Evolv Health is a healthy lifestyle multilevel marketing company, but it puts a motivational spin on its business model. It fuses its health products with a motivational message and a world-betterment commitment that claims to donate to charity for every product that’s sold.
What’s the deal with this company? Is it a hot commodity, or yet another bland health and well-being MLM?
Evolv Health has been around for seven years, but its popularity may be waning.
Did I get on board? This explains everything:
Based on data from search engine traffic, interest in Evolv Health peaked in mid-2013, and traffic has been sliding downward ever since. Currently, search traffic is less than a quarter of what it was at its peak four years ago.
Their focus is on their Reboot Leptin weight loss plan, but they offer a number of other products for boosting things like immune function, energy levels, and mental well-being.
The company rose to prominence thanks in part to Biggest Loser winner Danny Cahill, who lost over 240 pounds on the show, but started gaining weight after the hardcore diet and exercise programs he was on stopped. He turned to Evolv Health for help. Cahill credits the company for helping him “reboot” his body and get to a place where he can stay healthy.
Products
The flagship product line from Evolv Health is, without a doubt, the Reboot Leptin program. Leptin is a “fullness” hormone that’s released by your body when it’s had enough to eat.
Many health experts suspect that leptin regulation problems are at least partially to blame for the obesity epidemic: from a homeostasis perspective, it doesn’t make sense that our bodies would keep urging us to eat, even when we’ve had enough. Something about our lifestyle must be upsetting our internal balance.
This, Evolv Health claims, is where Reboot Leptin comes in. The program is split into three phases: reboot, impact, and maintain. The first two steps take 28 days, and can be repeated as many times as necessary to hit your weight loss goals. Once you’ve done that, you move on to the maintain phase, where you keep the weight you’ve lost off.
The reboot phase consists of avoiding grains and carb-rich foods, plus consuming Evolv Health’s supplements and energy bars as meal replacements twice per day.
Each day starts with a betalain supplement, which is a beet-derived antioxidant powder that’s been found to help reduce chronic inflammation in the body.
A 2014 industry-funded study found that a supplement rich in betalain helped lower inflammation in people with chronic knee pain, but it has not been directly investigated for its effects on leptin. Evolv Health claims that chronic inflammation causes leptin resistance, and research does show that leptin is related to inflammation, as reported by Miguel Oroto and other researchers in a 2004 scientific review study, but the connection is not rock-solid.
As you might guess, there isn’t any independent research that confirms the effects of Evolv Health’s Reboot program on leptin levels, leptin sensitivity, or even weight loss for that matter. You’ll have to trust the judgement of the company’s scientists and supplement designers. Even so, the overall program is not too bad as a general weight loss plan.
The energy bars are low-sugar and high-protein food products that function as meal replacements. You’re supposed to consume a LifeBar for breakfast and lunch, along with a light snack, for the first 14 days of the plan. This is supplemented by an energy drink made with natural non-caloric sweeteners.
You do eat one healthy meal per day at dinner time, along with an aloe vera leaf gel powder. This gel is purported to have anti-inflammation properties too, so the focus with the supplements is really on fighting inflammation.
A 1999 review article in the Journal of Ethnopharmacology reports that aloe vera gel does seem to have some interesting anti-inflammation properties, and some rat and mouse studies have even found it can be an effective fat loss supplement.
During the impact phase, you can start mixing in your typical foods a few times per week. The supplementation routine is largely the same. As you transition into the maintenance phase, you can incorporate more grains, but the focus is still on whole grains as opposed to sugar and refined carbohydrates. All supplements aside, this is a sound dieting strategy–but do you need an MLM membership to follow up?
Compensation plan
There are three options for starting out in Evolv Health. Their basic enrollment kit is $59.95, which consists of just your membership and a few promotional materials. To start qualifying for a bonus, you need at least a $115 monthly auto-ship. There is also a $499 starter kit that includes a large shipment of their health products, as well as a $999 starter kit that includes approximately twice the product volume.
The compensation plan itself is, to put it bluntly, Byzantine and confusing. There are dozens of different levels, bonuses, categories, and stipulations for earning each bonus and staying an active member. Their compensation plan is 21 pages long and a lot of it is fine print.
Recap
Evolv Health is an MLM that’s more hype than substance. When it gets down to it, their Reboot Program is a pretty good overall lifestyle modification strategy (which has no intrinsic monetary value) along with some supplements of questionable efficacy. The rest of their products tend to be expensive, and they don’t offer a broad range of products or solutions to a broad range of problems.
Because of this, and because of the high startup cost, auto-ship requirements, and confusing compensation plan, it’s not going to be the best choice for a weight loss program.
Basically, if you’re set on MLM, this one’s not terrible, but probably not the best, either.
If you’re doing it for the money, there are better ways to kill your day job. You might like our coaching because it shows you the good life without peddling overpriced products to your family and friends.
http://bodynutrition.org/evolv-health-review/
No comments:
Post a Comment