Rogue’s Gallery

According to the Free Dictionary, a rogue’s gallery is ‘a coterie of undesirable people’.  Apparently a coterie is ‘an exclusive circle of people with a common purpose’.  Yep, this pretty much explains what I mean by my rogue’s gallery.

I present the beginning of what will probably be a long list of people who I feel are doing you, in specific, and the public, in general,  a tremendous disservice through their actions in the health, nutrition and fitness industries.  I am placing them in a room together (please do not think that they all willingly posed for this photograph together, they did not).

These are to my thinking the worst offenders, both by their actions and by their reach.  Some of the people may be out and out criminals (although there are none of them in the gallery yet), whereas others may be good people who are preaching a damaging idea or profiting off of things they may or may not believe in, but still do nothing to help you.

I will put the case against each of these people in the rogue’s gallery write up and you can decide for yourself, do they deserve to be there.  Write your opinions in the comments section so we can all debate their merits and faults.  The purpose of this gallery is to hold the people who profit off of our weight problems accountable.  To hold those who use our problems to their benefit without concern for how their behavior will impact our ability to get fit.

People who spread misinformation to sell their product, people who sell products that have little or no evidence as to if they work or not, people who subvert the system to gain profit.  These are the undesirable people in this field.  They should be put in the gallery.  If I am missing anyone, please feel free to include them in the comments.

You might think as well that the room is a little empty and everyone is crammed in tight, but it is early in the rogue’s gallery life and I am sure it will get full in there, so I asked them all to squeeze together.

Jillian Michaels

She sells diet pills.  Here the trainer who became known for telling us to work hard and eat better sells diet pills to make a buck, or 150 million of them.  She says she uses the caffeine pills, but what about the others…  The cleanse is the most egregious of her products.  It is pure snake oil.  She asked me to do the research on her product when I commented that I thought it was worthless on twitter.  I did the research and I found a sordid tale of FTC violations, PHd’s portraying themselves as MD’s, products with non-existent ingredients, government official campaign donations to protect shoddy laws and shoddy business practices.  At the end of the day, she lied about who developed her cleanse.  That is bad, but what is unforgivable is that she has never come clean, never said why she was mistaken in thinking that Dr. Arne Astrup developed it.  That to me is unforgivable.  Feel free to sully your own name by hawking diet pills to put money in your pockets, but don’t take down reputable people with you.

“Diet pills and surgical weight loss options are two more examples of detrimental quick fixes. Diet products and procedures are simply gimmicks that target people’s apathy and hopelessness about their own health.” – Jillian Michaels Winning By Losing

Dr. Suzanne Gudakunst

I am not convinced that Dr. Suzanne Gudakunst is a real person.  Apparently some people think she is.  According to some researchers at Scam.com: “No, she is actually a Chiropractor, who used to live in Georgia, now suposedly living in Florida”  She sells a diet plan that appears to have been invented by Kevin Trudeau.

In any case, she is following me on twitter, so person or spokesmodel, I will put her image in the gallery to represent her idiotic scare mongering ideas.  It is so hard to summarize her ideas here and create a best of list of quotes because each one is stupider than the next, but here are three:

• “The Reason You Can’t Lose Weight has Nothing to Do With Your Will-Power, Over-Eating or the Right Diet! … The Reason You are Fat and Unhealthy is Because You Have Disgusting Plaque and Horrible Little ‘CRITTERS’ Living in Your Guts!”
• Would you trust anything living in your bowels that has teeth but NO eyes?
• Here it is…THE TRUTH (finally revealed!)…“The reason all the other diets, diet foods, organic foods, healthy foods, medicines and all the rest don’t work in this modern technologically-amazing age is because THEY WERE DELIBERATELY DESIGNED NOT TO!”

I am shocked the other images in my rogue’s gallery aren’t shunning her and leaving her in a corner by herself!

Side note:  Now she has a revolutionary new buying car top secret scheme going…  lmao!! I didn’t believe it when I heard it, but it sure appears to be true…

David Zinczenko

The guy knows how to sell magazines.  He has a formula for doing it.  He follows the formula constantly and consistently and by doing so he gets people with weight issues and sexual insecurities do pony up their dough month after month.  He claims he spends the better part of the month designing the cover of his magazine, Men’s Health.  Other past editors say that there is a file with some standard lines that are pulled out and slapped on the cover.  You would have to an idiot to think that it takes a month to knock off the cover.  It rips itself off so often that by accident they actually copied a previously magazine cover exactly (except for the image of the celebrity on the front).  All of this would be bad enough to get him his spot but from here he created a book called the Abs Diet.  The idea behind it… people will pay money for hard abs, so I will sell them a diet that promises that…  Thanks for giving us just what we want.

David went on to write a series of books about food swaps, an idea that he didn’t invent or create and it turns out, only has a slim grasp on.  The entire series of books appears to have been written by a computer program that randomly selects a food item with less calories than another on any given menu.  The problem is, David is a very effective editor, but he appears to know nothing about nutrition, still because he is the editor of a magazine called ‘Men’s Health’, he somehow believes he is a health expert.  David Zinczenko,  didn’t they tell you that you shouldn’t believe the stories that you are selling… please STOP DRINKING THE COOL AID!!

“In survey after survey, men and women say a lean, muscular abdomen is the ultimate symbol of sex appeal.” ~David Zinczenko

Jennifer Nicole Lee

JNL, or as she likes to be known, theJNL, is a sell out shill for the Ab Circle Pro amongst numerous other diet plans.  She allows the implication that she lost 80 pounds using the Ab Circle Pro to stand on the website and in online reports, when nothing could be further from the truth.  To watch her videos on YouTube is to understand just how low a human will sink to promote themselves and a product that Consumer Reports states is about as effective as a brisk walk.  It appears at times on QVC or whatever other television mall she sells her product on that she loves playing with truth so much that she can’t help herself.  Claims that you can get fit in 3 minutes a day and that the product is an aerobic exercise machine are in diametrically opposing positions.  You can’t do cardio workouts in 3 minutes… so what are you saying Jennifer??!?!

Do you not see that selling a less efficient exercise device to people desperate to get fit, to feel good about themselves, to have a chance at personal success, pride and achievement is wrong.  It makes my skin crawl to see you hawking the Ab Circle Pro.  That said, compared to your ‘revolutionary’ get fit with your baby routine you were pitching back when you had young kids, your Ab Circle Pro sales pitch at least doesn’t appear to harm kids (both physically and mentally).  That was the scariest thing I have ever seen and I didn’t believe that you followed that routine then by the way.  As well, giving false information to mother’s who have just had kids will immediately put you on the top of my hate list.  My wife and I both struggled with the difficulties involved with having children and being fit and it is nearly impossible to achieve this with good help and advice.  The most laughable thing about JNL is that she had videos on youtube that showed just how hard she worked for her body and she never once showed herself using an Ab Circle Pro until after she was the company shill.

“This is why I am telling you about the Ab Circle Pro.  It helps me train smarter not harder.  I get my workouts in in under 5 minutes” ~ Jennifer Nicole Lee

So that is the inaugural class.  Ladies and gentlement, I give you the first inductees into the rogue’s gallery.  I am seeking out photographs of Dr. Nathalie Chevreau PhD and Dr. Daniel D. Mowrey in an appropriate size for the gallery.  Please any tips on others who belong amongst these four can be left in the comments.