Diet Pills Exposed!

We all try our best when it comes to losing weight, but sometimes the demands of modern life make it hard to shed those few extra pounds. Fitting an exercise routine around a 9-to-5 job, while maintaining your social life, can prove an impossible job for the most committed dieter. That's where we need a bit of assistance, and that's where diet pills come in. No professional would tell you that diet pills are an ideal solution. However, the stress that modern life puts us through means that they are sometimes a necessary last resort.

Diet pills are drugs sold by drug companies which are claimed to produce a weight reduction benefit. They are of different kinds and work at different levels of the human physiology. Some can be enlisted as below:

• Prescription pills which are potent and can be taken only if prescribed by a doctor.
• Over the counter medications.
• Fat blockers
• Hormones which act upon the system to induce rapid satiety
• Herbal appetite depressants.

The effectiveness of diet pills has been intensively studied by many international organizations and research institutes. Unfortunately, this research is often not published in a suitable way for the customer to be able to compare the different diet pills, nutritional supplements and weight loss products available on the market. So here is our attempt to simplify stuff for you!

• Sibutramine
  

  This medicine acts by preventing the breakdown of the feel good and satiety hormone "serotonin". Thus, this neurohormone, once synthesized is available for a longer time making us feel full. It also makes a person feel relaxed and confident. One of its close drug called "amphetamines" was used by many elite university intellectuals as a performance enhancing drug. It also suppressed the appetite and the person felt alert, active, happy, energetic and the mind seemed to be at a very high level of creativity. But as expected, after the drug effect would wear off the person would hit abysmal levels of depression. The side effect of this drug is that it may exhaust the supplies of serotonin after sometime leading to a deep depression which again kicks starts the pleasure eating phenomenon.

• Phenteramine

  This medicine enhances the availability of epinephrine which leads to the feeling of fullness and the person does not feel like eating. The side effect of this drug is that because of its cholinergic action, it results in dry mouth, constipation and a rapid heart beat which may be potentially harmful for people with weak hearts. In fact, a very potent and popular preparation consisting of fenfluramine and pheteramine called "fen-phen" was banned after many deaths were reported due to sudden unexplained heart failure.

• Penylpropanolamine
  

  It is an ingredient that was used in prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) weight control drug products to control appetite. Now, it is no longer sold without a prescription due to a somewhat increased risk of stroke in younger women.

• Rimonabant
  

  This drug is peculiar because it mimics the actions of marijuana. It blocks the action of endocannabinoids which results in lessening of food cravings and gives the person a sort of a high.  But the good effects are short lived and continuous dosage leads to an addiction.

• Fat Blockers
  

  Many fat blockers like orlistat were introduced to prevent the dietary fat in the intestine to be broken down to smaller easily digestible portions. As a result, the fat passes out of the intestine without getting absorbed. The side effect of this medicine is that the fat soluble vitamins like vitamin A, vitamin K, vitamin D and vitamin E are no longer absorbed by the body resulting in their respective deficiencies.

Besides these above listed medication, there are a lot of plant-based products like HCA (based on the citric acid pathway) that can be used for weight loss. Even hormones like Ghrelin which increase the appetite or PPY which induces satiety are used as a method for weight loss. These medications do act or block some part of the metabolism, but this is completely unnatural. As obesity is a self created disease; therefore interfering with the metabolism only leads to severe serious side effects.

These pills mentioned above do offer hope for trimming ever-expanding waistline but there's no miracle potion out there to automatically shrink you back into your college jeans. These diet drugs work only if you also change your lifestyle, and that means following the same old advice of dieting and exercising.