When you call your company Total Life Changes, you know you’ve got some major aspirations.
So what is it?
Total Life Changes is a multilevel marketing company that sells primarily health and wellness supplements geared towards people who want to make major changes in their life to lose weight.
So did I get on board? This explains everything:
The founder, Jack Fallon, is a former Ford Motor Company who started Total Life Changes in 1999. Since then, the company has grown quite a bit, though its popularity has been waning recently.
Analysis of data from internet searches shows that the company had a big spurt of popularity in early 2015 and early 2016, with search engine traffic spiking upward dramatically. Current traffic has slipped, with searches tracking only about 50% of what they were at their peak in April of 2016.
Products
Though Total Life Changes offers a range of products, including health supplements, coffee, skin care products, and essential oils, their standard-bearers are their Resolution drops and their Iaso tea.
Resolution drops come in a small amber glass bottle and promise to reduce food cravings and help you lose weight in conjunction with their recommended diet. One serving is just ten drops, delivered onto your tongue with a dropper that is built into the lid of the bottle. So, what’s in it? Can something that small be effective?
A closer look at the label reveals why the serving size is so small: the supplement is a homeopathic preparation. Homeopathy is a branch of alternative medicine which postulates that small amounts of heavily diluted compounds have medicinal properties.
The ingredients in Total Life Changes Resolution Drops are arcane extracts and mineral ingredients, even for a health supplement. I’m not sure of any other product on the market that uses ingredients like calcarea carbonica or fucus vesiculosus or nux vomica. These are included at “5X” and “6X” homeopathic dilutions, which means the original substance is diluted by a factor of 10,000 to one million times.
Though homeopathy has a rabid following among a certain subset of alternative medicine enthusiasts, mainstream science has wholly refuted its premises.
An authoritative review article that analyzed a huge range of studies on the topic of homeopathic treatments found that there are no medical conditions in which homeopathy is useful.
The paper, which has been cited over 300 times, also notes that the founding principles of homeopathy have been thoroughly refuted and are not supported by modern biology and chemistry.
Oddly, people still seem to claim that the Total Life Changes program works very well. How could that be? Remember that the program includes the Resolution Drops and a special diet.
Well, this diet is a 1200 calorie per day plan! When you restrict your caloric intake that much, it’s pretty easy to lose weight. The appetite suppressant qualities of the drops are probably a placebo effect, which could be quite strong in a subjective measurement like hunger.
So, if you toss out the usefulness of one of Total Life Changes’ main products, how about the other one?
Iaso tea is more of an herbal blend; it contains two varieties of thistle, plus parsimmon, papaya, myhrr, chamomile, and ginger. Some of these are ingredients out of left field that have never really been researched for their health or medical potential, but a few have some scientific backing.
Ginger, for example, seems to have blood-thinning and anti-inflammatory effects. According to a 2002 paper authored by researchers in Kuwait, ginger and its extracts have potent biological effects on the body’s inflammatory and clotting systems.
The paper demonstrated significant anti-clot, cholesterol-lowering, and anti-inflammation action in rats fed a ginger extract as part of their diet for two weeks.
As for chamomile, researchers at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio notes the usefulness of chamomile tea and extracts in treating gastrointestinal disorders, inflammation due to arthritis, and ulcers, though it mostly cites traditional uses, not standardized clinical trials.
However, a major problem persists, which is that in the case of both the chamomile and the ginger, we don’t know what the actual amounts used in the Iaso tea are, since they aren’t disclosed on the label. Given that the Resolution Drops contain astoundingly low concentration, we don’t know if the concentration of these ingredients in the tea is similarly low.
Compensation plan
With such a checkered record for its products, Total Life Changes would need to have an outstanding compensation plan to make joining up worth the trouble.
Joining necessitates purchasing a starter kit, which costs just shy of $40. From here, you get retail discounts and the ability to start earning commissions, assuming you can keep up a monthly product volume of 40 on a consistent basis. Any less than this and you aren’t eligible for payment.
Total Life Changes uses a binary compensation model, which is becoming increasingly popular with MLMs. In this model, you only have two first-line distributors below you, which head up two separate “teams” or “legs.”
It’s up to you to ensure that both of these teams are performing up to snuff, since your rewards are based chiefly on the performance of your “lesser” leg, or the one that is selling the least.
Once you have your two legs set up, the commissions are pretty good; they start at 10% and grow up to 25% at the highest level (though you’ve got to move a quarter million product volume to achieve this; good luck with that!).
Recap
Somehow it always seems like the MLMs with the questionable products have pretty good compensation plans, and the opposite is true for the ones with great products. That’s definitely the case here.
The compensation plan is actually pretty good; the barrier to entry is low, and the minimum product volumes aren’t too bad either.
But to cash in on that, you’ve got to be able to convince people to buy some products that on the whole aren’t too impressive.
Bottom line is, 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/total-life-changes-review/ http://bodynutritionorg.tumblr.com/post/162099701239
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