Kimkins Weight Loss

The Kimkins Diet appeared on a website online in April 2006. The diet was created by 'Kimmer' (Heidi [Miller] Diaz of Corona, California), who claimed to have successfully lost 198-pounds in 11 months and to have maintained that loss for several years by following her own diet. The website gained popularity when Woman's World published a feature on the diet and its creator 'Kim Drake' (one of numerous aliases used by Diaz) in their June 12, 2008 issue. Within days of the article, the website signed up thousands interested in the diet at a rate of $59.95 each.

While the diet is promoted as a low-carbohydrate diet, the menus provided reveal an ultra low-fat, very low calorie diet (vLCD) starvation-level diet, that offers typically less than 800-calories each day, with some menu plans offering 500-calories or less per day.

Soon after the Woman's World article and the explosion of memberships at the website, rumors started to crop up on various websites, forums and blogs claiming that the diet was dangerous, unhealthy and that 'Kimmer' (Diaz) was not being truthful about her own weight loss. A private investigator was hired by a former business associate and he produced pictures of a 300+ pound woman, suffering from alopecia and morbid obesity. The rumors were confirmed, Heidi Diaz had not lost 198-pounds and was morbidly obese.

This led to speculation about the pictures that appeared on the Kimkins website that were said to be Heidi Diaz (Kimmer). What followed is an excellent example of crowdsourcing. A large number of individuals online in forums answered that question when it was revealed that a many of the 'after' photos appearing on the Kimkins website were taken from Russian bride websites to highlight entirely fictitious "success stories" of supposed customers. Within days of the first photo of a non-existent customer success story, the infamous supposed 'after' photo of the woman in the red dress that was claimed to be a current photo of 'Kimmer' (Diaz) turned out to be yet another Russian bride photo of Lesya, a woman 20 years the junior of Diaz. The after photo that appeared in the Woman's World article was also determined to be from a similar source, another Russian bride photo, but that of yet another young woman other than 'red dress' Lesya.

A lawsuit was subsequently filed as a class-action against Heidi Diaz. Assets in excess of $1 million dollars US held in a PayPal account and other assets of Diaz were frozen by the court in November 2007. The suit is still in progress in the Riverside County Court in California. The attorney for the class-action is John Tiedt, who is representing the class of individuals in the civil lawsuit. Heidi Diaz has filed a counter-suit against a number of the plaintiffs in the class action and others who used to be affiliates promoting the diet website. Despite a desperate attempt by Diaz to block further progress of the lawsuit by filing for bankruptcy in January 2009 following a change in her legal counsel, the lawsuit was nonetheless subsequently certified as a class-action by the court the very same week when neither Diaz nor her new counsel appeared at a scheduled hearing.

The Kimkins certified class obtained the bankruptcy law services of Scott C. Clarkson of Clarkson, Gore & Marsella, APLC, and on March 27, 2009, Diaz's bankruptcy was dismissed by the Bankruptcy Court for the Central District of California, with a 180 bar against refiling.