Reviews (1)

I am so glad I found some similar reviews to mine and hope if anyone is considering doing this they will think twice.

I’ve done the original South Beach Diet twice and the process works well for my body type. However, being in a busy season I thought we would do the pre-prepared meals to save money and time. They advertise "4 weeks plan with pre-prepared meals," so I thought this meant three meals a day, 7 days a week, 4 weeks.

When it arrived there was only one bit of information as to how to start and minimal information in the website. As it turns out the "plan" is only preprepared for you for the very first week. After that a booklet is provided (not included in mine but I found it online later), that is basically blank and you have to plan your meals yourself. I didn’t want to do this because of time. The ease of a pre-prepared plan and meals as advertised was why I purchased in the first place.

I was also startled because the first week is basically a lot of shakes and bars and tiny meals. We were soooo hungry the whole time. My husband noticed the amount of sugar in the bars and shakes too - quite a bit more than any Atkins or low carb, low sugar shake/bar. Meals were pretty small and disgusting - I had to throw it in a pan and season to make it edible.

Throughout the first week we lost about 3-5 lbs of water weight but our clothes fit tighter and our faces puffed up. This is when I took a serious look at the amount of sodium in the food - off the charts for anyone who doesn’t already eat a full diet of junk food. So while we lost a few pounds, I believe due to the 64 ounces of water per day, we both looked fatter. We both only needed to lose about 10 lbs each. We also were both bloated and constipated the whole time.

But I figured they had just updated the original plan and we stuck with it as we’d paid for it. But we ran out of food after 2 weeks. Then I noticed through website we were supposed to be doing a couple do it yourself meals - didn’t realize this and hasn’t budgeted for it. But this was all in the fine print and while it’s misleading, I wasn’t going to complain. I hadn’t ordered a second box and was just planning to do the rest independently.

Once we stopped eating the pre-packaged meals and started doing the diet independently according to the original south beach diet, we started to lose real weight. I had learned a lesson but wasn’t going to complain - I’m usually an avoider in customer service situations. But then I see a pending charge on our statement for a second box. I called in and told them we only wanted one box. They said the fine print stated I was signing up for 2 and I’d agreed to it. I felt that the fine print was different from the advertised print. I also mentioned that you see "keto friendly" everywhere on the website. This in combination with fact that the original South Beach Diet is truly low carb and low sugar, even no sugar the first two weeks, seems to be false advertising because the items in the box contain more sugar than either of the other two diets.

Like other reviewers have said, they told me there was a $125 cancellation fee. This would be $300 for two of us. I’ve never heard of a diet plan that didn’t offer money back guarantee. Or at the least free cancellation. The agent kept asking me how much weight I'd lost and after telling her a number of times that I didn’t want to discuss my weight, I just wanted to cancel, and she repeatedly asked me that, I told her it was none of her business. She then went in a tirade of shouting, I tried to intermittently interrupt to ask, "Are you seriously working in customer service?" She refused to transfer me to a manager but seemed to be putting me on hold to speak to one. I called back to try to speak to someone else because she had told me my account was "marked" as a combative customer. I said, "You mean like Elaine on Seinfeld?"

I did after an hour get to talk to someone else, kinder but still wouldn’t let me cancel, only said he could defer my payment a couple of months before the next shipment. But that was only on one box, the other had already shipped and they still want us to pay for it. This guy said why don’t you talk to customer service? I thought I was talking to customer service, but I agreed still trying to get through to a manager somehow. But the next customer service lady was as worse as the first. No matter what question I asked, she cut in and have robotic answers. The answers did not match the questions I’d asked and I wasn’t able to get through one sentence.

Hung up, called back in, waited almost two hours, got through to a kinder gentleman who essentially gave me the same information. He said at the end though, "Between you and me you are not the only customer who has had this complaint. My hands are tied, I literally can’t transfer you to a manager without losing my job, but I do know that some people have contested this with their credit card company." So that’s what we are doing.

Please note, this new South Beach Diet is not the South Beach Diet! It will pump you full of sugar and carbs. I’m convinced that those who lose weight on it have come from a diet of fast food and processed food. Don’t try it. I still stand by the diet from the original book. It still works!