Everyone wants to lose weight. However, not everyone is willing to sacrifice and do the hard work required to lose weight the right way. A lot of people don’t want to give up the unhealthy lifestyle that gave them the weight problems in the first place – fast foods, carbonated drinks, grains and sugars.
Weight loss fads come and go but because there’s never a shortage of people who take the easy way out, weight loss shortcuts never really go away. Americans spend billions of dollars on cosmetic surgery yearly but for those who are afraid to go under the knife, the diet pill seems like the next best thing.
Diet Pills: A History of Hits and Misses
Would you believe that the earliest forms of diet pills contained tapeworms or tapeworm eggs? Ugh. Since tapeworms are parasites, they cling on to the host’s intestinal wall to absorb food as it passes through the intestines. Tapeworms may also cause loss of appetite and pain the abdomen. It’s kind of hard not to lose your appetite knowing that you have parasites inside you.
In the early 1930s, two physicians from Stanford began promoting the use of dinitrophenol (DNP), an industrial chemical that speeds up metabolism and turns food energy to heat, making the user sweat profusely. The downside: DNP’s side effects included potentially fatal fevers and blindness.
By the 1950s, amphetamines came into fashion. Amphetamines are drugs which stimulate the central nervous system and also encourage weight loss by decreasing appetite. But despite good weight loss results, amphetamines were also very addictive and produced disruptive side effects, including increased heart rates, mood changes and chronic insomnia.
The 1990s brought Fen-Phen, a combination of two appetite-suppressing drugs: fenfluramine and phentermine. A University of Rochester study showed that people who dieted, exercised and took Fen-Phen lost an average of close to 16 percent of their weight. The publication of the results of the study put the combination diet pill on the map. However, Fen-Phen’s success was short lived because the FDA withdrew the product from the market after hundreds of cases of hypertension and heart valve disease among users were reported.
Besides appetite suppressants, the fat blocking drug Orlistat also joined the diet pill market. Marketed by Roche as Xenical and by GlaxoSmithKline as Alli, Orlistat is said to prevent up to approximately 30% of diet fat from being absorbed in the body.
Alli, the first weight loss pill to be approved for over-the-counter sale by the FDA, has a gross side effect: it can make you poop in your pants! That’s because if you take Alli and eat too much fat – which you can’t absorb properly with the pill – you’ll suffer the consequences.
Xenical and Alli are still in the market because they haven’t caused as much trouble as ephedrine, which is perhaps the most dangerous diet pill ever to be sold in the market.
Diet Pills Can Kill You
Ephedrine is an appetite suppressant, energy booster and performance enhancer derived from the herb ephedra, called ma huang in China. From 1993 to 2000, the FDA received 1,398 reports of adverse reactions linked to products containing ephedra, including 81 deaths, 62 cases of cardiac arrhythmia, 91 reports of hypertension, 69 strokes and 70 seizures.
The highest profile death was 23-year-old Baltimore Orioles pitcher Steve Bechler, who succumbed to multiple organ failure due to heatstroke after he collapsed during spring training in 2003. Bechler was taking an ephedrine supplement and died less than 24 hours after complaining of dizziness.
The FDA banned the sale of ephedra-based supplements in 2004. But despite the well-documented side effects of using diet pills, people are still willing to risk their health to shed those unwanted pounds.
Just last month, StarCaps, another popular weight loss product being marketed as a “natural” diet capsule, was found to contain bumetanide, a powerful diuretic with potentially dangerous side effects, including serious fluid and electrolyte loss and increase in uric acid levels.
The FDA has released a list of 69 tainted products (including StarCaps), mostly made in China, to warn consumers and help prevent adverse reactions.
Lose Weight the Natural Way
Dr. Mercola explains that contrary to the popular belief that you should eliminate fat, fat cells are actually very important to your body. There are two contributing factors which lead to an increase in fat mass: the number of fat cells and how much fat the fat cells store.
This means that it’s possible for you to have fewer fat cells and still be overweight because your fat cells are at their fat content limit. You can also have more fat cells but still be at your ideal weight because your fat cells are working properly and are not storing extra fat.
Either way, you’re still in control.
It’s not too late for you to take control of your weight. For Dr. Mercola, these four principles are the key to optimal health and weight management:
• Eating according to your Nutritional Type
• Sleeping right
• Managing your stress levels, and
• Exercise
Don’t be a diet pill junkie. Stop waiting for that magic pill. If you want to lose weight and get fit, it can be as simple as changing your eating habits, getting enough sleep, staying stress-free and breaking a sweat. If you badly want to lose weight and keep it off, you can do it.
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