Posts Tagged ‘diet pills work’
How Do Diet Pills Work?
I was actually going to make a post about “do diet pills work?” But I realized that it’s probably better to first explain how diet pills work. A lot of people aren’t really aware of how they work, and the companies making those weight loss supplements aren’t exactly helping with their misleading advertisement. Now as everyone knows there are two aspects that determine weight loss – amount of calories you get from food and amount of calories you spend. Clearly a pill isn’t going to make you spend more energy (regardless of the “burn fat!” claims.) As such the aspect that is influence by diet pills is the amount of calories you get from food.
There are two different ways that diet pills lower your caloric intake. 1. Tricking your mind into thinking you aren’t as hungry – you eat less (appetite suppressants) 2. By blocking some of the food you eat from being absorbed by your body – you eat the same but some of it is blocked thus you get less calories. Both accomplish the same goal but both also run into a similar yet different problem.
Human body is very good at adopting!
Yes, it’s very very good at it, and trying to interfere with it’s natural functions rarely works long term. For appetite suppressants it means that while at first it works exactly like it’s supposed to, after a few weeks (usually) your mind realizes that it is being tricked into thinking you only want to it one sandwich when you really want to eat 2. So your mind counters this situation by increasing the hunger level until you are eating almost as much as you did before despite using diet pills.
So you curse at the worthless pills and stop taking them, sadly your mind has adjusted and without the pills to lower the hunger level you are now eating more than you did before taking supplements. Your mind will of course adjust again and lower the hunger level to it’s natural level, but by the time this happens you have already gained all the weight you lost back.
A similar thing happens with he diet pills that use “blocking” (that’s the scientific term, definitely) except not only does it block calories but also vitamins and minerals that you’d get from food. As such it’s likely even worse than diet pills that use appetite suppressants.
There you have it, that is how most of the diet pills out there work. You can now read part 2: Do Diet Pills Work? and part 3: How To Use Diet Pills To Lose Weight of this 3 part mini series devoted to diet pills and the way they work.
