Happiness ...

Is a visit from my beloved Dancing in Socks Guy :) He'll be here till Monday, thus posting will be a little light though I'll try and update some of the links to the kimkins Google Bomb while he's in the shower. Thanks for all those and of course if you find new ones or some I have missed, let me know. Y'all are the best!

Speaking of Kimkins, here's a video of our favorite Discredited Diet Guru on KTLA.

And you know, there are people like Kimmer in the word, but there are also people who take in and raised orphaned baby coyotes. So it all evens out in the end.


Elle

Kimkins

KIMKINS: Internet Diet Fraud

KIMKINS is the name of a dangerous starvation diet devised by a morbidly obese woman named Heidi Diaz. Heidi Diaz claimed to have lost 198 lbs in 11 months by following this diet, a claim that was later revealed to be a lie. It was revealed that she falsified other Kimkins 'success stories' by using photographs taken from Russian Bride websites. She is currently being sued for defrauding members of her website.

Before you join kimkins.com, please educate yourself by reading the following sites

Kimkins Lawsuit
Kimkins Exhausted
Slamboard
Kimkins Scam
Winning Weight Loss
Mariasol
3 Fat Chicks
Kimkins Survivors
2bigformysize's weblog
Christin's Blog
Deni's Blog
A Pinch of ...


Elle

Kimkins Google Bomb

One blog I read most every day is Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, a site dedicated to reviews of romance novels and general romance snark. It's a great site, and one reason why I especially love it is it introduced me to the concept of a Google Bomb when my bitches decided to teach Bill Napoli a lesson.

A Google Bomb, according to Wikipedia, is:

A Google bomb (also referred to as a 'link bomb') is Internet Slang for a certain kind of attempt to influence the ranking of a given page in results returned by the Google search engine, often with humorous or political intentions. Because of the way that Google's algorithm works, a page will be ranked higher if the sites that link to that page use consistent anchor text.

You can see an example of this in action -- just type "Bill Napoli" into Google, and the first result will be this. Warning, that link is not work-safe.

So, I'm thinking the same thing needs to be done for Kimkins.

Those of you who have blogs may want to link to the following page. Those who post on message boards may want to do the same, but please, follow the rules and regulations of said message board when it comes to leaving links. Basically, every time you use the word "kimkins" turn it into a link that directs here:

http://grilledcheesewithpickles.blogspot.com/2007/11/kimkins.html

The text should look something like, "blah blah blah kimkins blah blah blah kimkins blah blah blah kimkins blah blah blah kimkins blah blah blah kimkins blah blah blah kimkins blah blah blah kimkins blah blah blah kimkins blah blah blah kimkins blah blah blah kimkins!"

There are so many good pages out there regarding this mess, I didn't want to single out any one to use as the link. Instead, they are all listed with a brief statement regarding the fraud etc. That's by no means an exhaustive list -- please leave the names/addresses of other sites in the comments and I will add them. Alternately, if anyone wants to contribute to the warning blurb, or has other suggestions, please feel free to leave that in the comments.

If this is done often enough, that page will come up first, or close to first, whenever anyone searches for "kimkins" using Google. That can only be a good thing.


Elle

Kimkins Debunked: Myth #1

Kimkins Myth #1: You can't starve if you have body fat

First, let me make this very clear: I am not a medical doctor. Nothing I write here should be construed in any way, shape or form as medical advice. However, I do have a doctorate in Biochemistry. That doesn't make me smarter than Kimmer and her minions it just ... nah. It makes me smarter than them :)

One oft-repeated claim by everyone's favorite discredited diet guru is that so long as you have an ounce of body fat on you, you will not starve. In fact, this individual claims there is no such thing as starvation mode, a statement she is uniquely unqualified to make. Nonetheless, on the face of it, this seems like it could make sense. If you don't eat, or severely restrict your calories, your body will naturally burn its own fat, and only its own fat, to make up the deficit, right?

Wrong.

Most people have an idea of what happens in hypothermia and frostbite -- the body shunts blood flow away from your extremities in an effort to preserve the brain and vital organs. You can live without fingers or toes, but you cannot live without a brain. Well, most people can't live without a brain. Your body will always, always prioritize functions in a way that ultimately preserves life.

If you enter a state of starvation or semi-starvation you will start burning body fat for fuel. But, and this is a big but, you will also begin to cannabilize your lean muscle mass at the same time. Yes, if you are obese you are going to 'burn' proportionally more fat for fuel than a lean person would, but you are most assuredly going to lose some muscle mass as well. Starvation isn't just about how many calories you consume, it also involves derangement of normal metabolism. If your body is consuming lean muscle as an energy source .... well, you're starving.

Why? Because muscle requires calories to maintain itself. One pound of muscle requires approximately 50 calories per day to maintain itself, as opposed to 2 calories a day to maintain a pound of fat. Your body has no idea whether or not you're eating 500 calories a day because you want your ex-husband's new wife to be jealous of your hawt new figure or because there was a massive natural disaster which wiped out most/all of the available food supplies, and it doesn't care -- the end result is the same. Your body will do whatever it can to preserve the only food supply it can count on -- its fat stores -- as best it can. Because muscle requires so many calories to maintain, it will reduce the amount of lean muscle mass as much as it can while preserving life in an effort to reduce the overall number of calories you need to stay alive.

May I just point out that consuming protein does nothing to prevent this.

An example -- suppose you are an individual weighing 200 lbs. You have undergone some fancy tests which reveal that 120 of those lbs represent lean body mass (which includes muscle/bone/organs) and the remaining 80 lbs is body fat. Now, suppose you know that of that 120 lbs of lean body mass, 60 lbs of that represents muscle. That 60 lbs of muscle will require approximately 3000 calories a day to maintain itself whereas the 80 lbs of fat will only require 160 calories to maintain itself.

Oh, Pshaw! Grilled Cheese Sandwich with Pickles Lady, you may be saying. Why should muscle require so many more calories to maintain itself? Because, dear reader, muscle is a lot more complicated than adipose tissue. A single muscle cell, called a myocyte, consists of many, many myofibrils which have a fairly complicated architecture and synthesis, which undergoes constant maintenance and repair in order to stay in working order. A single fat cell, called an adiptocyte consist of a basic cell with a glob of lipid in it. It requires almost nothing by way of maintenance. Furthermore, muscle is a better source of ATP (adenosine triphosphate, a molecule which all your cells use for energy, and which is synthesized from carbs, fats and proteins) than fat.

Now, suppose you're absolutely desperate and pay a morbidly obese woman a cool $60 to join her diet site, even though there is no indication anywhere that she ever successfully applied it it herself. This diet bills itself as a tweaked version of Atkins and Stillman's, basically keeping carbs at 20 g or less per day, 70-90 g of lean protein, and 'just enough fat to make it work." This diet, at best, permits 760 calories a day based on 20 g of carbs and 90 g protein. Suppose you decide 'just enough fat to make it work' means around 20g on a bad day (that's just under an ounce, BTW) -- well, you've just added 180 calories to your total which means that at the higher end of Kimkins you are consuming just 940 calories per day.

That, dear reader, is 460 calories less than the best meal you'd be served at Auschwitz and frankly, that way lies madness.

Elle

From The Kimkins Recipe Box

Stuffed Cabbage Rolls
- 1 Egg White
- 1 Cabbage leaf
- 1 Box of Ex-lax

Boil up egg whites and cabbage. Wrap egg white into cabbage leaf, bake at 350 for 20 minutes. While it's baking, agonize because you're cheating by having an egg white AND a cabbage leaf! Open box of ex-lax. While waiting for it to work, read the posts here. Come to your senses. If you've been scammed by Kimkins, consider joining the lawsuit.

That's my interpretation, anyway. Here's a real recipe, one I made up myself.

Lisa's Ginger Chicken Wraps
- 1 cooked chicken breast, skin off
- 1 quarter cup nuts. I use walnuts, but toasted pine nuts are good too
- 1 tbsp ground ginger
- 1 tsp olive oil.
- 1 stalk celery, chopped fine
- 2 cups cabbage, shredded
- Cabbage leaves
- Salt and Pepper to taste

Combine all ingredients except the cabbage leaves in a food processor, and chop till it's a paste-like consistency (there may still be chunks here and there, that's fine). Roll up in cabbage leaves -- how many you use depends on how big or small you like them, I usually end up with 2-3 because I like them bigger if they are a side dish. If you're making them as an appetizer, make them smaller. Bake at 350 in glass baking dish, covered, with a splash of water in the bottom of the pan, until leaves start to look transparent. Eat :)

I consider this a side dish, but if you made enough of it, you could have it as a main dish.

That filling is good for wontons as well, if you are not controlling your carbs, just be sure if you are deep frying them to use a high-heat, non-flavored oil (like canola). It also makes a great chicken salad as well.

Off to see if my LiveJournal will let me in ... for some reason I can't post!


Elle

Kimmer Tidbits

You know, if you're going to spend a lot of time on a bulletin board claiming amazing weight-loss success, it's probably not a good idea to spend even a little time plastering your 'before' picture all over the rest of the internet in an attempt to ...

1.) Get a date

According to this site (looks to be 3-4 years old) she has a bachelor's degree and makes 30-50K per year. And, despite her claims of regaining her lost weight (100 lbs, according to her latest explanation) only recently, she lists herself as 'a few extra pounds.' Okay. Recognize the picture? Others have dug up more of these listings, but I haven't see that one yet.


And, if you're trying to use 'protecting your foster children' as an excuse to never meet anyone in person, you should probably also not ...

2.) Post a bunch of stuff about your foster children.

Her profile indicates that this is everyone's favorite discredited diet guru. Thank God she didn't manage to adopt the kid she's talking about. Especially since she's so interested as to how much she can expect by way of an adoption subsidy. And, interestingly, despite her insistence that she's such a private person and must protect her foster kids, she mentions one by name. There's also an admission that she's on Social Security Disability, which is going to make earning all that money from Kimkins a little hard to explain to certain government officials.


More as it develops!


Elle

Dear Food Network

Please stop making Amy Finley apologize for presenting fancy gourmet food.

For those who don't follow this kind of thing, Amy Finley won the most recent Next Food Network Star competition, albeit after a series of odd twists and turns. She originally made it to the final three, was eliminated, and then reinstated when it was revealed that one of the two finalists had significantly misrepresented key aspects of his resume. Amy went on to beat the remaining finalist, Rory, and now has her own show called The Gourmet Next Door.

I must confess, Food Network, that I actually voted for Amy. Actually, I cast two votes -- at the time, I was still working part-time as a home health aid, and watched the show every Sunday night with my client (hereafter called 'Lady'). Lady watches your network religiously, and can I just tell you, she hated Rory. A lot. And Lady is what her pseudonym implies, a very sweet, very dignified elderly woman with nary a bad thing to say about anyone, except, of course, the finalist you clearly wanted to win. Lady expressed sorrow that she could not vote for Amy herself, so I offered to text in a vote for her, and cast my own online. (Note to Rory, that doesn't count as vote fraud. You still lost.)

Anyway, I was thrilled that Amy won, and, Food Network, I'm not a reality-show fan. This is the first time I ever voted for anyone in such a show. I wanted Amy to win because I thought it would be nice to have someone do some actual gourmet cooking for a change as opposed to dousing a tub of cool-whip with vanilla extract and gobbing it over hot rum to which butter and cinnamon has been added. Oh, I knew this wasn't what you had in mind, O Food Network, with the frequent references to "the home cook" and the palpable terror you evinced whenever a French cooking term was introduced. ("Mise en place? Shhhhh! Someone might hear you!")

Food Network, I am a 'home cook' and I'm here to tell you, there's room for all kinds of cuisine in my repertoire (French Word Alert!). In fact, it's because my repertoire is somewhat limited that I watch your network and look for new recipes. Certainly some people find shows like 30 Minute Meals and Semi-Homemade useful, what with their emphasis on making things easier. But guys, I already know how to open a can! I want someone to teach me things I don't know, like how to make Gougeres and Profiteroles. Thanks to my fellow voting public and no thanks to you, I have this.

Yet I notice that even though Amy won, you are still making her apologize -- on her own show! -- for what she does. Or perhaps you have inculcated her with an unreasonable terror that her cooking style is somehow inaccessible to your viewers. She says things like, "I know this looks fancy but ..." Food Network, please! This is wholly unnecessary! Do you make Emeril apologize for doing more or less the same thing? Giada? Ina? Look at the success of the few gourmet-geared shows you have, such as Iron Chef America! Clearly your audience likes these shows, just as they also appreciate those shows geared towards individuals who are looking for something a little less complex as well, and apparently an insatiable appetite for shows which bring us the best durned omelet in various diners and dives throughout the country.

I conclude, Food Network, with this simple plea -- leave the woman alone. Let her cook. If her show fails, it's because you didn't play to her strengths but rather to your own weakness -- the belief that your viewers are too limited to attempt anything more complicated than tuna casserole.

Elle

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

Gobs and Gobs of Snot

I came back from Italy two weeks ago. It was glorious! Beautiful country, lovely people, excellent food and wine.

Mom and I did a tour from Collette Vacations. This is the first inclusive tour I've ever done, in the past I've always found my own way around a given country and honestly, I wasn't too sure how much I'd like being ferried around. But, Mom was more comfortable with the idea of a guided tour and pointed out, correctly, that there was a far better chance we wouldn't kill each other if we didn't have to deal with making our own arrangements for transportation etc.

So, I figured why not, and decided to keep an open mind. I'm glad I did because I had a great time. Our tour guide, Teria, was just wonderful. Friendly, fun, yet professional, Teria is a first-generation Italian American who splits her time between the US and Italy, and regaled us with fascinating tidbits of Italian culture during coach trips to various places. Our driver, Claudio, was also amazing.

I'll be doing a travelogue about where we went and what we did, but one of the nicer aspects of this tour was that in addition to the standard things you'd see in Rome, the Amalfi Coast and Capri, they also took us to some out-of-the-way places I never would have gone to see on my own, such as a workshop where cameos are made, a Limoncello (!!!) factory, and even a farm where mozzarella cheese is produced organically from water buffalo. As for that last -- if you're going to be a domesticated water buffalo, you want to live here.

We went to lots of places, but also had quite a bit of free time, during which I also took the opportunity to scatter the last of my grandmother's ashes in the Tyrrhenian Sea, in the same waters her father, my bis-nonno, used to fish.

So, yeah, this tour kicked ass and I even spent nine days straight in my mother's company and we only yelled at each other twice. Well, three times. Maybe four.

Among the many things I brought back from Italy were tons of souvenirs, including a bunch of stuff for my Dancing in Socks Guy, a realization that my Italian is actually a whole lot better than I thought it was, and the worst motherfucking head cold I've ever had in my entire life. Some background -- I've traveled extensively, and it's been my experience that every time I go somewhere in Europe, I catch a cold. I was smugly congratulating myself on not catching one this time, and the day before we left I of course woke up with a head full of snot.

Lots of snot. Gobs and gobs and gobs of snot. I managed to totter through work these last two weeks with what I think might be adenovirus-14, but I've been more or less useless as far as anything else goes. I have something like 1000 pictures to sort through and upload, and a house that desperately needs cleaning, especially since Dancing in Socks Guy will be here in two weeks and we're still in the stage where I really don't want him to see all the cat-hair tumbleweeds blowing through here.

Elle

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