Kimkins Controversy - Kimkins Scam

Where’s Kimmer?

The controversy page on Kimkins and the Kimkins homepage don’t match up. It’s not so much a lie as an oversight.

Here is the sentence I am referring to…

Here is a screencap from Kimkins, slightly modified for the purposes of lulz…

Heidi is writing about a 50lb weight loss AND she has stopped documenting her progress on the front page. It doesn’t add up (or subtract up, depending on how you look at it).

Kimmkins With Two M’s

I don’t know why I didn’t have this thought process until just now. The people who are at the most risk of suffering financially and/or with regard to their health are also very likely to have poor spelling. They aren’t going to stumble upon the fact that Kimkens is a fraud if all of the anti-kimkins blogs diligently check their spelling. I shouldn’t imply that only unintelligent people are joining Kimmkins. A smart person with the right combination of a trusting nature and a burning desire to lose weight quickly is just as likely to throw their money down the well that is the Kimkins site.

Good News about Weight Loss

There is good news this morning. A medical study has concluded that moderate weight loss in overweight adults improves heart health. It further indicated that the benefit was there whether you chose diet, exercise or a combination. The best part of this is that benefits are immediate and apparent. People who know that they need to lose several pounds do not seem to take late onset diabetes and high blood pressure as a call to action. If you are conclusively told that you will feel younger if you lose weight, is that enough motivation?

Unbiased, a Definition

Most people with a reasonable amount of education and experienced already know what unbiased means. I am not claiming to be unbiased. If you were to Google the word ‘Kimkins’ you would see the word unbiased, which means free from favoritism or self-interest, describing Kimkins Review, the affiliate that to this date still publishes the fraudulent 198lb weight loss claim made by Heidi Diaz.

I think that affiliates have an undeniable self-interest. I have no problem with the concept of affiliate marketing, but those who do it well don’t lie. The best way to sell something is to actually believe that it is a good product and that your readers will benefit from buying it. I think many of us could name a small handful of people who put their names behind Kimkins when they believed that she was an actual weight loss success and then quickly put Kimkins behind them when they found out (or in some cases strongly suspected) the truth.

Anti-Kimkins Blogs of Note: Jimmy

I’m guessing that about 0.2% of the people that end up reading my title will react by thinking to themselves Jimmy who?

Jimmy is a low carb weight loss success story who went on to become a pro blogger and the host of a vibrant free low carb community. He has a lot of personality.

Jimmy spent months as a Kimkins affiliate and drew harsh criticism for a part of that time. His audio interview with Kimmer (who at that time was not admitting to her identity as Heidi Diaz) was a defining moment of this saga. I think you can pinpoint the moment when he stopped giving Kimmer the benefit of the doubt. He asked her if the picture of the woman in the red dress was, in fact, her. She said it was, in a tone of voice very much like the one that Heidi Diaz would later use to say No Comment to Chip Yost. The popularity of the audio interview with Jimmy Moore meant that thousands of people had absolutely no doubt that Heidi Diaz was Kimmer as soon as she spoke on camera. Surprisingly, Kimmer continued to deny being Heidi Diaz for some time after that.

Mission Accomplished?

After looking at all the tasks posted on Kimkins Scam I felt a bit guilty about not being as busy as some other people. When I decided to jump in and do my share, I got a surprise. Many of the promotional articles and posts about Kimkins have already been taken down. Here’s a 404 page. All the Kimkins articles at Awesome Articles have been replaced with the following words:

All Kimkins diet related articles have been removed from Awesome-Articles.com in response to the following news story:

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/OnCall/story?id=4162053&page=1

Kimkins.com is still up and running, but it is reassuring to see how responsive the article posting sites have been.

Anti-Kimkins Blogs of Note: Kimorexia

Let me put this in the simplest of terms. Heidi Diaz did some smart branding with the Kimkins Experiment. Now that we know she was not actually subjecting herself to this experiment, you have to question the methodology and the conclusions as well as the validity of the results. You have to wonder about the people who swallowed the kool-aid and said Kimmer lied, but the diet is not a lie.

Kimorexia delivers the ‘information, revelation, references, quotes, debates and more concerning the “Kimkins” crash-diet and/or its advice’ that it promises. Using information to combat the disinformation about diet and health over at Kimkins is a recurring theme. There are also a lot of outgoing links to interesting corners of the Anti-Kimkins community/cause.

Is Kimkins a Cult?

We generally associate the word cult with religion, but the definition is actually broader than that. Wikipedia describes a cult as a cohesive social group devoted to beliefs or practices that the surrounding culture considers outside the mainstream. So, yeah, I think you could argue that Kimkins is a cult.

I think the one saving grace with Kimkins is that its devotees are not in the physical care and control of their leader. I recently read some anecdotal information from an anti-kimkins blogger who knows some people who are still following Kimkins. The impression I got was the some Kimkins defenders who argue that it is a safe and viable diet actually cheat regularly on their diet.

Heidi is Blogging up a Storm

The Blogspot blog authored by ‘Kimmer’ is probably the most active and relevant ‘affiliate’ blog left. There is a lot of well constructed new content there. I am not being sarcastic, I really think it is a well designed and well written blog. There is even a comment or two on the blog. They are both from people who mysteriously address their comment to somebody other than Kimmer, as if they mistakenly think it was posted by someone else. Both commentators also created a Blogger account near the time that they made their comment on Heidi’s Blog. Not surprisingly, they are both very positive comments.

There is no way know if Heidi wrote the comments herself, but it seems plausible.

Kimkins Exposure

The tangled web that is the Kimkins Controversy was given the cookie-cutter treatment of television journalism a few days ago. It is great that countless people who may have never heard of Kimkins got the basic messages that it is a fraud and that it is not a well researched and safe way of eating.

Actually, I am curious as to how many people would have seen this item on Good Morning America. I was surprised to learn that the TV show is aired in Europe, the Middle East, the Philippines and Australia. The show spent a lot of years as the #1 morning show in America. In November 2006, GMA averaged 5.1 million viewers. It has been a close second to The Today Show for many years.

So it’s quite likely that millions of people saw this news item. The only website that was mentioned and shown on television was Heidi’s site. It may be a bit early to look for the effect of the television exposure on her traffic, but so far it seems to have been minimal.