Le-vel Thrive review – should you join?

Le-vel Thrive is a multilevel marketing company that specializes in premium-styled health and wellness supplements.

Their most widely-known product line is their eight-week Thrive Experience, a life transformation program with a holistic approach to improving your health and well-being.

Did I get on board? This explains everything:

Remember, we schedule 30 minutes for each call, so only schedule if you’re serious:

The company promotes a slick, professional aesthetic, and it’s clear from their marketing material that their target audience is well-heeled people who appreciate well-designed, high-quality, and well thought out products.

Instead of directly focusing on losing X number of pounds in a month, Le-vel Thrive promotes ideas like well-being or weight maintenance.  Put more simply, its program is supposed to be a lifestyle enhancer.

Popularity-wise, Le-vel Thrive is definitely on the upswing.  According to search engine traffic, public interest in the company has been rising since 2013.

There was a moderate downturn in web traffic in late 2016, but early data from 2017 suggests the company is rapidly turning this around.  Current search traffic is down less than 25% when compared to the all-time high.

Products

It’s impossible to talk about Le-Vel Thrive without looking at the eight week Thrive Experience.  The program consists of three supplements, a capsule based supplement, a shake mixture, and a dermal patch.

This combination of products is supposed to help you lose weight, be healthier, and feel more energized.  So, what’s in it?

The Lifestyle Capsules come in two different formulations, one for men and one for women.

The male and female versions are actually identical when it comes to vitamin and mineral ingredients: Both contain vitamin A, a combination of B-complex vitamins, and the trace elements chromium, vanadium, and selenium.

The difference comes in the herbal extract ingredients.  Both still contain several of the same ingredients: several probiotic bacterial spores, plus caffeine from guarana and green tea plus green coffee bean extract.

The men’s formulation contains a branched chain amino acid blend, glutamine, and arginine.  The women’s version swaps these out for serine, aspartic acid, and slightly different ratios of the other ingredients, as inferred by their order on the nutrition label.

Both of these are bound to have results: they are potent metabolism boosters.  The bad news is that most of this metabolism boost is likely coming from caffeine.

The scientific research supports caffeine intake, at least in natural forms like coffee and tea, as a legitimate way to increase weight loss by increasing your metabolism.

A 2005 scientific article published in the research journal Obesity followed a group of 76 overweight subjects who received either a placebo or a green tea extract and caffeine supplement for a period of three months.

Analysis of the results showed that the people who took the green tea and caffeine supplement lost significantly more weight than those who were taking the placebo.

The authors explained that the caffeine’s effect increased thermogenesis—scientific speak for heat generation and metabolism—thus burning more energy, which resulted in a an overall weight loss effect.

The meal replacement shake, Thrive Lifestyle Mix, is basically a souped-up protein shake.  Most of its calories come from soy, whey, and pea protein, which are known to be useful weight loss aids.

Research published in the journal Nutrition & Metabolism found that a whey protein supplement helped enhance fat mass loss and preserve lean muscle mass in a group of volunteers undergoing a weight loss protocol.

The souped-up part comes from the vitamin, mineral, and supplement additives.  Like with the Lifestyle Capsules, Le-Vel Thrive’s Lifestyle Mix includes a range of vitamins and trace minerals, to the tune of about 50% of your daily needs for nutrients like vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D, B vitamins, and several minerals.

The herbal extracts are also pretty heavy-hitting in the metabolism boosting department.  The first ingredient is the extract of the Garcinia cambogia plant, which is thought to be a fat-burning herbal supplement, and it also includes caffeine from black tea.

The caffeinated and metabolism boosting theme continues in the Thrive patch, which claims to deliver herbal extracts through your skin all day.

The brightly-colored patches include forskolin extract, green coffee bean extract (which contains caffeine), and more Garcinia cambogia extract, as well as a few other minor ingredients present in the other products, like white willow bark and CoQ10.

Even if it is possible to absorb these things through your skin, you’ve got to wonder–is it a good idea to pump so many metabolism boosting supplements into your body? Especially when so many of them contain caffeine?

None of these supplements actually list their caffeine content, so if you are sensitive to caffeine, you could be consuming far more caffeine than your tolerance, and could experience any number of unpleasant side effects.

Compensation plan

Joining Le-Vel Thrive requires purchasing an enrollment package, the cheapest of which is $200. From here, you need to maintain a monthly product volume of 100 to be eligible to earn money.

The retail discount for distributors is 20%, which is about middle of the pack as far as MLMs go.  The good news is that even at the lowest rank on the compensation plan, you can recruit three levels of distributors below you and earn a 4% commission on each.

Moving up from there is tough, though: you need to maintain a product volume of 4,000 per month and no more than 2,400 of it can come from your strongest leg.

So, unless you are an MLM pro, you’ll be stuck at the lowest rank and will be ineligible for the larger and more glamorous bonuses and rewards.

Recap

The branding and presentation of Le-Vel Thrive is very slick, but it’s hard not to call their bluff.  Isn’t the eight week Thrive Experience just a heavily caffeinated, somewhat risky metabolism boost?

With a product like their transdermal weight loss patch, it’s hard not to wonder if it’s more of a gimmick than a real weight loss strategy.

The compensation plan isn’t awful, but it does make it very hard to ever move up past the lowest rank.

This probably means the realistic ceiling for the amount of money you can earn is not that high, so at best, Le-Vel Thrive could be a side hustle, not your main source of income, unless you can figure out how to make a huge amount of money.

Basically, if you’re set on MLM, it’s not terrible, but probably not the best cash flow business out there.

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 juice to your family and friends.

http://bodynutrition.org/le-vel-thrive-review/