Cutting Through The Hype Of Supplement Ads

I’ll start with the bottom line: you don’t NEED supplements to burn fat or build muscle. The human body can function and make excellent athletic progress on nothing but quality food and proper training.

But you CAN use supplements to help the process along faster. The real key is knowing what works, what is garbage, and when an advertiser is simply trying to take your money.

Let me put it this way…in a recent muscle magazine, I counted 120 pages of full-page (in some cases 3 to 6 page), high-powered supplement ads. If you were to buy all these products, you’d be laughing all the way to the bank…laughing maniacally, because you’d have to rob it in order to pay for all those supplements!

There ARE good supplement manufacturers who make good products…they put in what they say they’re putting in and don’t try to fool you with advertising. But this article is about the BAD ones and it’s more fun to talk about them…

So what sneaky tricks do advertisers use to separate you from your money?

1. Unprovable Testimonials

How many times have you seen testimonials like “I lost 10 pounds in a week” or “I gained 20 pounds of muscle in a month.” These testimonials prey upon the desire in all of us for fast and easy results. Who wouldn’t want results this quickly? After all, if this person did it, I should get those same results too, right?

To me, this is like a car commercial that uses special effects to catch your attention then has an official disclaimer like “car should not be driven underwater” or “does not imply resistance to meteor strikes.” It looks and sounds cool but you know it’s just not real – you want to believe but…

And believe me, I would LOVE to think that results like this are possible with just a supplement. But how do you prove that those results even happened? You can’t. How do you prove it was due to that supplement? You can’t. How do you know the person wasn’t “on” something? You can’t. And how do you get your money back when it doesn’t work? You can’t.

About 10 years ago, I did an experiment on myself to see just how much weight I could gain in a week (keep in mind, I was just aiming for total bodyweight, which includes muscle, water and fat). By going on a very strict diet and training program for 2 weeks then completely reversing everything and loading up, I was able to gain 25 pounds of bodyweight in 7 days. And I owed it all to the incredible new supplement I was taking called Hydrogen Dioxide (a.k.a. H2O).

2. Before and After Photos

Before and after photos can be very inspiring and offer proof that a product works. Or they can fool you like the time Homer Simpson opened a can of beer that had just been in a paint shaking machine.

Here’s a before and after picture technique you can try at home:

Your Before Picture:

slouch as much as you can
let your gut hang out and down, push it out if you can
bow your shoulders in, hunch your back over, and bow your knees in
stand directly square to the camera so you look as wide as possible
frown or look miserable
have a messy, unflattering hairdo
wear the most unflattering clothing you can find – make sure the clothes highlight every bulge
don’t flex or tighten up anything – make yourself feel as flabby as possible

Your After Picture:

stand up straight and tall
suck in your gut and flex your abdominals
keep your shoulders back
look happy and wear a big smile
stand slightly sideways (tilting your body at angle makes it look thinner)
wear flattering clothing and have your hair neat
flex all your muscles and keep everything tight

You can make quite a change in yourself pretty quickly!

3. Pay An Athlete To Get Fat Then Pay Them To Get Back In Shape

It is a little-known fact that some supplement companies have been known to actually pay well-trained athletes to stop training and get fat. Why? To get a really awful-looking “before” picture.

Then, when the athlete starts training hard again, eating right and, of course, taking their magic supplement, they get into great shape very quickly. The goal is to convince you that it was the supplement that was the key to the transformation, not the fact that it was a well-trained athlete in the first place. But an average person is NOT going to be able to make a transformation like this, no matter how good the supplement is.

When you’re already a well-trained athlete, you can make dramatic changes to your body extremely quickly (as evidenced by my own 25 pounds in a week weight gain I talked about above). To me, it’s like telling a professional boxer that he can only punch with his face for a few rounds. When he starts up with the fists again, he’s going to make a pretty rapid improvement!