Body By Vi – Macclesfield Personal Trainer weight loss advice
We’ve started getting some questions recently about the ‘Body By Vi’ challenge.
It’s been something we’ve been getting inundated with ourselves as various people try to ‘recruit us’ into selling it.
This email is going to tell you my personal opinion of it.
If you still want to have a go, feel free.
What is it?
Body By Vi is marketed as ’90 Day Challenge’ where people can compete to lose as much weight as possible.
Winners can get prizes including cash, free prizes and holidays.
What is it really?
The whole system is based around consuming (and buying of course) meal replacement shakes.
What’s good about it?
The whole challenge system is a great way to get short term motivation going.
They use online support system very effectively – facebook, website, etc (as do we, I’d like to think) – you’re not completely left to it
What’s bad about it?
The shakes, whilst not the worst I’ve ever seen aren’t great nutrionally. Click here to see a list of ingredients.
Anything that contains Soya, Sunflower Oil, Maltodextrin and Zinc Oxide is out in my mind.
Soya’s the worst one – check out Charles Poliquin’s article ‘Soy is for Dorks!’
It’s based around the concept of calorie restriction – you have to limit overall calorie consumption which would lead to short term weight loss, irrespective of adding a shake to mix.
However we’ve covered many times before about how and why ‘starvation diets’ rarely work long term and usually lead to even more weight gain.
There’s little attempt to show followers how to eat healthily and make long term, non shake based changes.
But then, why would they?
There’s no money in that.
In my opinion the whole concept of meal replacements shakes isn’t a good one. Protein shake after a workout is cool. Rest of the time, real food is best.
Deceptive marketing. I know of at least three Personal Trainers who sell this using before and after photos that had nothing to do with the system / challenge and I’d be very surprised if there weren’t many more.
Multi-level marketing. You pay $499 to become a distributor. You then get commission on each sale above $200 a month.
Many join the system due to the ‘carrot’ of a BMW for getting to ‘Regional Director’ level at which point you must be selling over $12,500 a month ($150,000 a year). If you drop below that, you’re left with a 2-3 year lease to cover your self.
The reason we get so aggressively targeted by others selling it is that they need to hit their targets each month to ‘stay in the game’ and try and re-coup their initial investment.
Over the year, I’ve seen many get involved in MLMs only to burn lots of bridges with their increasing desperation to hit targets.
There isn’t necessarily a problem with the MLM system – but personally I would like an “expert” to be recommending something to me because it was the best thing for me in his or her professional opinion, not just something that lines their pockets (although I have no problem if it does both.
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So, in a nutshell, that’s my opinion on Body By Vi.
Feel free to try it if you like, but hopefully, I’ve enabled to make an informed decision.
Much love,
Jon “Body by lots of chicken” Hall
