Part 1: The Confession

As I’ve mentioned before, when I first started my weight loss journey I had no idea what to do. I had never set foot in a gym. I had no idea how to meal prep. These are all things I taught myself later on, but not until after I made the mistake of trying Plexus products.
For those of you who don’t know what Plexus is, it’s a company that produces pills and powders (as well as a line of cleanses and probiotics) aimed at helping people lose weight and become healthy. When I first heard of Plexus, the results people had from using the products were overwhelming. Among them, I remember these: No more migraines, no more blood sugar medicine, no more insulin resistance, etc. If you had a problem, Plexus had a solution.
I’ve suffered from severe migraines since I was a child, so the promise that Plexus could cure me once and for all was enough to get me to try the products. Unfortunately, as I later found out, Plexus’s whole idea of health was that if something was wrong with your overall health, your gut was out of wack. True, possibly. But instead of suggesting a trip to the doctor and a few rounds of prescription strength probiotics, these independent distributors instead suggested that a few of their pills, coupled with a cleanse or probiotic, and of course their signature pink drink would clear you right on up. But we’ll talk more about this later.
I found a distributor online and immediately contacted her to see which products would be best for me and my long-term health goals. I disclosed to her my history of intestinal issues, and I ended up choosing the following Plexus items:

• Plexus Slim packets (Drink 1 every morning)
  
• Plexus Probio5 (take 2 pills every night at bedtime)
  
• Plexus Accelerator (take 2 pills 30 minutes before the gym)
  
• Carb Block (take 2 pills 30 minutes before a high-carb meal). 
  

Let’s do the math. More than 6 pills a day, JUST to make my body work the way it’s supposed to work? And a drink that taste like a rancid red tootsie roll sucker? Looking back, I wonder how I talked myself into paying upwards of $170 a month for this ‘treatment’.
For the first two weeks or so, I was doing great. I had lots of energy, I was happier, I had less brain fog. The Plexus actually seemed to be working! Unfortunately, I can’t say that my results lasted. After the initial two weeks, I started experiencing brain fog worse than ever before. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I would forget what I was saying right in the middle of a sentence! I had headaches almost every single day. I was moody – and NO, it wasn’t “that time”. In addition, I started having stomach pains and that’s when I knew something was up.
At first my stomach pains were almost like cramps, but in my upper stomach. I had no idea what was going on. After a few days, my cramping escalated to sharp, stabbing pains. I could be just sitting at my desk typing as I am right now, and I’d get a pain that would double me over with tears in my eyes. I couldn’t workout. I could barely work! That’s when I messaged my Plexus distributor to let her know something wasn’t right. She immediately hit me with “This is totally normal, this is just your body adjusting to the products, this will go away in about a week.” For some reason, I believed her. (Reason: I desperately wanted there to be a way to get skinny fast and without working for it) After that conversation, I gave her products a deadline – I swore “If my body isn’t back to normal in one week, I’m throwing this shit away.”
I continued taking the products for another week, and unfortunately my condition never improved. The brain fog was getting worse, the headaches escalated to every single day, but the stomach pains stayed the same. (Thankfully they didn’t increase because my boss was already on the verge of sending me to the hospital) After that week I had been on Plexus for a little over one month, and all it had done for me was make my life worse and keep my from achieving ACTUAL results. I sent that Plexus lady an email telling her that I felt I was poisoning my body and I asked if I could get out of the rest of my three-month trial. She said it wasn’t possible. No remorse or explanation for what was happening to me.
So there I was, more than a month into my fitness journey, having lost around 7 pounds (largely due to those first two weeks of high-energy workouts) and without a quick fix. At that point I realized there’s not a quick fix. A body worth having doesn’t come from a bottle.

Click here to read Part 2: The Comeback