You’ve seen the ads everywhere, full of muscular, usually male, figures who miraculously lost weight doing a 7-minute workout using Tai-Chi Walking. And who wouldn’t want to be lean and muscular? So you sign up for the app, answer a few questions, and are presented with the answers - including how many calories you should be consuming per day. And if you want to be leaner? You just have to sign up!

You’ll be presented with a time-limited offer, often with one of those “spin the wheel for a discount” type things. You get a good one, so you decide to sign up.

Except that you find that after that first couple of days, the only thing losing weight is your bank account.

You go to cancel, but the provider makes you jump through hoops - for example, only allowing refunds if you can prove you’ve used the app for a certain number of days.

Finally you get out of the agreement, maybe get your money back, and you still need to lose weight.

How to protect yourself
Tai-Chi walking is a legitimate form of exercise that will help you stay healthy, but it’s not meant to make you lose significant weight or gain bodily definition in a hurry. Especially for only seven minutes a day!

Also, watch out for claims that you can drop weight fast. Extreme diets that only have you consuming a small amount of calories per day can cause other health issues - please only go on them after clearing it with your doctor.

While exercise and a controlled drop in calorie intake can indeed make you lose weight, it’s not a speedy process. These scammers rely on lazy people who think they can get around the hard work losing weight takes - dupes that don’t recognize that these ads are AI-generated; the “wise old asian man who’s incredibly buff”, at least in these ads, does not exist.