A Palmerston North woman is angry, embarrassed and out of pocket after an American company used her photograph without permission to sell "celebrity" diet pills.Maree Briggs, a mother of 2, says the photograph was used without her knowledge in an online testimonial for Metabo-Speed XXX, a dietary supplement touted as "the diet pill of the stars"

She practically blamed Mel Gibson* for why diet supplements are not regulated as drugs by the FDA and attempted to scare viewers with the extreme case of a woman's nose falling off!

The woman was following the Atkins diet and took supplements sold by the company. She spent four days in intensive care, the team reported.

The Atkins Nutritional Approach, popularly known as the Atkins Diet or just Atkins, is the most marketed and well-known low-carbohydrate diet. It was adapted by Dr. Robert Atkins in the 1960s from a diet he read in the Journal of the American Medical Association and utilized to resolve his own overweight condition following medical school and graduate medical training. After successfully treating over ten thousand patients, he popularized the Atkins diet in a series of books, starting with Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution in 1972. In his revised book, Dr. Atkins' New Diet Revolution, Atkins updated some of his ideas, but remained faithful to the original concepts.The Atkins franchise, a business formed to provide products to those individuals on the diet, has been highly successful due to the popularity of the diet, and is considered the iconic and driving entity of the larger "low-carb craze". However, various factors have led to its dwindling success and the company founded by Dr. Atkins in 1989, Atkins Nutritionals of Ronkonkoma, New York, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in July of 2005, two years after the death of Dr. Atkins. The company re-emerged in January 2006, and the Atkins logo is still highly visible through licensed-proprietary branding for food products and related merchandise.