A few months ago, I went for a consultation at L.A. Weightloss, and came to the conclusion that it was a giant scam. Since then, I’ve poked around a bit online, trying to find info on people that have actually paid for the program to see what they thought, and I went over to Epinions.com to see if there were any reviews.
Does anyone besides me think that it’s a little bit curious that out of 32 different diets, not a single review of L.A. Weightloss is posted? It’s the only diet (other than some obscure “Solutions” program that I’ve never heard of) that has NO reviews. Is there something shady going on here? L.A. Weightloss is a pretty well known program, and I find it hard to believe that no one has dropped into say anything. There are tons of reviews for other high cost programs like Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem, so I doubt that it has much to do with the cost (and therefore relatively fewer participants) of the program. Could L.A. Weightloss be holding Epinions toes to the fire, so they’re suppressing reviews?
Google “L.A. Weight Loss” and complaint. It looks like people are charged big bucks in advance and can’t get their money back if they don’t like the program.
I already know what their deal is…I asked way more questions about their “guarantee” of weight loss than the counselor really liked, and I obviously didn’t sign up.
What I’m really curious about is why one of the biggest and most well-known diet programs has no reviews on Epinions. I find it weird.
That’s curious, because there was recently an article (via the AP, I think) that basically said most diet programs are bunk. There were a few studies done on Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and some others that were cited, but the article specifically said that no studies had been done on LA Weightloss to try and verify its effectiveness.
I’ve often wondered what they are all about - did you get a feel for what their nutritional program is like?
No, I didn’t get any feel for what their nutritional program was like at all. When you go in for a consultation, you’re basically meeting with a salesperson. They try to blow a whole bunch of smoke up your ass about how fast you’ll lose, and they (try to) emotionally manipulate you by having you fill out a questionaire about why you want to lose weight and how your life will be better if you meet your weight loss goals…as if those answers aren’t pretty much the same for everyone.
They give you a hard sell on how your weight loss is guaranteed or your money back, and if you express any doubt, they just go in circles about how if you fail to lose, the nutritional counselors will tweak the program until they get it to work for you. Apparently, if you do sign up, you’ll fill out a big preferences and personality profile, and they send it off somewhere to have it analyzed and a program sent back. I didn’t get that far.
What you’ll never get them to admit without heavy and specific questioning is that you can’t get your money back on their “guarantee” unless you eat these very expensive supplemental bars, even though the program touts itself as a “buy your own food” arrangement.
Basically, the fee schedule is insane. It breaks down like this:
Processing/initiation fee (I forget what it was when I went, somewhere in the range of $200)
Weekly fees…this is where they gouge you. They calculate how much you have to lose (assume 100 lbs for the sake of calculation here), divide that by 2 (which is the number of lbs they guarantee you lose per week) and then add on 52 weeks of maintenance. Yes, you read that right…you have to pay for a full year of maintenance after your weight loss is complete, not just for the period you’re losing weight. So, you have a weekly fee of about $7 x 102 weeks for $714.
You have to pay the entire fee up front. I presume that this is to prevent someone from getting the program details and then doing it on their own.
They claim that if you maintain for a year, you’ll get half of your weekly fees back. I have no idea how many people actually get this far.
As I said above, they won’t honor their guarantee unless you eat the bars they incorporate into your plan. Bars are approximately $20 more a week, so you’re actually looking at another $1000 for 50 weight loss weeks.
I didn’t have any confidence that their meal plan was any different than you could find anywhere online, such as e-diets for $2/week. They push the bars hard, claiming they have special ingredients that help melt the weight off. I suspect the magic ingredient is a strong diuretic, but that’s probably just the cynical side of me coming out.
All in all…they wanted about $2k from me if I were going to follow the program that would allow me to get my money back if it didn’t work, and I didn’t have a good feeling about that, either. I could easily see them claiming you didn’t follow the program and therefore didn’t get squat. Feh.
I’m a former advisor at Eps and a current moderator on their boards. I have talked to the people who run the site a couple of times on the phone and I feel I can say pretty confidently that they absolutely don’t attempt to quash content. They yearn for content.
The site can be strange in the distribution of reviews. For many things, it seems that people decide to write a review after they see someone else’s review.
Also, according to the adds I’ve seen out here, LA Weightloss also includes weight loss drugs as a part of it’s program. I have no idea what kind of drugs, but I find their weight loss guarantees to be rather sketchy. I would never join a place that would guarantee I would lose weight, because you simply can’t guarantee that kind of thing.
I love reading epinions, and one thing I’ve noticed is that there is no apparent rhyme or reason to which things have epinions posted and which don’t. I suspect that a lot of things get listed because people ask for them to be listed, and if nobody’s motivated enough to ask, then it might not get on the site.
I was surprised to see a particular non-name-brand toy with an extensive review, and within the body of the review, the poster thanked whoever it was that added it to the site. I might just sign up and post my (positive) opinion about the toy, now that I see it’s on there. If it wasn’t there in the first place, I probably would have just assumed that it was too obscure for epinions to bother with.
All of which would support what jsgoddess just said.
(jsgoddess: Would you be interested in participating in a thread on epinions in general?)
Yes, the Category Leads can add a product, though they will need a little detail to help them out. I hang out almost exclusively in Books and I know they, well actually Grace, will do their best to get a book added if you will review it. I’m sure it’s the same way with toys.
