Method
How we review
A review site is only worth reading if you can check its work. This page is the method, the limits of it, and the rules we hold ourselves to — written down so you can hold us to them too.
Start with what we do not do
We have not taken any of these products. Not the supplements, not the medications. Every entry on this site is researched from what the company publishes on its own pages, on a date we record and print on the entry.
That is a real limitation and we would rather lead with it than bury it. It means we cannot tell you whether something works, how it felt, or whether you will still be taking it in six months. Any site that answers those questions for 138 products at once is not answering them from experience either.
It is also why there is no score out of ten anywhere on this site. A score implies a verdict, a verdict implies somebody used the thing, and nobody here has. We removed the scoring rubric rather than populate it with numbers we could not stand behind.
What we rank on instead
Every product gets one point for each of these 8 fields its manufacturer publishes. No judgement enters the count, which means you can check any product’s number against its page in about a minute and tell us if we got it wrong.
Directions
How much to take, when, and with what. Absent surprisingly often on products sold by the bottle.
Warnings
Who should not take this, and what to do if something goes wrong. A fibre product that does not warn you to drink water has omitted a safety instruction, not a marketing line.
Allergens
Dairy, soy, gluten, shellfish and the rest. Cheap to publish, and its absence tells you how much thought went into the label.
Third-party testing
Whether an independent lab verified identity, potency and contamination — and whether the company says which lab and for what.
Refund terms
The actual window, what voids it, and who pays return shipping. This is where the gap between the marketing and the policy is usually widest.
Shipping
Cost, thresholds and where they will send it.
Headline pricing
What one unit costs, published somewhere you can find before checkout.
Subscription terms
What recurs, at what rate, and how you stop it. Products that only reveal this at the payment step lose the point.
This measures transparency, not quality. A company can publish all 8 fields and sell you something that does very little — several do. What a high count tells you is that they were willing to put the details in writing, which is the precondition for judging anything else.
Why ties are everywhere
Most of the market clears this bar. Ranking positions among products on the same count are not meaningful, and no page here claims otherwise — a product listed above another with an equal score has not beaten it. We would rather publish an honest tie than break it with a tiebreaker we invented to make the list look decisive.
What we read, and how we read it
We take the manufacturer’s own product page, label image, FAQ, refund policy and terms, retrieved on the capture date stamped on the entry. Where a field is not published we record it as not published. We never infer it, never fill it from a competitor, and never estimate a dose from an ingredient list.
Two distinctions matter a great deal in this category and we apply both strictly. First, evidence for an ingredient is not evidence for a product containing a fraction of the studied dose. Second, evidence for a molecule is not evidence for a service that dispenses it without the supervision the trials included.
For telehealth providers the same principle applies to terms rather than labels: we count how many of twelve standard disclosures each company publishes about pricing, medication type, prescriber relationships and cancellation. That is the provider method, applied across all 461 of them.
Conflicts of interest
We currently earn no commission on anything published here. Not one supplement, not one provider. There is no affiliate relationship behind any entry on this site, and the affiliate disclosure page names that plainly rather than implying a commercial model we do not have.
The rules we work to: rankings are arithmetic and cannot be set by hand. We do not accept payment for reviews, for placement, or for a position, and we have no sponsored posts. If a commercial relationship is ever signed, the disclosure page and the entry itself will say so before any link goes live.
There is one hand-set position on the site and we would rather name it here than have you find it. One product sits at position one as a featured placement: chosen by the publisher rather than produced by the disclosure ordering. No money is involved, it is labelled every time it appears, and everything below it is ordered on the count as normal. The review of that product is written to the same standard as every other, criticisms included. Full terms are on our affiliate disclosure.
Corrections
We get things wrong. When we do, we fix the page and note what changed rather than quietly editing it. If you have found an error — particularly a disclosure we have counted wrongly, or a piece of research we have characterised badly — write to corrections@tomsweightlossrankings.com and we will look at it.
Companies are welcome to dispute an entry through the same address. We will correct anything factually wrong, including a field we recorded as unpublished that turns out to be published somewhere we missed. We will not remove a recorded gap because a company would prefer it were not there.
What we are not
We are consumer product researchers. We are not doctors, dietitians, pharmacists or clinicians of any kind, and nothing published here is medical advice or a treatment recommendation for you specifically. Where we describe research, we are summarising published literature as careful lay readers, not practising medicine.