Unless you’ve been hibernating in a cold dark room, you’ll have noticed the annual short burst of March sunshine has hit us! Most of last week was glorious, with a great weekend, and according to the Met office, it’s going to continue up until Thursday.

Wohoo… Get out the factor 50.

Now, I was going to post up a workout to make the most of this sunshine… but then the planets aligned or whatever and like the ghosts of Christmas past, 3 events came to me urging me to write about weight loss shake diets and hopefully save a few people from getting burned.

And not just by the sun.

Event 1: Last week I was emailed by an instructor friend of mine who’s been drawn in by one of the companies who deal these shakes. What you probably don’t know is that these companies often use a Multi-Level Marketing model where you’ll become a “distributor” (salesperson) with a promise of making thousands (often tens of thousands) per month, and the guy above you who’s also a distributor gets a cut from your sales and every one of his personal army of salespeople’s sales too. And so on up the chain.

You don’t have to have any nutritional education or qualification, in fact one of their big sales pulls to get people to become distributors is how a guy who made a couple of quid a day or something like that cutting grass became a distributor and now makes tens of thousands per month. So if the advertising’s to be believed, you could be taking advice about your health and well being from a guy who’s only qualified to push a lawn mower.

To cut a long story short, this guy wanted me to advertise for him and become one of his salespeople. I obviously (politely) told him where to go. Read more about Worthing Fitness Trainer warns to beware of the weight loss shakes! …