If You Can’t Lose Weight Then Diet Pills Must Be the Answer

Or Not. Do Diet Pills Work?

Weight Loss is Such a Challenge that Many People Believe that Our Vaunted Drug Industry Must Have a Solution

A pill for this, a pill for that. Pills for everything… and weight loss pills for our failure to control what we put into our mouths.

There are two major groups promoting the use of diet pills: First, is the pharmaceutical industry and second is the natural products industry (there are actually sites extolling the powerful effects of FAT BURNERS). Both operate in the same way and promote pills as THE solution to your weight control needs.

Interest in pharmacotherapy for obesity continues to increase because it’s so difficult to achieve successful long-term weight management with lifestyle changes alone.

But, once used, it must be continued because when stopped, people regain all the weight they lost.

Now, I have a real serious PhD from the Department of Physiology at the Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia. There, I was taught how to do research. These make-up artists are just scamming you on the virtues of these FAT BURNER products!

How Do the Drugs Work and How Well

Orlisat is a lipase inhibitor:

• it inhibits an enzyme that digests fat
• the undigested fat has to come out of your body and it does so in not pleasant ways
• in recent studies orlistat caused a 6 pound loss vs. 4 pounds on no drug and diet
• drop-out rates on orlistat were 33% and on sibutramine 43%

Sibutramine increases feelings of fullness after a meal so, in theory, one eats less.

Orlistat causes gastrointestinal side effects and sibutramine is associated with increases in blood pressure and heart rate. Both drugs appear to help with weight loss, but scientific evaluation is difficult because of high drop-out rates in clinical studies.

Long-term use of pharmacotherapy requires monitoring:

• 1 year treatment by sibutramine in association with behavior modification and a structured meal plan was three times more effective than drug treatment alone
• therefore, drug treatments alone provide the full risks of drug treatment without full medical benefits
• the point: you still have to eat less, there’s no magic in the drug

What About the Natural Product Diet Pills?

Do you get all the same unwanted e-mails that I get touting the benefits of all these natural weight loss aids?

You know, Hoodia as Seen on 60 Minutes.

Lets name them, there aren’t that many:

• hoodia
• green tea
• ephedra
• caffeine
• acai berry

So Hoodia is supposed to suppress your appetite (so you eat fewer calories — sort of the theme of this site and my books).

And what about the research?

There isn’t any. It’s folklore.

I searched the National Library of Medicine on the search term “hoodia for weight control.” The web page popped up and said, “Your search for ‘hoodia for weight control retrieved no results.”

Hmm… no studies. Are the marketers of the miracle herb aware that there’s nothing to this but folklore? Hey, I’m not down on folklore, so it may work. Yes?

Ephedra and green tea: Both promoted to increase metabolism (so you can burn more calories).

How much?

Do they work?

Yes, and by a couple of percent. Even if I’m generous they up the ante by about 3%. And they’re not additive, taking both doesn’t double it. So, say 3% on a person who has a resting metabolic rate of 1,500 calories per day — the herbs can up the ante by about 45 calories per day (it always comes down to calories, doesn’t it?)

Walk a mile: 100 calories. See my point?

What’s the Diet Pill Conclusion

Both pharmaceutical and natural don’t seem to offer much hope. Both work on altering one’s caloric intake. Nothing new because as I show on this site and in my books, calories are the sole dictator of weight gain, loss, and control.

The diet pills must have some association with eating less and exercising more to realize their full benefit. But the percent of benefit that they provide is very small.

The only free lunch I’m aware of is:

• the low-carb diet, no hunger, automatic 30% reduction in food intake with no effort on your part
• imagine the effect of reducing your calories by 30%!
• no diet pill even gets close
• and vibration exercise
• no effort and fat loss
• new study just showed a reduction of 7% in body fat in vibrating rats

Check out my pages on vibration exercise and read the pages on the low-carb diet. These powerful tools are available right now through Dr. Gregory Ellis’s Targeted Body Systems, your one stop shopping zone for matters related to weight loss, anti-aging, and optimal health.

And what you get here is not some shop-worn cliche of biased science, just the facts as they exist. I had to do it for myself so you might as well reap the benefits of all my on-the-fore-front research.

Glycation: the Cause of Most Degenerative Diseases

Glycation is a Major Killer

Harman’s Free Radical Theory of Aging was the early belief as to the causes of aging.

But the newest theory presented in the mid-1980’s was Dr. Anthony Cerami’s Theory on Glycated Proteins and their effect on aging.

Diabetes is a model of rapid aging. The normal aging process that occurs in non-diabetics accelerates when a person is diabetic. Dr. Cerami focused his initial work on this disease.

Few People Have Heard Anything About Gycation

Dr. Cerami wrote:

“As people age, their cells and tissues change in ways that lead to the body’s decline and death. The cells become less efficient and less able to replace damaged materials.

At the same time, tissues stiffen. For example, the lungs and the heart muscle expand less successfully, the blood vessels become increasingly rigid and the ligaments and tendons tighten.

Older people are more likely to develop cataracts, atherosclerosis, and cancer, among other disorders.

Few investigators would attribute such diverse effects to a single cause.”

It’s Only Recently that the Hazardous Biological Effects of Glycation Have Been Understood

Food chemists from 100 years ago understood the process by which glucose binds to proteins, but biologists were unaware of this process and how it would contribute to disease development.

The chemical reaction was known as the Maillard or browning reaction, the same way meat browns when cooked.

• glycated proteins cause the vast majority of degenerative diseases
• glucose or blood sugar is the offending agent
• diets high in carbohydrates are dangerous
• glucose from carbohydrates binds to tissue proteins, gluing them together
• glucose binds non-enzymatically in a hap-hazard way
• one glycated protein binds to the one next to it and a chain reaction forms

Glucose Also Binds to RNA/DNA, Your Organs, and Blood Vessels

We are all made of proteins that provide our structure and glucose attacks all of them: brain, skin, eyes, organs; everything.

The Medical Establishment is hardly aware of this condition. Patients are encouraged to eat carbohydrates that yield glucose upon digestion. Talk about a dangerous way to eat. Eat fat and reduce carbohydrates.

The focus is still on fat. Fat was never the problem, it was always carbohydrates.

Now, the degenerative diseases are increasing exponentially with the rise in carbohydrate intake.

• arthritis
• heart disease
• genetic problems
• diabetes
• heart and blood vessels
• repair and maintenance mechanisms wear and tear
• eyes become damaged
• skin loses its elasticity
• brain tissue deteriorates
• the list of problems caused by glycation is very long and scary

You Can Avoid Glycation by Consuming a Low- or Carbohydrate-Restricted Diet

Thousands of studies prove that glucose isn’t the inert, non-reactive, non-dangerous substance that most biologists believed it was for the last century.

We consume lots of glucose and we’re constantly building the deadly, irreversible glycated protiens driving us to premature disease and death.
This data shows that glucose and glucose-derived glycated proteins are involved in and speed-up the aging process in all individuals.

Glycation is the main reason that I advocate a low- or restricted-carbohydrate diet.

It Makes NO Difference if the Carbs are Processed, Such as White Flour, or Unprocessed Foods Such as Whole Grains

All carbs digest to glucose and fructose, or fruit sugar, is more dangerous than glucose.
You should reduce your carbohydrate intake to maintain good health and slow the aging process.

My books describe glycation in detail and outline the hazards of carbohydrates. They also show how to correctly follow a low-carb diet. The popular Atkins’s program is full of flaws — learn how to eat healthy, stay away from dietetic and medical advice about what to eat. They’ll still living as if it’s the early twentieth century.

The Cause of Diabetes is Carbohydrate Over-Consumption

Now, that’s an Earth-Shattering Statement that’ll Rock the Medical Establishment

What’s the cause of diabetes?

It’s still a seeming mystery even eighty years after insulin was discovered.

Diabetes is characterized by a physiological state in which the body’s whole metabolism becomes deranged and out of control. Researchers still grapple with the enormous complexity of this disease.

Obesity and diabetes are tightly associated and obesity is just as complex in it’s causes as is diabetes. But, obesity has only one cause and the solution is a simple one. Does that mean that the solution to the cause of diabetes may also be simple?

Hmm….

The Primary Fuels for the Body’s Cells are Sugar and Fat

Is the Use of These Fuels Related in the Cause of Diabetes?

Blood sugar (glucose) control has been and is the primary medical treatment for the cause of diabetes. The use of blood sugar lowering drugs is the focal point of diabetic control.

High blood sugar is what leads to a diagnosis of  Type 2 diabetes.

What has also been known is that there’s a serious disturbance in the body’s handling of fat:

• free fatty acid levels increase
• triglyceride levels increase
• there’s an excessive increase in body fat accumulation in various tissues including muscle

What’s unclear is whether the breakdown in the body’s handling of fat is a result of the diabetic state OR is it actually a primary cause of diabetes?

Improper Fat Handling is Actually the Cause of Diabetes

Why? A diet high in carbohydrates (typical diet for most of us) profoundly disturbs the way the body handles its fat fuel!

Since the 2002 explosion in interest about the low-carbohydrate diet (by the people and by scientists) amazing new information has evolved over the healthful effects of carbohydrate restriction.

It was always just stated that fat was bad and carbohydrates were good. Believe it or not, few ever relied on the scientific facts when making this statement.

Although the medical establishment continues to condemn the low-carbohydrate diet, the cracks in the dam are going to make their position obsolete.

Researchers have found that:

• the low-carbohydrate diet improves sugar control and fat control even if no weight loss occurs — that’s crazy
• risk factors for heart disease and other diseases decrease better on a low-carb diet than a low-fat diet — that’s crazier yet!
• but you can lose weight more easily with low-carb because this diet style causes people to automatically eat 500-1,000 less calories each day with no effort on their part — how crazy is that?

Here’s Why the Magic of the Low-Carbohydrate Diet Works

When cell enzymes, which process fuel, are exposed to carbohydrates, there are several major changes that occur:

• the primary enzyme responsible for converting carbohydrate into fat (did you know that carbohydrates convert to fat?) increases in quantity and in its rate of action
• it converts carbohydrates into fat and this new fat stores in the body’s fat tissues and in muscle as well
• carbohydrates derange the action of many fuel use-based enzymes and fat-handling breaks down and sugar control gets all whacked out
• the sugar problem, then, comes after fat metabolism breaks down
• this is the primary breakdown arising from eating a high-carb diet
• unfortunately, there are very few researchers and far fewer medical clinicians who understand these biochemical pathways

What’s Causing the Rapid Rate of Increase in Type 2 Diabetes?

Our modern diet of a high intake in carbohydrates and our inactive lifestyle work in combo to drive the ever-increasing rise of obesity and type 2 diabetes.

If people would eat fewer calories and increase their physical activity level, this could lead to a reversal of some of the damaging events.

Compliance to this combination has proven to be extremely difficult:

• eating high-carbohydrate diets turns on fat-making from carbohydrates
• fuel levels in the blood decrease and as this new fat stores then hunger sets it because there’s little fuel in the blood
• insulin’s primary job is to control the release of fat from the fat cell
• carbohydrates increase insulin release and two things happen: 1) more fat is made from carbohydrates and 2) fat stays locked in the fat cells
• this deadly scenario plays around the clock as the body is driven into a storage mode
• there’s only one way out: carbohydrate restriction

There’s One Researcher Who Understands the Facts Described Above — In Fact, He Discovered Them But, He Advocates the Use of Drugs to Increase Fat-Burning in the Body’s Tissues

The belief that fat is bad and carbohydrates are good taints the research projects of most scientists. That’s what happened to the man who was a leading diabetes worker, Dr. J. Denis McGarry.

He found that it was the inability to burn fat that was leading to the diabetes epidemic. But he died before he had a chance to really figure out that the diet approach was the way to increase fat-burning, not drugs.

Because our researchers have been held captive by their love of and their passion for what they believe is the health-giving nature of carbohydrates (and the supposed hazards of fat), the vast majority have never studied fat metabolism.

I did, in fact I got a PhD in fuel metabolism.

Now, I know when you eat more fat and restrict carbohydrates, fat-burning increases within a matter of hours in all the body’s tissues.

In fact, in about two weeks, the brain and central nervous system will receive 75% of their fuel from a form of fat called ketone bodies.

This is just what we want — no drugs involved:

• you’ll lose weight
• your health will improve
• your energy will go through the roof because fat is the body’s primary fuel
• you’ll exercise more using a variety of styles including walking, resistance training, and the newest and one of the most powerful forms of exercise — vibration training
• what I’m teaching you are the Ultimate Diet Secrets

So, I’ve now shown that the primary cause of diabetes is a too high intake of carbohydrates which is also responsible for causing you to eat too many calories.

My Ultimate Diet Secrets lite book teaches the whole process of weight control including diet and my Net Carb Scam is a book about diet — everything you need to know about what food to eat — nothing else out there has ever looked at the science of eating as this book does. You’ll realize that when you see the science references I list (if references float your boat).

Dr. Atkins’s Low-Carb Plan Has Many Problems

Serious Flaws in the Design of the Atkins’s Low-Carb Diet Sabotage Unwitting Dieters

If you have heart trouble go to a cardiologist. If you need dietary info go to a nutritional biochemist who has personal experience in being overweight and solving the problem. Atkins was a cardiologist.

Atkins’s low-carb plan claimed that carbohydrates were the primary cause of overweight, and relegated calorie control to the trashbin:

• this mistake led to a flawed design from the top down
• the next problem was that Atkins had no idea how the body processes food as fuel
• it was impossible at this point to create an effective weight loss program

The First Major Blunder was Atkins Low-Carb “Induction Phase”

In the Induction Phase of Atkins’s low-carb plan, one reduces carbohydrates to about 20 grams per day. Why is this a major mistake?

Your body has two different enzyme systems for processing fuel: one for processing fat and one for processing carbohydrates. And, our bodies are very efficient and don’t keep things around that we’re not using: if you’re eating lots of carbohydrates, the enzymes that process them increase, and the ones that process fat decrease.

Most people eat between 200-300 grams of carbohydrate each day. When you drop from that to 20 grams using Atkins’s low-carb, you must burn fat for fuel. And there’s plenty around: fat on your body and now fat from your diet.

But, the enzymes for processing fat are in shutdown mode because there was no reason for your cells to keep them fully active because you were forcing the body to burn carbs just because of the vast number you were consuming.

Now, you go from plenty of fuel to almost none. The fat IS there but you just can’t process it.

What happens next gave the naysayers all the fire-power they needed to condemn the Atkins’s low-carb diet:

• nausea
• headaches
• excessive fatigue
• bad breath
• mental confusion
• lack of zest for living
• rapid ketosis develops (more on this later)
   

Atkins’s Low-Carb Induction Phase is Survived Only by the Hardiest Individuals

When I first did Atkins’s low-carb diet, many, many years ago, I promptly gained 5 pounds. You don’t tell a former football lineman that he can eat all the meat he wants because he’ll do it!

So, that’s how it plays out: some gain weight on Atkins’s low-carb plan, some (5-10%) lose lots of weight — more than 40 pounds — some lose 10-20 pounds, most (who do actually lose) lose 5-10 pounds and then hit the wall.

How did Atkins address weight loss plateaus? He had you cut your carbs by 5 gram increments until, in theory, you started to lose again. Rarely happened.

Of course, since carbs do not control weight and calories do, this plan could not possibly work. Few can tolerate living on less than 30 grams of carb per day.

Easy to give up on Atkins’s diet at that point.

Ketosis: Atkins’s Miracle for Slimness

When I did my PhD, I didn’t know much about ketones. If I had it would have made my work that much better.

I showed that exercising rats who had been administered estrogen switched to fat fuel as a source of energy, preferring it over carbohydrates. My work was published in the Journal of American Physiology. If I had known about ketones, I’m sure I would have found that they were the preferred fuel.

Ketones form during:

• starvation
• eating a low-carb diet
• with estrogen administration
• each condition lowers insulin which controls the release of fat from fat cells: low insulin, fat releases; increased insulin causes both fat and carbohydrates (converted to fat) to be stored in the fat cell

The production of ketones is one of the primary negatives of this diet as claimed by the medical Establishment.

• ketones were first discovered in the urine of diabetics
• that led the medical Establishment to believe ketosis was very bad
• but there’s physiological ketosis and pathological ketosis — one normal and one a disease
• using ketone sticks to test the urinary level is one way to determine ketosis

Ketones are a form of fat fuel. As the fat cell releases fat, it travels to the liver where it’s repackaged into a four carbon compound called a ketone body. This is released to the blood and becomes the primary fuel of all the tissues of the body including your brain and nerves.

(Atkins was unaware of much of this as I found out in 1989 when I was on his NY radio show as a guest. He took me to dinner and ate both his potato AND mine, sorta’ fell off the pedestal.)

Ketosis is a good thing because now you can begin to live off your own body fat and, MOST IMPORTANT, not experience hunger. So, ketosis is good.

How did Atkins mess it up? It takes time for your body to build up the enzymes to process ketones, at least 2-4 weeks. When they’re fully flowered, you start burning all the ketones for fuel and there are none left to spill over into your urine.

You can see now why the Atkins’s low-carb Induction Phase is such a disaster: can’t cut your carbs that hard without dys-regulating many processes. You can survive it, but it’s not easy, particularly when you have no idea what to expect (Atkins doesn’t tell his readers any of this).

So, when you quit losing weight, Atkins’s low-carb plan has you cut more carbs to get back into ketosis (ketones in the urine is how he measures it). But few will spill because they’re burning them as fuel. You cut carbs, as he says, but you’ll still stay stalled in your weight loss efforts.

What do you do? Quit the diet in utter frustation.

Atkins was right to try to create ketosis, but he just didn’t know how to do it correctly. The medical boys were wrong to claim ketosis was a bad thing. Be very careful when medical doctors try to do nutritional biochemistry.

Now that Atkins is Dead, What Happened to His Plan?

Since Atkins’s death the low-carb program has become very popular. And, most follow his plan. Those who took over his company actually published a new book using his plan in its entirety. They have no clue about its extensive flaws.

The other problem is that they have embraced the Glycemic Index or the “Good Carb/Bad Carb” philosophy, integrating it into the overall plan. So now, the diet goes from bad to worse.

Hey, I suffered through a five pound weight gain on Atkins’s low-carb when all I wanted to do was lose some weight.

It took several years for me to work out the issues, but when I finally understood the supremacy of calories and understood the dynamics of “regulation of metabolism” and issues related to enzyme function and adaptation, I was able to work out a plan based on how our body actually works.

Out the door went speculation and belief systems — I developed it based on hard science. My little 52-page book, The Low-Carb Diet: How to Do It Right is a comprehensive primer on doing this diet the right way.