A Review and Comparison of Ediets and the Performance Diet.

The two Leading Online Weight Loss Programs that Charge a Fee.

Edietsis a fully interactive online diet program. Ediets claims 3.4 million email subscribers in their community since 1996. In their public financial statements for 2000 they disclose 250,000 paid users.

The Performance Dietis a hybrid interactive online program that has extensive interactive online features as well as a diet, nutrition and exercise software that you download and use from your IBM compatible PC. As a privately help company it does not give out its sales statistics.

Cost Factors
Diet and Nutrition Features
Exercise features
Support features
Ease-of-Use
Web Site, Sales and Marketing Approaches
Typical User Profile
Other Important Features not Available
Results
Value to User Summary

Ediets costs about $30 for each 3-month period or $75 if you sign up for a year. There are no free trials to see if Ediets is what you are really looking for. Ediets offers a 90-day refund policy. The Ediet’s return policy is subject to many detailed and stringent conditions as well as selected charge backs that could mean if you are unhappy you might not get any or only a fraction of your money back. Ediets automatically bills you on your credit card at the beginning of each new three-month period. If you do not remember to tell them to stop billing you, you may have to go through a tedious re-crediting process.

For 5 full years of online access, The Performance Diet costs $24.95 (U.S.) for the Basic package and  $39.95 (U.S.) for the Pro package. The Performance Diet does have a Partial Free Trial version that you can download and test at your leisure. The Performance Diet offers a 90-day return policy that is simple and straightforward. If you are unhappy you quickly get all of your money back. There is nothing else to buy for the 5 full years of online support.

Ediet’s diets meal plans and shopping lists are very generic and similar to those you can find free all over the Net or in diet and nutrition books at your local library. Its cookie cutter meal plans are not well customized to your specific personal food tastes and require considerable personal effort to adjust. It seems that to develop a meal plan that is composed of all foods you like; you almost will have to start from scratch. The degree of nutritional detail Ediets displays is again similar to the free diet sites elsewhere on the net.

Edietsfocuses on weekly-required weigh-in results and also uses body mass index tracking (BMI) to measure weight loss progress. It also uses traditional calorie restriction diet planning. Ediets does all its food recording and meal plan adjustment online. Unfortunately the Internet is definitely not ready for doing this type of detailed repetitive data entry recording and switching between screens. Online it is tedious and slow.

The Performance Diet’smeal plans, and shopping lists are highly customizable and able to be personalized within the software that resides forever on your own IBM compatible PC. It promotes using meal plans that are completely composed of your favorite foods and has a meal-planning feature in the software to more easily help you do this than at Ediets. Due to the patent pending NutriCode innovation exclusive to the Performance Diet, the degree of graphic nutritional detail available in the software is far beyond Ediets and is much faster and easier to display.

The Performance Diet focuses on delivering long terms results that you maintain for at least 5 years. That is most likely why the program already includes 5 years online support.

It does track weight and body mass index (BMI,) but it goes beyond that to the higher standards of an effective weight loss program. It tracks body fat percentage and change in lean body weight (muscle mass.) These last two statistics determine if the weight loss is real fat or water and muscle tissue and more importantly, if your likely to keep the fat off for the long term.

The Performance Diet has a newer technology approach to calorie restriction and diet planning. This is because merely restricting calories in and out is simply not the whole story. The Performance Diet uses cutting edge Low Glycemic Food Technology and other new technology approaches to minimizing the "calorie squeezing" starvation effect and to maximize the amount you can eat while still losing real fat.

The Performance Diet does all its food recording and meal plan adjustment within the software on your PC. Besides being faster and offering much more detail in summary reports and graphing capabilities, it is completely secure and under your control. If you’re a person who treasures their privacy, be aware that solicits Ediets and controls on their servers considerable personal information about your health, attitudes, thoughts, feelings and personal behaviors!

Edietsprovides generic exercise recommendations that are the same as one would find in any book that contains general exercise routines.

The Performance Dietshows you how to create a powerful personalized exercise program that is based on the most effective technologies that are focused exclusively on achieving maximum personal weight loss and lifelong goal weight maintenance. It offers a complete ebook to assist you with your cutting edge weight loss exercise program.

Ediets provides good email support when you have questions. They offer online meetings and numerous chat rooms. The Ediets chat rooms and community are very similar to the generic and generalized diet support chat rooms and diet communities already offered free in many places on the Net.

Most of the advice of the Ediets health professionals appears to come in the form of generic, but customized, form letters that also seem to be computer-generated based on answers to standardized questions that you complete at various parts of the program. They try hard with photos and other marketing tools on their web site to create the feeling that you are getting a letter from a real health professional who is personally involved in setting your recommendations, but you can’t help getting the feeling your are really just getting cleverly designed computer output.

They do promote personal assistance from various health professionals, but if your think from their marketing that your going to have the personal and exclusive ear of a $60 an hour heath professional frequently and for long session periods, you may be disappointed.

The Performance Dietalso provides good email support when you have questions. They offer an online bulletin board and through links connect you to a wide variety of online diet chat rooms and diet communities, but diet chat rooms and building a diet community is not a major focus of the program. Performance Diet email support is focused on getting you through the program successfully and on to better things in life. Their approach seems to be not getting you too comfortable in sympathetic diet chat communities.

The Performance Diet does not provide personalized health professional assistance because it is believed that for this to be truly effective would entail a significantly more detailed knowledge of your medical history than Ediets is currently requesting as well as a face-to-face medical interview. That would significantly raise the cost of the program.

At key areas of the Performance Diet program, if needed, you can send printed or emailed summary reports from the software to your local Personal Health Professionals for recommendations or adjustments. The Performance Diet states that your current local health professionals know far more about you and consequently would know how to better adjust the program to your unique and personal circumstances if needed.

You can also use the abundant reference links to additional professional information resources. The Performance Diet empowers you to make the choices with your trusted local Health Professionals to continually tailor your program so that it will work best for you.

Edietsspends a huge budget to market a diet program that implies that it is easy and your will get big fast results, but you can’t free trial it to see if their marketing claims are realistic. It is great diet sales copy, but unfortunately the sales pitch is hardly reflective of the real life experience of 99 percent of all dieters.

Honest and lasting fat loss is not easy or fast. Never was, never will be! It requires considerable effort, time and changes in basic eating and exercise behaviors known to be stubbornly resistant to change.

Ediets, because it is fully interactive only online, suffers all the same problems of other current web sites trying to run intense data entry functions over the net.

The Net and Net enabled software on normal phone lines are just not there yet. It is far too slow and tedious to do repetitive food entries or do extensive meal plan restructuring or creation over the net.

In some ways Ediets, at first, does appear initially easier to use. But that is due more to its content being Generic and "Dumbed Down" for the masses. When you look at this content in more detail you discover that it often does not provide sufficient technological depth to be really useful or to help you understand the principles behind what you are doing.

The Performance Diet tells you right from the start that honest and lasting fat loss is not easy or fast and that it will require considerable effort and time to change eating and exercise behaviors.

Because the Performance Diet it is a hybrid program and most of the repetitive entry food, exercise and meal planning recording is done on your own PC, it does not suffer nearly as much of from the slow and tedious data entry problems of web sites trying to run intense data entry functions over the Net.

The Performance Diet is initially more difficult to learn to use, but it is much easier and faster to continue using once you have learned it. The reasons it is harder to learn initially is because it has far more features than Ediets, it’s features go into far more technical depth (so that you can really understand the principles behind the decisions you will need to make on an ongoing basis) and, the Performance Diet offers you far more cutting-edge Diet Technology than the "Dumbed Down" materials on Ediets.

Edietshas a multi-million dollar web site with great cosmetics. It aggressively markets its product and floods you with new email with continuous success stories or sales pitches for one new product or service after another. When it is not pressuring you to buy something additional, it is trying to get you to sell and recruit your friends into the Ediets program.

The Performance Diethas a simple web site and a simple philosophy. It was designed to get the weight loss job done. It was not designed to make almost every web page be a continuous sales pitch. Once you sign up for the Performance Diet that is it. There is nothing else to buy.

You do not receive scores of emails each month selling you something else or telling you how successful someone else is. The regular support emails you do receive are focused on important technical issues that will make your a diet success. There is no sales pressure to recruit your friends or others into the program. The Performance Diet appears to rely exclusively on demonstrated results to attract the interest of other people seeking similar success.

Ediets:The typical user profile of the Ediets user is unknown, but Ediets does appear to target it’s marketing toward individuals who may be starting their first diet or looking for a fast and easy quick fix.

The typical Performance Diet useris college educated and comfortable with computers and sophisticated technologies. They like to learn and want to resolve things for themselves at their own pace. They are careful shoppers who seek out the best technology and tools. They already know that anything worth accomplishing is going to take effort and time. They are not easily swayed by marketing hype or sales pitches. They are seen by others as independent thinking, successful individuals.

It appears that most of the people who find a home within the Performance Diet have previously tried and failed to find success within at least 3-5 other diet programs. Because of their past experience they know the easy fast dieting hype does not work and they are ready for straight talk and honest results

The Performance Dietoffers many additional features not found in Ediets at all or not found at the considerably higher level found in the Performance Diet software. Some of those additional Performance Diet features are:

1. Cutting edge diet motivation technology that includes an ebook and 6 MP3 motivational tapes.

2. A comprehensive color diet and exercise goal planner to use when you are away from your computer.

3. Extensive symptom tracking.

4. Extensive medical test tracking relating to weigh risk factors.

5. Extensive diet, nutrition and exercise progress, goal and summary reports.

6. A strong cultural approach to finally resolving the weight issue.

Neither organization currently releases detailed success statistics for the 5-year period standard to good weight loss studies. Both have sections of user testimonials. In spite of no published success statistics there are other factors to consider that might help you extrapolate which program has higher user success rates.

Edietshas been in business since 1966. Its stock currently is trading at about 65% off its 52 week high and at a small fraction of its highest post IPO numbers. It has a difficult and stringent refund policy with possible charge backs. Stringent and difficult refund policies usually indicate a play tough attitude to stem a high number of refund requests.

The Performance Diet traces its diet program roots back 20 years. It is privately held so there is no way to determine current stock value, but unlike Ediets its refund policies are simple and full. (It claims to have one of the lowest refund rates in the diet industry.)

Because losing real body fat (not just water weight) takes considerably longer than most dieters think, Ediets is going to cost the user a lot more money over time and in maintenance costs. In fact, the same full 5 years online service you get with the Performance Diet $39.95 Pro package could cost you almost $375.00 with Ediets.

Edietshas a very aggressive marketing and sales driven approach to running a weight loss program. To serve the masses it appears to have been genericised and dummied down. Its dieting and exercise technology appears to be somewhat dated. Most of what Ediets offers can be found on many free dieting web sites on the Net. Ediets also appears to focus much of its resources on building a dieting community and keeping users coming back to socialize for things as far off dieting as horoscope materials.

The Performance Diethas a low-key marketing approach and has a more technology-driven approach seeking to deliver the best tools to serious dieters who want lasting results. The Performance Diet actively promotes getting the dieter off the program and moving onto doing better things with the rest of their lives.

This is a program for individuals who primarily are seeking the cutting edge technology advantage for maximized results. It contains many proprietary technology advantages such as the NutriCode and the exclusive license to the largest lists of Low Glycemic (diet result-enhancing) foods available.

Socializing online with strangers about being overweight and being a long-term member of a community of overweight individuals is not an objective of the Performance Diet. If you are serious and honest about lasting results at a great price and want a program with solid value; the Performance Diet appears to be the hands down diet-technology and online-diet winner.

* This review and comparison represents the personal opinions of the reviewer. The qualities, policies and pricing of either organization were reviewed just prior to 3/3/01 and could be different or upgraded at any latter date. Other editorial reviewers may have different opinions.