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Diet pills and the food you eat

Understanding how a diet pill does its job is an important part of trusting it to help you. There are legitimate scientific explanations for why you lose weight when you take them. The three main ways that diet pills work are by affecting one of the following:

• The food you eat (fat blocking)
• The appetite you have (appetite suppressing)
• The energy you use (metabolism boosting)

Each of these is effective in its own right, and each of them warrant a closer look to discover exactly how the diet pill accomplishes its purpose of helping you lose weight. We’ll start with those diet pills that affect the food you eat

Blocks fat

Some drugs can actually affect the body’s ability to break down fatty foods. Thus, rather than breaking down that large steak into its basic components, and applying the extra calories to your net weight, the fat merely passes through your body. These drugs prevent pancreatic enzymes from effectively breaking down the food that passes into the intestines. Since no fatty acids are freed from the food, they cannot be absorbed into the body, and are simply excreted.

Blocks sugar

Other diet pills contain an organic compound (from the bean phaselous vulgaris) which prevents the alpha-amylase enzyme in the body from doing its normal job. The “normal job” of that enzyme is breaking carbohydrates into glucose (sugar). Instead of those carbs converting to sugar and padding your body with more fat, the excess sugar is simply excreted, acting very much like the fat-blocking drugs described above.

Prevents water retention

Some compounds can be taken in pill form that keeps the body from storing excess water. Water retention is one major form of excess weight, and it is not necessarily a condition of obesity. These drugs function as a diuretic, meaning that they elevate the rate of urination, thus eliminating water from the body.