Complaint Review: dietdoc

Follks, please do not drink the Koolaide.  The folks of diet doc don't care about you.  They are consummate scam artists.  Look, losing weight is a terrifically difficult ordeal.  The only thing this company will do for you is make you cynical, disappointed, despairing, hopeless and broke.  Do you really want to feel that way?  Don't allow yourself to go through such needless pain.  It's not worth it from a medical, physical, emotional standpoint; and it sure ain't worth it from a financial standpoint. 

My mother is a well-renowned dietician: she invented the wildly popular "Deal a Meal" plan.  She is a premiere expert on nutrition and was the chief dietician at "Scripps Executive Health" in La Jolla Ca.  She has counseled Sam Walmart, the entire Jackson family, not to mention the plethora of top executives that flew in from around the world to seek her advice.  When she first heard about my job at Diet doc, she was more than a  little disconcerted.  She felt it was morally wrong:  giving people false hope, not to mention exploiting people that are desperate, was in her mind,  just plain wrong.  But, I really needed the job, so I tried to ignore her ethical omens.   But this was a job I felt terrible doing.    The owner, Julie, a hefty woman I observed eating In and Out Burgers and Pizza only,  is unduly proud of the company she started.  Her top salesperson is even more morbidly overweight.  Yet these women are the so-called "experts" of the Hcg diet.  Hmm.  Wonder why it hasn't worked for them?  They make all types of enthusiastic claims that it "re-sets" your metabolism...that you will feel euphoric on it, and you won't gain the weight back if you follow the maintenance program...hm...

It was just too bizarre to be working for a company that touted "healthy diet, healthy diet, healthy diet" but were pushing a very unhealthy diet plan on  the patients.  They were essentially walking oxymorons:  living very unhealthy lives--mentally and physically--while trying to promote health.  They were all pallid shut--ins  that never even got up from their desks but to eat french fries or smoke.  All they talked about was money.  I never heard them say one nice thing to me, or  one nice thing about a patient  The owner, Julie, was a harsh taskmaster who shrieked incessantly at her staff about losing her "money," and that they had better "pick up the pace." What?  I've never seen such efficient albeit unhappy sales people in my entire life.  The place was so depressing it bordered on CREEPY.

My ma told me that the original hcg diet enjoyed a brief stint of popularity in the sixties and early seventies but quickly fizzled out because it did not work.  The only thing that works in the hcg diet is the "placebo effect."  Or at least that is what the experts are saying. It's not the hcg that causes you to lose weight--It's the fact that you are on a low carb diet of eight hundred calories that facilitates weight loss! 

On a trivia note:  did you know the original low carb/high fat diet was not the Atkins diet?  The original diet was designed for epileptics because it reduced seizures.  One of the side-effects discovered was the inordinate amount of weight epileptics were losing...Hence the birth of the "Atkins Diet."  Now we all know that diet had to be perfected.  Allowing for unlimited fat couldn't have been a good thing.  So it was perfected with time, and now, low carb diets with only good fats have become the definitive diet for all.  And we know it works.  Coupled with exercise,  you are guaranteed to lose weight long term. 

However, what is critical to the process is total behavioral and mind transformation.  One has to go on a moderate diet for a lifetime, period.  And the only to achieve this is to first of all: stop trying to lose weight quickly.  YOU WILL INCONTROVERTIBLY GAIN IT BACK NO MATTER WHAT.  What I say next may offend some people, but it is the truth.  Food is an addiction!  I have lots of expertise here... having been an addict and having worked in a rehab center when I got well.  Unfortunately, I had to learn the hard way that there was never a silver bullet.  I unequivocally failed every time trying to find the "easy way."  I finally learned the "easy way" was much harder in the end.  I didn't succeed until I finally surrendered to the fact that it was incumbent upon me to change my thinking FIRST.  If silver bullets don't work in drug addiction then why would they work for food addiction?  Because they don't, folks, sorry.  Wish it did, but it just doesn't.  But, if you can just hang on, and do it twenty-four hours at a time, with a good support group (overeaters anonymous, or any other strong support group) and get honest with yourself, I can guarantee you will beat this monster.  Fake diets are not "getting honest."  Your addiction loves the hcg diet! 

Now, back to the folks at Diet doc.  At first they will ooze with fake compassion, and promise you, you will lose up to "thirty pounds a month."  Please hear the "up to" part.  Some people lose 20 the first month but most lose closer to ten-fifteen.  Most of it water weight. 

I got many more calls from depressed, disappointed, angry folks than I did with folks that had success with our diet.  The only the folks that had some smidgeon of success were folks that only needed to lose fifteen to twenty pounds.  They are not addicts, that is why!  They can cut down, just like hard drinkers can cut down but alcoholics can't.  If you are more overweight than that, please do not set yourself up for failure with these people.  To get you to sign up, they will offer "unlimited clinical support."  Hogwash.  They hate when you call back for anything but ordering more hcg or some of their more sillier products.  My first duty on the phones was what they euphemistically called "follow up calls."  You know, to check up on the patients, see how they were doing?  It was so sad to hear their woeful tales.  I almost wanted to cry.  But the owner wasn't having any of that.  She told me to quickly get off the phone with anybody that wouldn't buy any product.  However, I couldn't be that cold.  I did listen.  And it broke my heart.  I listened to people cry over the phone about lost money and no lost pounds.  And of course the antidote was to sell folks these useless "prescription strength" herbs and vitamins. Julie told me to always say our herbs and vitamins were prescribed by the doctor because "customers fall for that sort of thing.  They hear it's being prescribed by a doctor and they immediately think its something really great."  I thought I would laugh in her cunning face when I heard that.  Please, girl.  Folks, there is no such thing as "prescription strength" vitamins or herbs.  Why?  Because they are not prescription medicine.  It's just a sales tool she came up with to fool  the "ignorant public."  And the prices!  Try forty dollars a week for saffron.  Stuff you can buy in the health food store for considerably less!  Moreover, I never heard one customer say they worked.  All I heard was the anger in patients voices about how the diet did not work and the herbs they sell on top definitely didn't work. 

By the way:  if you want to take advantage of the "unlimited clinical support" by say, phoning diet doc to ask why your diet is not working, they will contemptuously tell you that "you cheated."  I have never felt as dirty as I did working for that company.  I blew a tremendous sigh of relief the day I was 'let go."  I couldn't stand the fact I was not allowed to display any compassion and was there only to swindle customers with snake oil. 

Folks, there is not one shred of empirical evidence that Hcg works.  It is only a theory, not fact.  It's never been proven to work.  The evidence is only anecdotal.  Look at what the Mayo Clinic has to say about it:  "Don't walk away from this diet, run away from it." 

My mother called once and poised as a customer asking all kinds of things about the diet and nutrition.  In frustration and disgust she finally gave up her disguise by saying to one of my ex-colleagues: "Young man, you have no idea what you are talking about, do you?"  He hung up on her.  They don't even employ a real MD.  He's a Homeopathic Doctor, unlicensed to prescribe anything except HCG and some anti-biotics.  I bet that is one thing they will never tell you when you sign up.  I know Julie spent most of her time in the office dialing attorneys to protect an untenable position she found herself in.  Apparently, an ex-employee was "blackmailing" her by besmirching her name.  Really?  If she had nothing to hide, I wonder why she was so infinitely overwrought by it?   Last I heard, she didn't appear to be having much luck because when she finished talking to one attorney, she was quickly on the phone with another attorney... feeling very very sorry for herself.  A very unattractive trait in greedy people.  And that she was: unquestionably greedy.  It was always all about her. Oh vey.  How do you say unbridled capitalism gone awry?   

But as Julie would say:  "by the time these people call us, they are desperate.  Believe me, they will buy."  Folks, do you want to be exploited by these people that just want your money and don't care a fig about you? Say no!  And good luck.  To tell you the truth:  the only people I enjoyed while working there were the patients... and all I can say is I feel really bad about even the short time I worked there.  I hate being exploited and so should you.  These are not nice people.  Have the courage and confidence in yourself to do a lifetime diet.  In time, after carb withdrawal, you will recoil from junkfood as you would from a hot flame.   God Bless.