...uk seems to be Lipotrim. It sends groans up and down the country when members see the name appear in the new reviews in list. I sometimes wonder if it was different if we had 350 proper reviews instead of desperate people mistaking dooyoo for a discussion forum for Lipotrim and leaving five ... Read review
Advantages: possible rapid weight loss Disadvantages: starve yourself eating only drinks & soups, boring, dangerous, no doctor supervision
...for a discussion forum for Lipotrim and leaving five lines and then disappear? I made a point of rating most so called reviews and lately leave comments almost five times longer than the ramblings.
My review has come together a lot quicker than I actually anticipated so I hope that my review will clear up some of the questions members might have wondered about. This review based on my own opinion and contains research into the subject ... ...
== LIPOTRIM - What the heck is it? ==
Lipotrim is a 3-Step programme designed for people who are either overweight or obese. The programme is designed to work for both men and women.
The programme is offered by independent pharmacies (and very few doctors - you have to pay for private consultation from what I can gather) and a list of pharmacies who stock Lipotrim products is available via the official ... more
The biggest joke on Ciao's direct rival review site dooyoo.co.uk seems to be Lipotrim. It sends groans up and down the country when members see the name appear in the new reviews in list. I sometimes wonder if it was different if we had 350 proper reviews instead of desperate people mistaking dooyoo for a discussion forum for Lipotrim and leaving five lines and then disappear? I made a point of rating most so called reviews and lately leave comments almost five times longer than the ramblings.
My review has come together a lot quicker than I actually anticipated so I hope that my review will clear up some of the questions members might have wondered about. This review based on my own opinion and contains research into the subject that has had people scratch their heads not knowing what it is and never getting answers. It is not entirely based on personal experience but I will add it where I have actually got experience. I have decided to divide the review into section so you can skip bits you are not interested in.
LIPOTRIM - What the heck is it?
Lipotrim is a 3-Step programme designed for people who are either overweight or obese. The programme is designed to work for both men and women.
The programme is offered by independent pharmacies (and very few doctors - you have to pay for private consultation from what I can gather) and a list of pharmacies who stock Lipotrim products is available via the official website. The pharmacist will ask you to fill in a questionnaire and provided that you don't suffer from serious health problems you are put on Total Meal Replacement. Weekly check-ups and weighing is required so you have to return to the pharmacy on a regular basis.
STEP ONE: Total Meal Replacement programme (cost from £30.00 per week)
One week's supply of the programme, all meal replacements are sold at around £30 for women, £40 for men, consisting of 3 average servings per day for women and 2 large servings per day for men.
You are not allowed to eat any other food at all while you are on this programme. You are told to drink between 3 and 4 litres of liquids, no fruit juices at all, water all the way. If you drink coffee or tea it will count towards your water intake but you cut out milk and sugar, artificial sweeteners are allowed. There is a strict NO ALCOHOL rule, so cut it out.
During a normal day you are required to use three sachets of formula (or two sachets and a chewy bar.) Just follow the instruction given, either for the shakes/drinks that are available in a variety of flavours, or the chicken soup. The instructions say that you should try and use a food blender or mixer to get everything nice and smooth and drink immediately.
The body changes and will start 'eating' itself, working on the stored sugar and fat reserves (as it would with every diet). However with the food replacement it appears the body does it even quicker.
Side effects of total food replacement and cures: Headaches - drink more water Constipation - drink more water Bad breath - use mouthwash and breath strips (listerine strips), not mints
It's not good to do heavy exercise during the first week of the diet as the body has to get used to the new regime and you might feel tired and lethargic. I also think your body might go into shock when you put even more pressure on it, first of all no food at all, just a few drinks to fill you up and then masses of exercise. However, without being condescending, people who are overweight rarely do heavy exercise.
STEP TWO: Refeeding
Once you have reached you desired weight by starving your body and relying on drinks and potions only it is time to re-introduce food into your diet. You are weaned off Lipotrim slowly so you don't automatically binge eat and feast on everything in your site. You will instantly put weight on as your carbohydrate starved body will go ballistic and store all the lovely but unhealthy things in your body.
After weeks or months of living off meal replacement your body will, hopefully, have adjusted to a new regime and in the process you stomach will have shrunk. So eating large meals will not only 'poison' your body but also make you feel sick.
There's a seven day plan to get you back on proper food and at the same time maintain your weight and not put it back on.
You start with one proper meal on day one, making sure it's low fat, low calorie and does not contain bread, rice or fruit. You are allowed skinless chicken or turkey, white fish and salad - but no dressing. You continue by cutting out a second drink on day two and replace it with another low cal meal. From day three onwards you can start adding some potato, yoghurt and milk. From then on you can add more foods to your diet but still start the day off with one Liptrim drink. Keep going for several weeks so your body can adjust to the food. Just make sure you don't add fat to your meals and keep meat lean, stay away from sauces and anything that's sugary and fattening.
STEP THREE: Maintenance (from £18 per week)
The maintenance programme is low calorie, high fibre food replacement drinks or soups. You can use them to either maintain your present low weight (once finished with your diet) or if you use them more frequently then it is claimed that the programme can actually help you lose weight.
The maintenance programme is sold in units (7 servings per unit), for weight maintenance you need 2 units per week, for weight loss you require three units per week. This looks strangely like total food replacement again, two or three meal replacements a day? Anyhow, each so called 'unit' costs £9.00 and you should be able to buy it in participating pharmacies or directly from the makers Howard Foundation Research in Cambridge but they will charge you £4.95 for postage and packing. If you order from the makers directly you have to order at least two weeks' supply (either 4 or 6 units) setting you back between £40 and £60
From what I can see, the difference between the total meal replacement at £30 per week is that you have the personal service of the pharmacist who will weigh you and check your ketosis level and you don't eat anything other than Lipotrim while the maintenance programme allows you to have a low calorie dinner (with the third serving consumed before dinner to fill you up so you don't eat so much).
In conclusion: Lipotrim is a very strict version of the 'Slim Fast' diet with all its drinks and soups but infinitely more expensive and should not be attempted on your own but only under medical supervision (that's my opinion anyway) due to cutting out food altogether and living on powdered products where you do not know the benefit of it. But it advertises itself as a medical programme, the problem is, I can't find evidence of that.
How come there was an influx of Lipotrim 'reviews' on the review site dooyoo?
The answer is easy. If you type Lipotrim as keyword into google.co.uk you will see that dooyoo is first on the list of results even before the official Lipotrim website. If you use yahoo.co.uk it will be a little lower down the list but still in third or forth place. Clicking on the dooyoo link will take you to the latest 'review' and of course the review total will show the number of submissions. And it looks impressive, not all products have 200 entries.
What about the official Lipotrim website?
The official website is: www.lipotrim.demon.co.uk. The question is, has anyone ever bothered to look at it. It's pathetic, it's amateurish and not easy to navigate.
The homepage is a mess of different colours and font sizes with a navigation bar to the left. It contains a number of clickable links that will open new windows. The whole front page is littered with these links making the site very messy to navigate and look at.
I can imagine people giving up trying to find information from this site simply due to the mess the site is in. The only reason I dug deeper was the promise of a free sample. To get to the free sample you have to click through a number of pages full of writing until you finally find a page where it explains that you have to send them an email with your address.
The samples they send you are NOT for the total food replacement programme but for what they call the Maintenance Programme you go on after you'd done the Total Food replacement (unless you don't need that and only want to substitute a couple of meals to keep on track.)
If you want a quick run down of what is actually behind the mess of links just click on the 'site map' link on the left and a page will open with headers and sub-headers, making it much easier to see what is on the official site. Clicking the links from the site map still opens the rest of the mess of the rather wordy descriptions.
FREE SAMPLES (Maintenance Range Only):
To receive free samples find the email address for your country (UK or Ireland) and send them a quick email with your address details and the free sample will be with you within days. They were really quick I have to give them that.
I was also surprised to see that they didn't just send one product but a variety. The package I received contained a number of photocopied pages with instruction on how to prepare the samples together with calorie and nutritional breakdown of each. They had to enclose these extra information pages because the actual product sachets do not contain information other than the name of the product, flavour and best before date.
This is what I received in my free sample package: 1 x 'Orange Crème' (orange flavoured drink mix) 45g 1 x 'Summer Fruits' (fruit flavoured drink mix) 55g 1 x 'Chocolate Whip' (chocolate flavoured whip mix) 45g 1 x 'Cream of Vegetable' (vegetable soup mix) 43.5g 1 x Lipotrim Maintenance Bar (caramel flavoured bar) 60g 1x Fibre Clear® (soluble powder fibre supplement) approx 35g
TASTE TESTING in the name of research:
In the name of research I actually prepared - and consumed - the samples sent to me. It was lunchtime and I started with what sounded like the most palatable choice, the vegetable soup. The instruction tell you to add the contents of the sachet to 300ml (1/2 pint) hot water. They tell you to use a whisk or electric mixer to blend everything together. You're allowed to add seasoning or vegetables.
Once finished the soup was a lovely orange colour (thanks to the beta carotene I reckon) with bubbles on top (because of my vigorous mixing). I could see small green and red bits floating in the soup. My guess is that those are the 5.8% dried vegetables.
The soup didn't smell bad, it didn't smell of much but it didn't put me off eating it. I don't know what I expected the soup to taste like but I must admit, I was very pleasantly surprised. It was a lot spicier than I had expected and there is an abundance of pepper in the soup. Even after finishing the soup you will still have the peppery taste in your mouth. The only time I could actually identify the soup I was eating as vegetable was when I came into contact with the dried vegetable bits. While it was creamy (as you would expect any 'cream of …' soup to be) the only real taste it has it the pepper. It's hot, creamy and liquid and edible. But so are most cup-a-soups and that's basically what it is.
The difference with the Lipotrim soup compared to cup-a-soup (apart from price) is that it apparently contains bucket loads of vitamins and minerals and 117 calories per serving and they list all of them. It's a shame they list all vitamins but don't mention how much of the recommended daily allowance it covers.
I don't think I could survive on eating this soup on a daily basis, not even every other day. It would be too boring after the first couple of days and the peppery taste would really annoy me. I will stick with my own clear vegetable drink that may have some salt content in it but only about 15 calories when I make it. I sometimes in the evening use 1/3 of a vegetable stock cube, mix it with hot water and drink it instead of coffee or cold drink. It tastes almost like soup and is nice and warming on a cold winter's night.
I don't think I would ever fork out £9.00 for 7 sachets of soup under any circumstance. Not even the most expensive cup-a-soup will cost that much. And worst of all, an hour after I had the soup my stomach started growling and I felt hungry.
I tried the drinks, too but as I'm not keen on milk shakes or other drinks of that kind I was a little apprehensive and rightly so. The orange drink had me gagging, it was not the most pleasant one.
Furthermore, in the list of ingredients on all products I was sent I found something really disturbing: hydrogenated vegetable oil (trans fatty acids, TFA), the worst thing to find in meals if you want to lose weight. TFAs have been linked with clogging of the arteries and heart disease.
Is there an ACTUAL Lipotrim Forum?
Yes, there is, and I would like all future visitors to dooyoo trying to post a short cry for help point into the direction of: www.lipotrimusers.com
There is often a reason why people are overweight. In most cases it is simple over-eating with lack of exercise. It's very simple, if you stuff yourself and overload your body with masses of calories the body does not need and you do not burn them off during the day then you will put on weight. Do this over a long time and you will become obese.
The body needs a minimum of 800 calories a day just to sustain itself. That means if you stay in bed all day, do nothing at all, you still need that many calories. If you add exercise (or just moving around) your body will need a few more calories just to keep its equilibrium. To maintain weight the body need the same amount of calories as it burns.
It's very simple, if you eat more calories than you burn off you put on weight, if you burn off more calories than you take in your body will start using its own fat and sugar reserves and you will gradually lose weight.
I put on quite a few pounds extra over the past 18 months due to a number of factors, quitting smoking, moving house, losing job, finding job, personal problems and so on. I didn't overeat but ate the wrong food and just couldn't be bothered to exercise.
My doctor did a full health check to rule out anything organic and suggested seeing a dietician and she asked me to keep a strict food diary for a week. I filled it in, every bite I ate I logged and when I met her we analysed where I could improve.
For me it was a simple solution, I had to change when I ate (no more skipping breakfast, even a late breakfast is better than none), smaller portion sizes during the day and not one big meal at night, plus I needed to eat a larger variety of fruit and vegetables. I had to see the dietician a number of times, every other week and we talked about my progress (or lack thereof). My weight went down, slowly but surely, a pound a week here, two pounds or more there but it was steady, no rapid weight loss but slow and steady.
I increased my exercise gradually, I now walk at least 5 miles per day, cook meals from scratch - no more meals that come with instructions on the packaging - and I drink a lot more water and juices (fruit juice does count towards your 5-a-day fruit & vegetable requirement). Heavy meals are out, low calorie stir fries are in. Bread and cakes are out (for most of the time) and crispbread (for fibre) and low fat yoghurts are in. Chocolates and crisps are out but I do treat myself occasionally.
I still have some weight to lose but I'm not bothered about it anymore. I have changed my lifestyle to fit in with my new eating regime, I don't believe in quick weight loss as it is impossible to maintain, one slip up and you put on a lot of weight again. Losing weight is not a quick fix, it's a long process that requires rethinking and re-educating yourself and you family as well as training your body to like healthy food.
Would I recommend food replacement diets? No, not unless a doctor prescribes it for morbidly obese people where everything else fails. I would only think it's a good idea if done under strict medical, not pharmacist, supervision. It most certainly should not be attempted without being checked out on a regular basis.
More education about healthy eating, less crash diets. That's my opinion.
I do not lay claim to having tried the diet - I tried some products from their range. I never set out to prove the diet works. All diets where you are in effect starving your body can only be classed as dangerous and should not be attempted unless medically necessary and under strict doctor's supervision.
Reading some dieters' accounts either on ebay where they are flogging the product or on dooyoo, some claim losing large amounts of weight in the first week or two. This might or might not be the case. But if it is, has nobody actually told them that unless done in a controlled environment under permanent supervision it is unhealthy and dangerous. Healthy weight loss is between two and four pounds per week max (1-2kg max).
I hope you found this review at least a little helpful and it answered some of the questions you may have had - or not.
Advantages: lose weight fast, nutritionally sound, Disadvantages: hard to stick to, headaches are a pain, have to register, mixing it is awkward
...and I heard about the Lipotrim diet via a friend of my wife who is a consultant dietician. It was recommended for people medically classified with a body mass index of over 30. I was 31.
So with great reluctance I decided to try it. You have two choices if you want to get Lipotrim, you either buy it at extortionate prices on the auction sites and get no choice of flavours really or you go and register with a participating chemist. (Details at the ... ...could choose my meals.
Lipotrim comes in four different drink flavours; strawberry, chocolate, vanilla and chicken soup and two different flapkack flavours; peanut and coconut.
If you are male, you have two per day, female three smaller ones. The make up of the product is designed to exactly meet your daily nutritional needs while taking your calorific intake below half. It has ingredients designed to sate your hunger which work quite well.
The ...
fightgear 13.07.2007
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Lipotrim
Advantages: Weight loss Disadvantages: Misinformed begrudgers
...I am currently doing the lipotrim programme, and I find that a majority of highly opinionated people out there are very ill informed about this programme and I need to get some of the real facts out there.
Firstly this programme is broken into 2 catagorys - If you are obese and have a BMI of over 30 this programme is only available from your doctor, your doctor will closely monitor your health - so there is good support there if anything should ... ...do are highly trained in lipotrim and everything about it.
Now I read a lot on the internet - mostly skinny people who cant understand why anyone is fat - anyone overweight has heard the bull from these people - eat healthy and excercise and then you wont be fat. Well I can tell any of those people that its not that easy. When you are overweight and you eat healthy the results are so slow and sometimes non existent - I myself done this and lost ...
oxoxallyoxox 14.04.2008 (04.11.2008)
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Lipotrim
Advantages: not too expensive; takes food out of the equation Disadvantages: poor long-term success-rate; dangerous
My husband was on lipotrim for two months last year; and I wanted to share our experience. I notice most of the reviews here are written by those just starting the plan but my husband was on it for quite some time; as was my sister and several other relatives. So I wanted to present the story from the other side. At first it seems like a very promising way to lose weight; and rapid weight loss is guaranteed at least in the first week. Lipotrim was ... ...any medical conditions which using lipotrim could be dangerous with; but again these checks are often not properly done. The plan is not suitable for those with many medical conditions including clinical depression and asthma. The mark-up on lipotrim for the pharmacies is very profitable and thus many are using it purely as a way to make money. However some pharmacies are scrupulous and will not give lipotrim to just anyone and will only let those ...
lowri_mai 17.01.2008
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Lipotrim
Advantages: helps you get out of bad habits Disadvantages: need to make adaptations to make it palatable
...on day three of the lipotrim diet. I have already lost 6lb. I had a BMI of 31 and 2 other friends had recently started on this programme with excellent results. I find if I use a hand held blender to mix the milk shakes and soup they dont have the powdery consistency they did on the first day which made me bawk. The soup is greatly improved with a lot of white pepper, in fact my son had a little taste and said 'mmm can I have one'. Not sure what ... ...to prepare meals for the kids each night without succumbing to temptation either. Had to attend a seminar today where a beautiful buffet was laid on and I never touched a morsel despite 2 colleagues eating cake either side of me!!! So surprised at my own willpower. Did feel hungry on day one, incredibly hungry so just has a small amount of chicken breast and this seemed to take the edge off. My problem before was always eating rubbish and lack of ...
beeeebeeee 03.12.2008
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Lipotrim
Advantages: Speedy Weight Loss Disadvantages: For me - Severe Constipation & Hair Loss
...all millionaires), I heard about Lipotrim from a friend who was doing very well on it.
I started and to be honest it was around this time 2 years ago (Nov) - yes in one way it was a bit difficult but in another way quite easy. The difficult part was that sometimes I yearned for a slice of bread/sandwich/toast on the otherhand - I didn't have to do any shopping , didn't have to think about what I was going to make for dinner. Very quickly the weight ... ...know where people are buying lipotrim for £30 per week , when I started as I said was probably this time 2 years ago, it was £44 per week in Northern Ireland) and I imagine that you do reallt need to come off it properly and not do as I did - I just stopped it and to date all of the weight that I lost is back on with the exception of 9 pounds. ...
TheBigFatLadySings 10.11.2008
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Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful Review of Lipotrim
Advantages: plenty of food to choose Disadvantages: can get confused mixing meat with carbo foods
of food is fine. The people in my class are all alcoholics or chocoholics (I'm the latter), so we always manage to turn the topic to chocholate and booze. The talking about how much you've lost is boring it takes half an hour to go through and if you've put weight on its "oh dear, what happened this week" etc.
It is all meant in the best way though I suppose.
For the lady in a previous post, the class fee has gone to £3.25, but you never get any free joining offers with Slimming World unlike WW.
The worst most disgusting diet I tried was something called Lipotrim (I think it was called) that doctors in hospitals were recommending. Liquid milkshake (absolutely awful). You'd kill for a plate of peas after a week on it then there was the carbohydrate withdrawal, banging headache for a couple of days.
Give me any of the slimming ...
