Body by Vi is the brain child of ViSalus, a company that produces and sells weight-loss products like shakes, drinks, powdered supplements and bars. The premise behind Body by Vi is very simple: you set yourself a weight loss challenge, and, using only ViSalus products, you have 90 days to achieve that goal. If you make it, you can win prizes and be entered into drawings for extravagant rewards, including free products, cash prizes and photoshoots. Additional mini-challenges like “Project 10” give Body by Vi users more opportunities to win rewards for their weight loss goals, while signing up friends and family can earn you your products for free.
What does Body by Vi cost?
There are a few different options for getting started with Body by Vi, ranging from the most basic starter kit, at $49/month, right up to the $299 Fit Kit. Add-ons are available for each kit at various price points from $39 up. Opportunities are also available for distributors and “Independent Promoters”, with sign-up costs of $49-$999 leveraged against the possibility of making money through Body by Vi down the line.
Does Body by Vi actually work?
As promising as Body by Vi makes its system sound, nutritional experts who have examined the products universally agree: it’s all smoke and mirrors. The biggest problem is right in Body by Vi’s advertising: “Instead of adapting your lifestyle to fit a program, the Body by Vi™ Challenge was adapted to fit your lifestyle.” It sounds immensely appealing – why spend hours at the gym when you can lose weight from the couch with ViSalus shakes? – but if your lifestyle got you to your current weight, your lifestyle has to adapt to get you down from it, otherwise the weight will come back with a vengeance once the diet ends.
A look at the ingredients list for a basic ViSalus shake reveals that it has shockingly low levels of anything remotely nutritious, including protein, good cholesterol and even straightforward calories. Since the ViSalus products are supposed to completely replace your regular meals during the Body by Vi challenge, that makes it very clear where the weight loss is coming from: you are literally starving yourself to lose weight. Not only does that result in the worst kind of weight loss; it has also led to Body by Vi participants actually suffering the effects of malnutrition. Even if you make it the full 90 days with no ill effects, you’ll only gain the weight right back as soon as you stop the program and your body takes advantage of the new influx of calories.
Can you make money with Body by Vi?
Body by Vi does offer an incentive plan for encouraging others to join the program, and a closer look at the incentive plan reveals it to be a pretty straightforward MLM business. If you want to turn Body by Vi into a source of income, you sign up as an “Independent Promoter”, with an additional enrollment fee of anything from $49 to $999, depending on whether you want large quantities of samples to offer or sell to your downline. After that, you earn commission for every sale or purchase your downline makes, as well as additional bonuses for growing your downline and maintaining certain sales volumes. Show a particularly high level of success, and Body by Vi will even foot the bill for a brand new BMW. If it sounds like a fairly simple system, it isn’t: a look at the Body by Vi compensation plan shows an immensely complicated metric that requires extremely high sales volumes to maintain each tier of promotership. Making money with the program is not easy; harder still is actually maintaining a downline, since promoters have a tendency to drop out altogether once they’ve completed their own weight loss challenges. On top of that, the fine print for the new car has left many promoters with expensive out-of-pocket car payments.
Conclusion: is Body by Vi a scam?
Unfortunately, it’s bad news for Body by Vi. ViSalus’ weight loss products fall into exactly the same trap that many weight loss programs fall into: they’re vastly overpriced, and they just don’t work. The same basic ingredients that go into a Body by Vi shake can be bought individually for a third of the price – not that it matters, because the nutritional value of a Body by Vi shake is barely enough to keep a hamster going, let alone a human being, and the weight loss goals are downright unhealthy. In addition, the financial incentives are unreliable at best, since you always run the risk that your downline will back out once they complete their own 90-day Body by Vi challenge. The much-vaunted “Bimmer Club” might get you into a BMW if you work hard, but the risk of dropping below Bimmer Club qualification and being on the hook for the remaining cost of your new car is unreasonably high. Body by Vi hasn’t been taken down for illegal activities yet, but it isn’t a good or an ethical way to lose weight or make money.
