Complaint Review: Food Lovers Diet

I thought I was fairly savvy about weight loss gimmicks, but this one caught my attention because they claim to show you how to combine your favorite foods with other foods (based on carbohydrate value) to eat what you want and still lose weight.  I hesitated, but decided to take a chance.  Their testimonials are full of statements that are the exact opposite of what the literature says when you get it.  One guy who claims to have lost 100 pounds says he ate spaghetti, pizza, cookies, brownies, lasagna... I don't eat that stuff and I still carry around too much weight!

I ordered the plan mid January and it arrived February 1st.  I paid the $19.95 shipping (which is supposedly all I will have to pay if I choose to return it) and the $19.95 first monthly installment.  I placed my order online.  After declining every additional offer, they still sent a bottle of vitamins (for $1) and enrolled me in the online program.  Both of these extras will be billed at exhorbitant rates if I don't call to cancel them (I did that on Day 1). 

I opened the box and found everything shown on the infomercial inside.  Once I began reading, though, the promises of "eat what you want" fell through really fast.  You are told to throw away your salt shaker, avoid all sugar, avoid all fat (like oil, butter, etc.) and discard egg yolks.  The 7-day quick start had two meal offerings for dinner - their recipe for meat loaf or chili - that just rotate every other day.  Breakfast was an egg white omlette or "breakfast patties" (not real sausage), again rotating every other day.  I imagined I would lose weight pretty fast because I would be totally sick of these same foods by the end of the 7th day! 

If you've ever tried to cook an egg white omlette without fat, you're in for a struggle.  Cooking it in broth like they suggest results in a rubbery, awful mess.  It's disgusting. 

So, where is the part about eating the foods I love while I lose all this weight???  The infomercial says you can have pizza and chocolate cake, but the materials strongly discourage it.  They want you to eat 1/2 cup of oatmeal for breakfast, with no butter, no sugar, no salt -- no flavor -- and somehow that is supposed to be the same as eating the foods you love.  Sorry, but it's not working for me.  I expect my food to have flavor.  I can imagine the calorie count for women is about 1000/day.

They're not just telling you how to combine your favorite foods with other foods to achieve weight loss; they're telling you how to change your favorite foods so they have a very low calorie count.  I could do that for free by just swapping out ingredients.  Their web site shows pancakes with butter and syrup.  The book says to forego the butter and use sugar free syrup.  So, I can't use simple, natural maple syrup.  I'm supposed to use synthetic syrup - and THEIR pancake recipe, not my own.

All the claims they make are too good to be true.  I should have known.