Isagenix is the name of a weight-loss program promoted by a company of the same name. It combines nutrient-rich meal-replacement bars and shakes with a periodic cleanse which purportedly rids the body of toxins – toxins which promote weight gain and general ill health. Proponents of the program claim miraculous results, including rapid weight loss, greater energy, and the curing of everything from migraines to gout to tumors. It is not available through retail channels, instead being promoted through a multi-level marketing program which rewards customers for selling the product themselves, as well as recruiting their friends and family to also become salespeople. And–okay, stop. Stop right fucking there.

Look, I’m gonna level with you guys: there really, really shouldn’t be a need for the rest of this rant. You should have heard “cleanse” and “multi-level marketing” and started running in the other direction. But my sister got hooked on this shit, so I feel like I need to talk about it and spell out exactly why she – and you, if you’re an Isatard – is being taken for a ride.

1. The Cleanse

The real magic of Isagenix is the cleanse. See, this is nothing new to me – I’ve seen this kind of woo before – and “cleansing” or “detoxification” is a key component of herbal-medicine woo. The basic theory goes that your body is just full of toxins that get into you via food, water, or air. Your body stores this stuff in the tissues somehow – exactly how depends on the flavor of woo being promulgated – and all this accumulated cruft basically slows down your metabolism, immune function, and basically just leaves you feeling like shit. Well, thank Goddess for Naturopathic Herbal Medicine, which has a solution for this problem in the form of a sort of magic potion that, when drunk, will permeate each and every one of your cells and dissolve the gunk, to be excreted in your sweat, urine, or feces. The potions contain extract of bilberry, blueberry, dandelion, alfalfa, and other things my mom could get at Bedient’s gardening store. The typical protocol for a cleanse is to fast for a day or three, drink the cleansing fluid, and keep hydrated with plenty of water while you pee or poop or sweat out the bad stuff.

As it turns out, if your body does really have a problem with ridding itself of toxins, doctors have a name for that. It’s called “kidney failure”. It’s how a great many cats die, including poor old Smokey. (Cats’ kidneys tend to go; for humans, it’s hearts.) But if you have a functioning pair of kidneys and are alive and walking around, your body’s toxin-flushing system is working just fucking fine.

As for the cleansing potion? Usually it contains a diuretic or a laxative of some sort. That’s why you have to drink so much fucking water; you run a real risk of dehydration (or, in the case of a laxative, bowel obstruction) by taking this stuff. It makes you pee or poop in great quantities, and you must think to yourself “boy howdy, if I’m peeing and pooping this much, those toxins must really be coming out of me! Boy I gotta tell all my friends about this! Look at the size of that turd! Man, I think I should save it as a trophy or something. Lemme take a picture of these humongous turds I made and put it up on the internet, as proof that this makes nasty stuff come out of you.” YES PEOPLE ACTUALLY DO THIS. IT’S DISGUSTING, BUT THAT DON’T STOP ‘EM. LEAVE IT TO HERBAL WOO-MEISTERS TO ENGAGE IN TURD SIZE CONTESTS.

also one kind of cleanse, the liver cleanse, makes you poop soap

So when somebody says to me “Isagenix works, look at all this weight I lost” I’m like, yeah, sure, okay. Because without the cleanse, Isagenix is FUCKING SLIM-FAST. Okay? If you stop eating the normal shit you put in your mouth and start drinking these shakes and are really disciplined about it the way the Isagenix program-meisters pump you up to be, OF COURSE you’re gonna lose weight. But you’d lose weight simply by… being disciplined about what you put in your mouth. Anyway.

But with the cleanse, it becomes a whole nother kettle of fish. Because the cleanse’s primary ingredient is a diuretic and/or laxative, you lose a lot of weight in poop and/or water right off the bat. This has the effect of artificially inflating the amount of weight you lose when combined with the dietary program, tricking you into thinking “hey, I’m doing great! Look at all these pounds I shed!” but they’re not real pounds – i.e., not fat pounds, they’re pee and poop pounds. It’s like a slot machine which gives you a small payoff in the hopes that you’ll keep feeding it quarters in anticipation of the jackpot. The odds are stacked against you, but that little payoff gives you hope and feeds your expectations, and the proof that a lot of suckers fall for this despite that they should know better is the fact that Las Vegas isn’t just a dusty hole in the ground.

But the thing is, not only do they fool you with the magician’s trick of misdirection – getting you to think the cleanse cleans out your toxins when in reality it’s there to precipitate a rapid, fake weight loss so you get encouraged to stay on the program – they also outright fucking lie to you about what’s in their products. According to Dr. Harriet Hall, the only M.D. I could find who actually looked into Isagenix and put her findings on the internet, one formulation is advertised as being caffeine-free, yet it contains green tea. And what’s in green, or any, tea? Caffeine.

I checked this out myself; what I found is that their product “Cleanse for Life” is advertised as containing no laxatives. But a key ingredient in Cleanse for Life is aloe vera. Which even the most woo-ful herbal crazies will tell you is a potent natural laxative when taken internally. I guess they were hoping no one would bother to actually check the ingredient list and find out what each ingredient, you know, does.

So what’s effective about Isagenix isn’t special, and what’s special about Isagenix isn’t effective. Also, they’re liars.

2. The Hard Sell

So the next thing I want to talk about is the sales strategy. Isagenix is promoted through a multi-level marketing scheme. It’s actually a form of legal pramid scheme. It’s legal because there is an actual product being sold; as long as people paying into the scheme actually get something, you can’t accuse the originator of fraud.

How it works is that you, an “entrepreneur”, “associate”, or “independent business owner” (this is actually a dodge so that Isagenix doesn’t have to pay you for your time spent peddling their shit) buy the Isagenix products in great quantities, and then you are responsible for selling them. You can make a little money this way, or you can collect a commission for referring people to Isagenix for direct sales. But the real money – the promises of yachts and vacations and “making money in your spare time” – comes from recruiting your friends and family to become Isagenix salespeople. Because you get a cut of the sales generated by everybody you recruited, and everybody recruited by people you recruited, and so on and so on. Such a vast sales network could set you up for life! Well, not really. There are two problems with this.

One is, the sales network grows exponentially. Meaning it roughly doubles (or triples, or whatever) at each level of the network. Let’s say Alice is a sales person and she needs to recruit two others into her “downline”. That’s one at level 1. She recruits Bob and Claude, that’s two at level 2 for a total of 3. Bob recruits Daniel and Ephraim; and Claude recruits Fritz and Gus. That’s 4 at level 3 for a total of 7 in the network. At the 10th level, there are 2047 network members; at the 20th level, there are over two million. Two million is a medium-big American city, or a small U.S. state! Imagine a state full of people trying to sell Isagenix to one another! Of course there’s no way everybody in your city or state is going to be interested in buying Isagenix products, let alone selling them. Then you have to factor in the fact that people within close proximity to one another tend to know one another. So just a few levels down, people are going to be trampling over each other’s networks, competing for candidates to recruit. Meaning that realistically, the market will saturate well before you get to 20 levels deep. And the late joiners will not be able to build up much of a downline. If the salespeople are more aggressive, they may try to recruit more than two new salespeople. This has the effect of making the maximum network depth shallower.

The other thing is, there’s also the fact that just like you make a cut from people downline from you, everybody upline from you gets a cut of your cut. Which probably means, given how starved the lower levels are for newer candidates, they will probably pay out more than they get. The upper levels, having fewer levels above them, pay out less and receive more (having a bigger downline, including you, you sucker). And the founder? Well, nobody is above him, so he doesn’t have to pay anyone. And he’s making money off everybody else in the network, all without lifting a finger.

Funny how that works, eh?

Normally in these schemes only the top couple of rungs see any significant money. Isagenix is over 10 years old; chances are, if you are a new recruit like my sister, you won’t see a thin dime from sales, either your own or sales from your downline. You will probably even lose money. All that hard work and time and energy to wind up in the hole? Fuck this. Fuck it sideways.

Isagenix, like all multilevel marketing schemes, is a way to make money off a sales force who works for nothing. It’s a bit of carefully contrived malware designed to exploit vulnerable human brains, and coordinate them into a human spam botnet just like the botnets made up of Windows computers that had been compromised into mass-emailing people V1@gr@ ads.

The human “malware” works by pumping you up. They tantalize you with promises of easy money, of yachts and vacations and luxury homes. Of course if you’re rational enough to see that most people won’t make it that far, they will tell you that you’re different. That you have more passion or whatever. That if you really wanted wealth, wealth would come to you.

Sound familiar?

I think The Secret, which started off as something called “New Thought”, is actually a fragment of malware from some early 20th century get-rich-quick scheme or another, that sort of broke off and did its own thing, and took on a life of its own. And that’s why con artists are drawn to it like moths to a flame.

Combine this insidious scheme with what I said above about Isagenix not working quite the way it’s advertised, and what do you have? That’s right, motherfucker. A perfect storm of deceptive bullshit.

3. Conclusion

I’ve got a new weight-loss plan for ya’ll. It’s simple, no-bullshit, guaran-fucking-TEED to work if you stick to the program. It’s been shown effective by clinical study after clinical study, and like… 10 out of 10 doctors recommend it. It was known to the ancient Egyptians, and is the basis for all diet plans including Isagenix, but the Powers That Be have tried to keep it hidden from the public.

I call it Stop-Eating-So-Much-Fucking-Food-A-Genix.

See, the whole system works based on one easy-to-remember principle: you see all that fucking food you’re packing into your gob? Well, stop eating so God-damned much of it. No really, eat less and exercise more is the weight loss advice that doctors will give you, every time, because nothing else fucking works. And even your mom will tell you that vegetables are good for you. So eat sensible amounts of veggies, fruit, and lean meats and go really light on starches and sugars (except for fruit).

The beauty part is, you can adapt it to the foods you like. There are loads of delicious ways to combine vegetables with meat and spices, so you don’t need to settle for bland and boring “meat and two veg” meals. Just as long as you don’t eat so much fucking food. Especially sugary food, that’ll give you the diabeetus and stop your heart.

So yeah, sign up for Stop-Eating-So-Much-Fucking-Food-A-Genix and start losing weight today. There’s no commitment and nothing to buy.

And stay the fuck away from that dangerous scam.