[PREVIEW] The Toxic Intersection of MLMs and Diet Culture

Yes, it’s clearly a diet. It’s as shitty as any other diet. But also, it’s not a good business plan. It’s not a good way to make money. And these companies are preying on women in more than one way. 

You’re listening to Burnt Toast! This is the podcast about diet culture, fatphobia, parenting and health. It’s time for your June bonus episode!

June is a really intense month for me. I recorded this in May, trying to get ahead because June is when I am finishing my book. You’ll hear more about it in the newsletter, so I won’t bore you with book details right now, but that’s the biggest thing going on in my world, as I’m recording this, and when you are listening. So send me good book writing vibes! I will be hopefully in my final couple thousand words, trying to make them good, and trying to remember what words are.

But that is not what we’re here to do today. It is bonus episode time. We’re going to do the same thing we did last month, which is a grab bag: I’ve got a reader question, a diet to debunk, and some butter for you.

PS. If you enjoy this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, rate and review us in your podcast player. And if your subscription expires this month: Make sure to renew by June 30 to be entered in our Burnt Toast Book Giveaway!

Episode 46 Transcript

Q: My fear is that my nine-year-old, who notices everything, is clocking how many packages I receive and return. I don’t want her to think that I’m dissatisfied with my body or that something is “wrong” with me. I guess this is the only reality that she knows because I don’t go shopping for clothes in person ever. And I’ve made such a successful effort not to shit talk food, or my or anyone else’s bodies. But this is something I never thought of until recently. I don’t talk about why I’m returning something, just say I didn’t like it.

Have you ever considered this in your journey for clothes that fit and are good? Does it indirectly say something to kids? Should we tell them the fashion and clothing industry is wacky and broken? 

I’m literally recording this next to a box—A pile? A mountain, one might call it?—of boxes of things that I need to return. There’s Land’s End, there’s Bare Necessities, there’s Nettle’s Tale. I think I’m past the return dates on that one, that’s a bummer. You’ll see that stuff on @selltradeplus soon. There’s some New Balance sneakers that don’t fit. Yeah, and Old Navy.

I’ve talked before about returns with Dacy Gillespie of Mindful Closet. I consider returns just a de facto part of shopping—especially if you are someone in a bigger body. Because we can’t shop in stores. The stores in my town don’t carry my size. I would have to drive over an hour to a mall that would maybe have stores that carry my size, but not in a great selection because I wear the biggest size most of them make.

So, online shopping has been my reality since way before COVID. I was recently texting with a mom friend who mentioned she was going to the mall to shop for jeans, and I just had a moment of like, wow, people buy jeans in person. She’s straight-sized, she’s got options there, but it’s not an option for me. So for my kids: Seeing me return things is their experience of shopping. That is their normal. They assume that you buy things and you send stuff back if you don’t like it. And especially with my eight-year-old, I should start to explain more about the larger system that creates that. We should start to talk about how fat people can’t access as many clothing options. And that the way that clothing is designed and mass produced, which makes it so hard to find things that fit. I think normalizing all of that is a great idea! Even if your kid is straight-sized now, there may very well be a time in the future where this is their reality. Putting the blame on the system is so much better than putting the blame on the individual. The fashion and clothing industry is wacky and broken. Check out my interview with Kyeshia Jaume to get more into that. And of course, the whole Jeans Science series where we get into that.

I think for a lot of kids it’s really tough, too! I’m going to be working on a piece later this summer about the issues of sizing limitations for kids, because they’re really significant. That’s a market that just hasn’t evolved at all in the right direction. (If you have a story to share about this, please comment on this post or email me!)

If you think about it, if you do any in-person shopping, you do this in the dressing room anyway. What your daughter is seeing and what my daughters are seeing isn’t that different from what I saw as a kid, sitting in dressing rooms with my mom trying on tons of stuff. And most of it going back, and then she bought one or two things. That was what retail used to be, when it was all in person. 

So it really all depends on how we talk about it. If you are not shit-talking your body in the process, if you are not saying “I’m so sad.” I mean, it’s totally normal to feel sad, if clothes don’t fit, of course. I don’t want to deny that. But if you’re not blaming yourself, if you’re blaming the system, and if you’re taking it in stride, as well, this is a way that fat people are oppressed and this is something we can work on. That is going to feel very different to a kid than having a mom who’s constantly dissecting her own body. So if you’re not doing that, I think it’s not a big deal for them to see the buying and returning because. It’s just something we need to normalize, unfortunately, while we work to make fashion better. 

There is the environmental component of having to buy and return lots of things. Amanda Mull did a piece for The Atlantic outlining all the ways in which, when we return, depending on the brand, sometimes it just gets destroyed and doesn’t end up on store shelves. That is enraging, but it is not on the individual consumer to fix. And that’s also something that’s great to educate kids about. Kids are such good environmentalists, and they can understand this issue, for sure. But you can also then talk about how do you make an effort to support smaller, more sustainable brands when you have the budget for it. Or do you make sure to check into what this company does with their returns to know what you’re opting into? The reality is that we can’t always do that, because you need to put clothes on our bodies. If Target’s plus sizes are your best option, as they often is for me, then we’re rolling the dice on the fact that Target probably does not do a great job with returns. It’s not great, but it’s a reality. This is all part of helping kids understand this larger constellation of issues.

So yes. Normalize talking about returns with your kids, and blame the system, not your body, forever. This has also really motivated me to box these returns up and get them to UPS this week. So, thank you for that.

Is It A Diet? Optavia Edition

Q: I first heard about Optavia because my sister in law, who lives in Westport, Connecticut was on it during our family vacation over Thanksgiving. And she was eating like basically nothing? And she was like, “oh, every mom in Westport is on it.” She seemed completely oblivious to the fact that it’s an MLM, or maybe just didn’t care. But it struck me that they became the fad diet for a set of quite well off, relatively young moms in very highly educated suburbs. These are not 22-year-olds in the Tampa exurbs hawking It Works! 

Optavia is so interesting, because it absolutely is a diet, it absolutely is an MLM, and it’s wildly expensive. I mean, I just clicked around on the site a little bit to get ready to talk about it with you all. I’m seeing the Essential Optimal Kit—the plans are so confusing—which is $423 for 140 servings of things that are not meals. They’re meal replacements and they’re snack-y type items. There’s a lot of bars and shakes. I am fascinated that this brand has gotten this foothold in the Westport mom type setting and I think it’s also big out in some of the ritzy California suburbs and places like that. Because the food does not look good. It doesn’t look like Goop food. It doesn’t look like Gwyneth Paltrow-approved chia seed nonsense. The packaging is not that sleek. It sort of looks like a nice Macy’s brand. It’s not Neiman Marcus, is what I’m saying. It’s not Goop. I’m so interested that it is resonating with this cohort of people because (I’m not that far removed from that cohort and) I don’t really see the appeal.  

For example, they don’t call them snacks, they call them “fuelings.” But they’re just bars, like granola bar type things. And also some of them are soup? Some of them are brownies? This literally says:

“Best of all, each fueling is nutritionally equivalent and portion controlled. So you can substitute anyone for any other. Not in the mood for soup? Try a brownie instead.”

So, it’s a “all foods fit, except all the foods are tiny and packaged by us” thing. Then at the same time, they’re marketing their Lean and Green meals. So, which one is it? Do I get to eat the brownies? Or do I have to eat lean and green? Diet culture, make up your mind.

I guess this is the kind of thing that if all the moms at the PTA meeting are doing this, it starts to seem appealing. But for sure, it is just a diet. It’s not even a particularly innovative one, it feels very Jenny Craig circa 1990’s with these meal replacements. Or Weight Watchers, because you’re buying all these snacks.

But let’s also talk about the MLM piece of this. For anyone who’s new to the conversation, I recommend the podcast The Dream, which is a deep dive into the whole MLM industry. My previous reporting is older, it was about 10 years ago when I was on the MLM beat. I did a big piece on Mary Kay for Harper’s Magazine, but it’s been a minute since I was really in the space. And I don’t think the industry has changed very much, which is super depressing. (I also recommend reading Meg Conley on MLMS here and here. And ICYMI, we had a great Friday Thread about diet culture and MLMs last September.)

So to become an Optavia—what are they, coaches? Of course! They’re coaches, just like Beachbody, just like It Works. To become an Optavia coach, the buy-in is this $199 business kit. With this $199 business kit, obviously you’re hoping that you’re gonna get a return on your investment. But what’s interesting about the MLM approach is that they often get you by simultaneously convincing you this will be an extremely lucrative career path and at the same time reassuring you that you’re not really doing this as a business. You’re just doing it because you like the products, right? That’s the thing that people always say. It’s something that women learn to say because it protects them from feeling like failures when they don’t make money at these businesses. Which, the vast majority of people do not.

And it always breaks my heart. Because if these companies really did care about investing in women the way they claim, if they really did care about helping people become entrepreneurs, that’s the kind of talk they would push back against and say, “No, you’re an entrepreneur! Own it! You’re going to make this amazing business, we’re going to help you build out this whole thing.” Instead, they encourage women to buy things by saying, “oh, yeah, you can just do it in a casual way, you don’t have to really be trying to make money.”

This allows these companies to justify their numbers about how few people are successful at it, because they can say—as numerous PR people for these brands have said this to me over the years: “Well, most of our people are only in it for recreational use. They’re not trying to make a big business.” So, it’s fine that most people aren’t making money because they just like the products. They’re not trying to make a business out of it. But maybe they aren’t or maybe that’s something they’ve had to tell themselves. 

You don’t have to look very far on the Optavia website to find their integrated compensation plan, where they tell you what their consultants for their coaches earned. In 2021, almost 20 percent of their coaches made $0 with an average of 12 months in business, and another 40 percent—So that’s 60 percent of their coaches—made $1,000 or less in 2021. 60 percent of people who do this make less than $1,000. And you’ve spent at least $200 on your business kit, plus however many months of those meal plans at $400 a month. This is not a good business plan.

Even at the higher end of that—the folks who are making $500 to $1,000 in a year—they made that after an average of 19 months in business. Then they have a continued breakdown of each income bracket. Only 1.6 percent of Optavia coaches made between $50,000 and $100,000 last year. Fewer than 2 percent of them are making a full-time income, let alone super big bucks.

I guess one reason it’s not surprising that Optavia is doing well in wealthy suburban enclaves is that a lot of those women may not need to make money off these businesses if they have a partner who’s the primary breadwinner. This is something they’re doing on the side. But then we just get into this highly gendered, highly retrograde situation where these are women who maybe don’t have a lot of financial control in their lives. Even if there’s money, they may not have a lot of access to it or control over it. Maybe this felt like a way to get some control.

MLMs make me really sad, and that’s on top of it being a shitty diet. I mean, I don’t want to eat “Fuelings.” I don’t want to eat “Lean and Green.” All of that is patently bad diet culture. And as this reader said, her sister-in-law doing it was basically eating nothing. So it’s using restriction.

But let’s just think about that toxic intersection. You’ve got this workforce that you’ve recruited to your MLM that is all on your strict diet. So they’re all hungry and cranky, and not fully functioning. And you’re continuing to promise that you have solutions for them. It’s really fucking predatory and really gross.

If this is a business you’ve ever considered, definitely look at the integrated compensation plan and you can see the breakdown. And this is what the company tells you, by the way. They have every incentive to make these statistics look as good as possible. And they have backdoor ways to do that. Like, I have a feeling they’re not deducting what people spend on products from the income. I haven’t fact checked this with Optavia, but when I reported on other MLM companies that was a common tactic. They would report the compensation but they wouldn’t ask people to report how much they spent on products. So somebody making $50,000 a year might be spending $30,000 or $45,000 a year on product, or even spending more than they’re making. Their income looks good on paper, but not when you deduct the products they’re buying.

So here’s what I really want to hit home. Yes, Optavia is clearly a diet. It’s as shitty as any other diet, but also, it’s not a good business plan. It’s not a good way to make money. These companies are preying on women in more than one way.

So that’s a cheery place to end! I certainly would love to hear your MLM stories in the comments!

Butter For Your Burnt Toast

It is the first week of June. It should be nice and summery pretty much everywhere. If you are a houseplant person, like me, this is the week to take your houseplants outside, if you haven’t already been able to do so. Most houseplants really love spending the summer out on your deck, or your fire escape, or your porch, or in your driveway—any outdoor space you have where you hang out. I love it because I do container gardens, too, but buying all the annuals for container gardening is kind of expensive and then they just die at the end of the season. Whereas the houseplants already are beautiful and they get even more beautiful when they’re outside. Most of them are from tropical climates, so they love a hot, humid summer. You’ll notice plants getting a lot bigger, plants that maybe never flower indoors will flower for you outdoors. Definitely be fertilizing, as well, every week or every other week with most plants. Not succulents, but other houseplants.

Try to pick an overcast day to do it, if you can, because they do have to acclimatize a little bit and if it’s really hot and sunny, their leaves can scorch. If you have a covered porch or a screen porch, something like that, that can be a really good place to get them outside where they won’t get too much direct sun. Your succulents can definitely handle the direct sun, although I’d still try for a cloudy day to start. But anything with leafy leaves probably doesn’t want direct hot blazing sun. Look for a shady spot. They’re also nice to use in shade gardens for that reason, because a lot of them do great in shade gardens and it can be so challenging to figure out what to plant in shade gardens, especially if, like me, you have a lot of dry shade. Houseplants can help pick up a little dry, shady corner.

So that’s my tip for you. It is ironic that I’m giving that tip today, because as soon as I finish recording this, about to go bring a bunch of mine indoors because we’re getting a big thunderstorm tonight. And succulents should not stay out on a day when you’re predicted to get almost an inch of rain, because they will drown. So there’s a little bit of work involved. If you have a covered porch, they’re fine, though. So it’s a little bit of work involved, but it’s really nice for your houseplants and it will make you happy. 

I hope you enjoyed this month’s bonus episode! Please make sure you are subscribed for free in your podcast player and tell a friend about this episode.

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing.

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting independent anti-diet journalism.