Is Slimming World a MLM?

[Ihatesundays]

Just out of interest.
Someone I used to work with has given up a very well paid job to do Slimming World full time, the mention of Team Leader pricked my ears up!

Can you really make a good living from it...?

Do many ever really hit their target weight. Who sets that?
I’m quite fit/ have muscles so don’t expect to hit a low weight ever.

Quark sounds rank.

SW isn't MLM, it's franchise/licenced. They make money by having a busy group and retaining members. There's no obligation to recruit consultants below you, i.e no upline or pyramid model.

Consultants do get bonuses for certain targets reached and competitions won, for example, woman of the year coming from your group.

My consultant is doing very well from it, he boasts he has 500+ members every week weighing in. He does 3 double sessions.

I've lost nearly 3stone this year, I don't always follow the plan to the letter but just made sensible healthier choices. The discipline of having to get weighed every week keeps me on track. You set your own target, a weight you feel is realistic for yourself, it doesn't necessarily put you at a healthy BMI.

But doesn't using weight as a metric of progress drive some pretty unhealthy obsessions with weight.

Body fat, measurements, how your clothes feel, how you look, how you feel..... are surely much better yard sticks to go by?

“Do many ever really hit their target weight. Who sets that?”

Yes lots, I couldn’t give you figures without a lot of homework but more do than don’t.

They set it, some go by BMI, so set ones outside a healthy BMI range but much lower than their start weight, some set it at what they know their happy weight is, some wait until they’re in a certain clothes size or are happy where they are and go - this is it, set it here.

“Quark sounds rank.“

It’s alright, makes a good sour cream type dip, and I prefer the taste of it to yoghurt, wouldn’t make a cake out of it though, lol

Biggest joke of all at SW is bananas... a banana is free but if its mashed its 6 syns so what happens to a banana when you eat it... it gets mashed 😂😂

*will always have two camps on any SW thread. Those who are evangelical about it and those that say it's a 'cult'.

It's like anything else - a bit of common sense goes a long way*

Agree. I'm somewhere in the middle. I like the plan and the recipes. I've lost a stone and a half. I also know about counting calories though. So I don't actually stick fully to it. If I don't fancy eating bread one day but I fancy a couple mini chocolates or something, I don't syn them. They would equal the same calories as the bread I skipped.

I also know that if I eat only when I'm hungry I am more likely to lose weight. I don't believe food is free, I don't gorge on pasta or rice. But I also like that I don't have to weigh it. It works for me anyway.

Using weight as a metric is perfectly reasonable. How else do you know your BMI? I basically set my target weight for where I’d worked out that I’d dipped into the healthy BMI range. Seems v sensible!

I was doing SW for a year and was doing really well, almost 5 stone down but I've given up because I got so fed up of the consultant and the fake jollity in the group, not to mention the constant changes of group times available and venue changes, which the consultant would always patronisingly insist were for our own good. I used to go to the quieter of the 2 sessions before she decided to merge them both because "bigger groups work better", just meant having to queue for twice as long and listen to 40 people banging on about how many muller lights they'd eaten that week instead of 15!

The consultant was always badgering the group to help her distribute thousands of leaflets, or to join the social team because there weren't enough of them, or to constantly share her ads on social media. It was tiresome. Moving the venue to somewhere without free parking was the nail in the coffin for me, £3 parking on top of the weekly fee and constant pressure to buy raffle tickets or donate to collections for a poorly member etc was getting to be too much. A shame because it does work. Maybe I'd be better off doing it online.