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.