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What You Should Know About Weight Loss Medication

admin — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 19:38:00 +0000

There comes a point in the fight with obesity where you may just say, “Forget diet and exercise, I need weight loss medication!” The good news is that there are a wide variety of weight loss drugs on the market today. The bad news is, there’s pretty much never going to be a circumstance where you can truly forget about diet or exercise. That doesn’t mean that weight loss drugs are useless, of course – far from it. Weight loss medication can be very helpful in your quest to lose weight.

There’s a big difference between over-the-counter diet pills and genuine, prescription weight loss medication. Anyone can buy diet pills. Usually, the only function that diet pills provide is a boost to a person’s metabolism through assorted herbal compounds and a generous dose of caffeine. This can be enough for some people when combined with diet and exercise, but it’s not always going to get the job done in severe cases.

Prescription weight loss drugs are, of course, tougher to obtain. When your doctor feels that weight loss drugs are the way to go for you, he’ll recommend them for you and write a prescription. Generally, weight loss medication is only prescribed to people with a body-mass index of over 27, and even then, sometimes only if that person suffers from obesity-related symptoms.

Obesity-related symptoms are numerous, and can include: heart disease and stroke, high blood pressure, diabetes, cancer and more. If you’re suffering from these symptoms, then you need to lose weight, and fast. Losing weight is more than just a matter of fitting into your summer swimsuit – the symptoms it can cause can be life threatening!

Most weight loss drugs are meant to only be used for a short period of time – a couple weeks, months at most. There are a few medications made specifically for longer-term use, but their safe use has not been tested past 2 years. Again, your doctor will be able to advise you of the dosage and length of time that you should use any weight loss drugs he or she prescribes.

Most of the weight loss drugs on the market today are one of two types: appetite suppressors or fat absorption inhibitors. Those are a lot of big fancy words for saying that these drugs either make you get hungry less or make less of the fat in the food you digest “stick.” Only one fat absorption inhibitor is legal in the United States, so most of the time a doctor will prescribe an appetite suppressant.

Ironically, appetite suppressants actually work on your head, and not your stomach. These drugs trigger the release of a natural chemical in your brain that helps keep your appetite in check. Basically, your brain believes that you’re not hungry or even full when you’re actually not. With these types of weight loss medication, you’ll have less desire to eat to fill yourself up, but you’ll still need willpower to avoid eating for pleasure, so hide those chocolate bars!

Weight Loss Diet Fads

admin — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 14:09:31 +0000

The Diet Guy asked:

Obesity is a physical state that refers to excessive body fat. Chances are you have experienced the frustrations of dieting at least once in your life, if you have problems with your weight. Close to a hundred million Americans go on a weight loss diet in any given year and up to ninety-five percent of them regain the weight they lose within five years. Worse, a third will gain back more weight than they lost, in danger of “yo-yoing” from one popular diet to another. The conventional approach to weight problems, focusing on fad weight loss diets or weight loss drugs, may leave you with just as much weight and the additional burden of ill health.

Today, an estimated sixty-five percent of all American adults are obese or overweight. Our culture obsesses about staying thin even as we grow fatter, but this isn’t about appearances. Obesity is known to be a precursor to many debilitating health conditions such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, osteoarthritis, and gallbladder disease. Obesity contributes to as many as 375,000 deaths every year. In addition, the public health costs for obesity are staggering. According to researchers at Harvard University, obesity is a factor in 19% of all cases of heart disease with annual health costs estimated at 30 billion dollars; it’s also a factor in 57% of diabetes cases, with health costs of $9 billion per year.

Set Realistic Goals:

No doubt you have fallen for one or more of the weight loss diet schemes over the years, promising quick and painless weight loss. Many of these quick weight loss diet programs undermine your health, cause physical discomfort, flatulence, and ultimately lead to disappointment when you start regaining weight, shortly after losing it. Fad or quick weight loss diet programs generally overstress one type of food. They contravene the fundamental principle of good nutrition – to remain healthy one must consume a balanced diet, which includes a variety of foods. Safe, healthy, and permanent weight reduction is what’s truly lost among the thousands of popular diet schemes.

Some of the weight loss diet schemes reign supreme briefly, only to fade out. While some wane from popularity due to being unproductive or unsafe, some simply lose the public’s curiosity. Examples of such fad diets include the South Beach Diet, Atkins diet, the Grapefruit diet, Cabbage Soup diet, the Rotation diet, Beverly Hills diet, Breatharian, Ornish Plan – the list goes on and on. These fad diets advocate a specific technique (such as eliminating a certain food, or eating only certain combinations of foods) in conjunction with the basic idea that the body makes up the difference in energy by breaking down and utilizing some part of itself, essentially converting matter into energy. This self-cannibalism, or catabolism as it is referred, typically starts with breakdown of stored body fat.