as I went off the shakes on to real food gained it all back as with any other CICO diet.
Super expensive, tastes terribly artificial (well it tastes like what it is), I was hungry all the time and pretty low on energy, plus the constant irritation of the pyramid scheme… did not last long.
The scheme thing I can understand. I am not an expert in nutrition but I struggled with weight loss for years and lost a lot of weight while on Herbalife. I was 198 when I started and was able to get down to 153. I had two shakes a day and one meal plus two snacks, one in between breakfast and lunch and one between lunch and dinner. I didn’t calorie count but I did meal prep and followed portion sizes. I had personal situations that lead to me dumping my diet and exercise and gained back most of that weight. The only thing keeping me from herbalife is it’s prices. I am a preferred member so I do my own ordering through the website at 40% off the retail price but with my not working at the moment it’s still a bit hard. So that’s what’s led me to give Keto a try. I have seen the results with keto so I’m excited to give it a try. But Herbalife can work for weight loss, it’s not total BS
Welcome Sheila, I hope you find support in this forum to improve your health and well-being without a huge financial outlay.
Dr Jason Fung has a good line about this somewhere in one of his many books he says (paraphrased) “All diets work. All diets fail”. I take from this that there is a period of time when being really motivated enables us to stick with any regime and lose weight. Lord knows I did it enough times on CICO myself in my youth. The crucial part though is that calorie restriction messes up the metabolism and reduces the resting metabolic rate meaning that we put weight on again more easily if we start eating “normally” again.
My take on products such as herbalife is that they are not just BS they are dangerous BS because their purpose is not to make you or me slim and healthy the purpose is to enrich the members of the organisation at the sweet point of the pyramid selling scheme.
With low carb diets such as the keto one promoted (without financial benefit) by the two dudes we can belong to a community which offers support whilst tailoring a diet which suits our own needs and preferences. No-one grows wealthy at our expense. Many of us are healthier now than we were 10 or 15 years ago.