by Lynda Lampert

Created on: November 23, 2008

No, diet pills do not work. Most diet pills are little more than glorified caffeine pills. They increase your body's functioning and perhaps make you want to run for miles, but they do not provide any sort of lasting weight loss.

Do they even help you to lose weight? I doubt this one particularly. Taking a stimulant may keep you up all night, but the only real fat burning benefit it has is caused by increased exercise. Caffeine and derivatives have a diuretic effect, so you will lose water weight, but this is not true weight loss. You're paying quite a bit of money for things that are only fooling you into believing that they work.

Let's look at what it really means for something to work. If something works, it solves the problem and allows you to move onto another. This is not the case with diet pills. When you take them and have tremendous energy, perhaps you will lose ten pounds. When you stop taking them, nothing has really changed. You still eat what you do and then go back to the same ways of exercising. You don't learn how to eat and don't develop the right habits of exercise to effect true weight loss. In essence, these pills are a gloss that hides the truth.

There is even evidence that diet pills could kill you. If you had a heart arrhythmia that was not diagnosed, the stress of such a stimulant could throw your heart into a lethal rate. Even most healthy hearts can't handle very high heart rates. Dehydrating the body is not good for the system overall and can result in going to the hospital to get fluids. Lack of potassium, magnesium, and calcium in the blood have muscle and heart repercussions that are directly related to severe dehydration. Diet drugs can induce heart attacks, damage heart valves, and irritate just about every system in the body. An overdose of these pills can be deadly. Again, the human body was not designed to take the sort of punishment a constant stimulant provides.

Also, take a look at the other ingredients in diet pills. Shark teeth extract and other ridiculous sounding names have absolutely no scientific basis in the pursuit of weight loss. I am all for alternative medicine, but I need at least some sort of proof that I'm shelling out my hard earned cash for something helpful. The drug companies expect you to pay for custom blends plus a stimulant. There is no science and a lot of empty promises with these drugs.

Don't be fooled by the claim of no caffeine, either. It is known by other names, ephedrine (also ephedra) being the most notorious. Before you put anything in your body, be sure that you know exactly what it is and what it is supposed to do. If you have underlying health problems, don't even try. Talk to you doctor about it, and he'll also tell you not to waste your money.

In short, if you want to lose weight that badly, do it safely. Take the money for the pills and buy a gym membership. At least you would have a fighting chance with proper diet and exercise.

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