The truth about Valentus

Instant coffee and energy drinks for weight loss: that’s the main idea of Valentus, a multilevel marketing company that competes with other specialized weight loss solution companies who vie for the lucrative weight loss market.

The company offers a variety of powdered and liquid drinks, but all of them are focused on weight loss and weight maintenance.

So did I get on board? This explains everything:

In terms of popularity, Valentus is in the midst of a surge in public interest, so if the products are good and the compensation plan looks solid, now might be a good time to join up.

Search engine traffic reveals that interest in Valentus has jumped upward sharply starting in early 2016, and its popularity hasn’t really waned very much.  

Even over a year later, traffic is still near peak levels.  Timing when to get into an MLM market is tricky, but Valentus seems to be in the sweet spot when it comes to the balance between popularity, name brand appeal, and market saturation.  

Of course, it could plunge into oblivion at any moment; whether or not that happens is going to be contingent on the quality of its products on the consumer side and the strength of its compensation plan on the distributor side.

Products

The flagship products offered by Valentus are mostly instant-mix drinks for weight loss.  Two of the best-selling products are SlimROAST and Prevail Trim, which serve as representative examples of the company’s supplement approach.

SlimROAST is Valentus’ instant coffee offering.  Despite the name, there’s a lot more to it than coffee.  In addition to dark roast coffee, it’s got several weight loss supplements added to the mix.  

There is garcinia cambogia, a headline-grabbing metabolism booster from a few years ago, chromium picolinate, which is also purported to boost fat burning, green tea extract, caffeine, and green coffee bean extract.

One serving of SlimROAST contains 3410 mg of this proprietary blend, but we don’t know how much of each individual ingredient is in a serving.  

This is troubling because so many of the ingredients contain caffeine.  Too much caffeine can cause jitters, a racing heart, anxiety, and other negative side effects, especially if you are sensitive to caffeine.  But the problem is that you don’t know how much caffeine is in a serving!

Similar problems affect Prevail Trim.  This isn’t coffee based; it’s more like an instant energy drink mix.  It comes in single serve pouches in powder form.  

The fruit-like flavoring comes from pineapple powder, orange powder, and lime powder, as well as the non-caloric sweeteners xylitol and stevia.

Unlike SlimROAST, Prevail Trim provides a good bit of dietary fiber, thanks to its inclusion of inulin.  According to scientific research conducted by Britt Burton-Freeman at the biotechnology firm Amgen, dietary fiber plays an important role in your sensation of satiety, or fullness.  

So, the logic goes, Prevail Trim’s four grams of dietary fiber from inulin could increase your feeling of fullness, and thus reduce your desire to eat food later in the day, thus lowering your energy consumption and helping you lose weight.

But that’s not all that Prevail Trim includes.  Its proprietary blend also contains caffeine, thanks to green coffee bean extract.  Like SlimROAST, it also includes garcinia cambogia, and its active ingredient, hydroxycitric acid, or HCA for short.

Though garcinia cambogia has generated a lot of hype, large scientific trials, such as one conducted in 1998 and published in the Journal of the American Medical Association which found no effect of  garcinia cambogia on weight loss.  

Reports on the safety of garcinia cambogia vary; supplement manufacturers point to evidence that there are no toxic effects of the plant or its extracts, but there have been cases in medical literature detailing patients who have suffered liver damage after taking weight loss supplements containing hydroxycitric acid.

Compensation plan

The product approach to Valentus (lots of weight loss supplements blended together) is pretty old school, and their compensation plan is too.  

Joining up requires a $60 starter kit (though you can buy a more expensive one to launch yourself into a higher sales ranking for the first month), and after that, you get an across-the-board wholesale discount of 25% on all products.  An autoship is required; to be eligible for commissions, you need to keep a 60 product volume ($60) order every month.

The compensation structure is a classic binary MLM setup.  To move up the ladder, you need at least two active distributors below you, and your lesser leg has to achieve a certain level of sales in addition to each rank’s global sales volume requirements.  This means you have to manage your team to ensure you aren’t being held back by underperforming sales legs.

Unusually, the commission’s structure is based on flat dollar amount bonuses, instead of a percentage of sales like with most other MLMs.  These bonuses do “cycle,” so you can reap them multiple times if you and your downline distributors are doing well.

Recap

Coffee, caffeine, and lots of weight loss supplements all rolled into one.  It’s a tough proposition to really believe in Valentus; its business arrangement just reeks of old-school caffeine and stimulant-heavy weight loss products that only help you lose weight by jacking your metabolism through the roof.  

On the other hand, it does seem to be pretty popular right now, so it could nevertheless prove lucrative if you can get a team set up that takes advantage of the flat bonus based compensation structure.  

That being said, if you’re just doing it for the money, there are better ways to kill your day job.

You might like this coaching because it shows you the good life without peddling products to your family and friends.

http://bodynutrition.org/valentus-review/