I am psychic

This past Monday I was sacked out on the couch, reading and watching TV (in the background), recovering from my cold and thanking the universe that I had the day off because it was Veteran's Day. The clicker was ... somewhere and I didn't feel like looking for it, so I ended up watching a show I'd never seen before, The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet. Actually, I wasn't paying attention to it at first but then I heard "... Atkins meets anorexia!" and I immediately thought, Kimmer.

Some background: About 4 years ago I found myself with some 30 lbs to lose, and a real problem with constant exhaustion and mood swings. I decided to try Atkins, since a relative had had some good results with it, and it looked ideal for a hypoglycemic like me who also had a serious addiction to pasta and other processed carbs. Now, keep in mind that Atkins, when done properly, does not involve no carbs ever, unlimited meat and cheese and buckets of fat. True, the first two weeks (known as Induction) involve 20 grams of carbs per day and enough protein so you are full, but not stuffed. Cheese is limited during this time to 1 oz per day (not a lot), and while you are encouraged not to fear dietary fat, you are by the same token not encouraged to start spooning in bacon grease either.

Induction tends to swoosh off a lot of weight at first -- I lost 13 lbs in those first two weeks -- but a big chunk of that is usually water weight. However, Atkins does not encourage massive weight loss on a continuing bases. Once induction is over, you add back carbs at the rate of 5 grams per week in the form of unprocessed foods such as vegetables until you reach a stage where you are still losing about 1-2 lbs a week. Once you are close to your goal, you enter Pre-Maintenance where you increase carbs until your weight loss slows, and then you are in Maintenance where you have an upper limit of carb consumption where you can maintain your weight and not gain. You are encouraged to exercise and drinks lots of water. You can read all about it here. I know I sound like a massive apologist, but it worked for me and, let me emphasize, I eat well. Fruit. Vegetables. Lean protein. Minimally processed legumes and grains. High fiber, whole grain breads, even. I eat this way 85% of the time, which lets me have special foods on special occasions. This Thanksgiving, I will have pie. I just won't have a whole pie.

Anyway, I ended up spending a lot of time on the Low Carb Friends bulletin board. This proved to be filled with about 90% helpful, supportive people and 10% wingnuts. One wingnut in particular stood out, a woman who went by the name of Kimmer. According to Kimmer, she'd lost 198 lbs in 11 months by 'tweaking' Atkins, aka eating almost no carbs and no fats. Furthermore, she stated she did this without ever exercising and didn't bother drinking water, preferring non-caloric soft drinks. I personally thought that while it was remotely possible she'd actually lost that much weight -- some people are lucky, I lost my 30 lbs in 4 months, but I exercised -- she'd probably exaggerated it by, oh, at least 50 lbs or so and otherwise was full of shite. She spent a lot of time spouting such nonsense as counting dietary fiber towards your carb total, even though it's not digestible (unless you happen to be a gut bacterium), 'true' ketosis and the benefits of limiting your calories to a ridiculously low number. Which kept changing, 1000 calories, 800 calories and so on.

Kimmer was quite the polarizing presence. I largely ignored her, but there were plenty of people who didn't. Some people loved her, and dubbed her version of this way of eating, 'Kimkins'. Other people thought she was a health menace, but for a long time there were many more of the former than the latter. Many of the people on that board had a lot of weight to lose, one hundred, two hundred pounds and were desperate to lose it. Here was a woman who had done what they so desperately wanted to do, and so quickly. There were her before and after pictures! Who were they going to listen to?

I fell in the latter camp. As previously mentioned, I thought she was full of it, and I also thought she had the very bad habit of handing out medical advice she was in no way qualified to give. I thought her 'after' pic was wildly different than her 'before' pic, and in a way that a 200 lb weight loss would not explain. Fast forward a few years. I stopped visiting the board on a regular basis, but checked in every once in a while, and on one visit, found Kimmer had left LCF in a huff and founded her own website, kimkins.com. For the low price of $60, she would share her plan with you, and you'd get 'special access' to her and the ability to post on her heavily moderated forums. She even snagged herself a cover story in one of those women's mags you see in the checkout line at the supermarket, Woman's World, and a mention in People Magazine. I recall seeing the Woman's World article (in which she gave her name as Kimberly Drake, red flag for me as I seemed to recall she'd said on the boards that 'Kimmer' was not based on her first name), reading it while standing in line, and thinking that it was only a matter of time before she got herself sued.

I am psychic, kind of. In a couple of ways. First, she's being sued. Second, it turns out that everything she said was a complete and total lie. It turns out she's a morbidly obese woman and there is no indication she ever lost the weight she said she did. Her one claim to authority was that amazing 198 lb weight loss in 11 months, a fact that was trumpeted loudly in the Woman's World article (and she allegedly signed on 40,000 new members at $60 a pop from that article) and it was not true. Some enterprising individuals found that her 'after' pictures were taken from Russian Brides websites, and that many of the 'Kimkins Success Stories' pictures were as well (and the stories themselves were, needless to say, false). Some of her real 'success stories' have suffered serious health problems, the least of which is hair loss. This has been coming out for a while, due in large part to her refusal to ever meet anyone in person (and it's clear why that was), with former business partners outing her, private investigators trailing her, a television station doing an expose (links here) and Kimmer denying everything up until the day of the Mike and Juliet show in which Kimmer's PR person admitted it was all true (transcript here, Kimmer apparently couldn't make the show because she was in court that day over the lawsuit). You can read a good summary of the whole mess here and here and here are a bunch of tagged posts as well. Or just Google kimkins. It's quite an interesting read.

You know ... it's so tempting to go for the quick fix. That was the real secret of Kimmer's success, if you can call it that, the promise of quick, nearly effortless weight loss. Her problem was, she got greedy. She had her own little fiefdom on LCF, but the second she took it to her own site and started making money from it, it was doomed to collapse. But thank God for Kimmer's greed because it exposed her for the fraud she is. It's bad enough that her starvation diet landed some people in the hospital, but left unchecked -- her site still exists -- it wouldn't surprise me if it ends up killing someone. Caveat emptor.

ETA: Whilst following links regarding the court case, I found that she's spent a little time in the San Bernadino courts as well. You can find them here. Don't worry about all the directions up top, just hit 'accept' at the bottom and it'll take you right to it. Enter in Diaz for the last name, Heidi for the first. One civil case, in particular, is sad since it involves her divorce which looks ... not amicable, but I am sure the world will want to know that in addition to scamming people out of close to $2 million, she also has an active case against in her San Bernadino ... for not vaccinating a dog. Oh, and her ex-husband has filed something to amend his spousal support, presumably because he's recently learned she had around 40,000 people give her $60 each.

Also ETA: I've noticed a gigantic spike in traffic due to this post, mostly from the low-carb community. A big shout out to my LCF buddies! I promise I'll stop by just as soon as I've found some 'after' pictures on a Russian Mail-Order Bride Website to prove I've maintained my goal weight all these years. I think I'm going to write up a series of posts debunking some of Kimkins' claims from a biochemical standpoint, so look for them on the site. They'll be tagged with 'kimkins.' First up, why being semi-nauseous all the time (SNATT) means you're in deep poo.

Actually, that might wait ... some more interesting bits of Kimmer's life may come first. And here they are.

Elle