If there is one thing that I can guarantee, it is that there are bloggers and influencers out there that are actively promoting products that they have never used. This includes “health aids” such as slimming products and diet foods. I used to promote health fads. But this is something I won’t do anymore.
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It all started 10 years ago when I started this blog. Businesses were falling over themselves to give money to bloggers to promote their products. I was one of them. I was sent products for free, given affiliate links for orders, and a nice handful of cash for telling everyone how they changed my life. It was all well and good until we all got ill.
For me, it started with Juice Plus, something I was a rep of at the time. Once the blog was up and running properly, I was offered detox teas, supplements, and all sorts of stuff. Sounds good, right? Wrong. While I used the products and (at the time) thought they were great, after a while, I noticed my stomach wasn’t the best. It took a while for me to realise that the health fads I was promoting were damaging my health instead of filling me with energy. Within a year of heading down this track, I was house bound because my stomach was such a mess. Every time I ate something, I was in crippling pain. At one point, I was so bad with the pain, I was afraid to eat. I reduced my meals to just one meal a day when I knew my husband would be home so I could go to bed and scream into a pillow while my insides felt like they were being pulled apart in a torture routine.
Over the years, I’ve made a slow recovery. My insides have been repaired enough that I can eat food at any time of the day (as long as it is not dairy). I can leave the house again to go shopping or go to work. However, I still have to warn everyone that I work with that I have stomach issues and they can be set off by the slightest thing. Thankfully, all of the people I have worked with over the last few years have been very nice and don’t pass comments when I need to go and destroy a toilet bowl somewhere. There are still nights when I have to go to bed after having dinner because something didn’t sit right with me, but they are few and far between now, and not have as painful as they were years ago.
I’m not the only blogger that won’t promote health fads now. A lot of the OG bloggers have had their fingers (and insides) burnt. You might remember a few years ago when a few bloggers said they got pregnant after using detox teas. Basically, the teas “detoxed” them, aka gave them massive amounts of the shits, and their birth control didn’t work. The babies that were born after this craze would be about 8 or 9 now. The backlash effect was more than just babies, many bloggers quit the business after this because they were horrified and ashamed that they had promoted something so dangerous. I add myself to the ashamed list, thankfully my following was so small that nobody took any notice of what I was promoting at the time.
Despite all of this, companies are still reaching out to people on social media and asking them to promote their “health products”. Most of the ones that have contacted me recently are for weight loss. Over the years, I’ve been pretty candid about what happened and the struggles I have faced because I once decided to promote health fads. But still, they keep coming with offers.
So, the next time someone is talking about the “amazing new weight loss” thing that they swear by, stop for a moment before you get caught up in the buzz. Do they really take it? What are the long term effects of taking this? Will this make me shit my insides out and leave me with crippling pain and IBS that ensures that I will never be able to enjoy a bar of milk chocolate again? Important questions. Stay away from diet fads you lovely people, you are all perfect the way you are <3