Diet pills are manufactured to help, support or supplement individual weight loss efforts. That said, it’s important to note that these are not products that cause weight loss on their own (no matter what their manufacturers might claim. It is imperative to include routine exercise and a healthy diet if you want to achieve measurable results, particularly those that will last for more than a few hours at a time.
There are many different types of diet pills on the market. Within each category, there are hundreds of options from which to choose. That said the best ones depend on what you are trying to accomplish. After all, if you’re taking an appetite suppressant but your top lifestyle change to help drop the pounds has to do with exercising more, then you’re not going to maximize your benefit.
Choosing Types of Diet Pills to Support Your Weight Loss Strategy
Ideal over-the-counter diet pills are generally the ones that you’re comfortable using, that contain clinically researched ingredients, that contain substances to which you are not allergic, and that provide benefits that suit your weight loss strategy.
Therefore, before getting started in looking into the types of diet pills and what they claim to do, you need to know how you intend to lose the weight.
- Are you going to cut back on your calories overall?
- Do you plan to follow a low-fat diet? Is a low-carb diet more of your style?
- Do you know you’ll be sticking to a more specific plan like Paleo, Keto, or even the Plant Paradox?
- Are you aiming for a more doctor-recommended plan like the Mediterranean diet or even DASH?
- Will you also be boosting your fitness level through cardio and/or strength training workouts?
Each of your answers will help you to better understand what your efforts and your challenges will be. From there, you will be better able to know which diet pill types will give you the most support.
The Most Common Diet Pill Types
Some of the most common types of diet pills include:
- Energy boosters,
- Appetite suppressants,
- Fat burners,
- Fat blockers
Energy Boosters
Energy boosters are typically considered to be the most helpful all-around types of diet pills. These options provide general weight management support by giving you a hand in several areas of your weight loss strategy. These do so by helping you to combat fatigue while enhancing your workout performance.
Don’t think that sounds like much? Wait until you give it a try. Fatigue and exhaustion are among the top complaints associated with healthy dieting. Fatigue can cause you to skip workouts, cheat on your eating strategy, drag during exercises, and experience cravings for sweet and fatty foods.
By upping your energy levels, you give yourself a sincere advantage in keeping up with your exercises, powering through fat burning workouts, staying driven to stick to your healthy diet and overcoming – or even eliminating cravings.
Appetite Suppressants
Appetite suppressants play the role of keeping an individual from having thought regarding food for long periods. These suppressants ensure that one feels completely full after consuming relatively small quantities of food. This is quite favorable because the ideal plan for weight loss consists of frequent meals but in rather small quantities.
Appetite suppressants are commonly prescription stimulant drugs and may act similarly to amphetamine in the body. Studies indicate that the medications of appetite suppressants are at their best when in combination with a program for weight management.
Fat Burners
Fat burners are also common types of diet pills and they aid in turning consumed fats into energy while raising the individual’s metabolism to ensure more efficient burning of calories. The body is capable of burning calories even while resting, but this requires the metabolism to be high. To experience a rather heightened experience level is dependent on the variety of the metabolism booster in use.
Similar to appetite suppressants, fat burners assist in appetite regulation through a hypothalamus action in the brain. A release of chemicals to the brain increases the response of stress hormone adrenaline, also known as the flight or fight mechanism. Triggering the stress response leads to burning of more calories by the body due to the perceived danger, while the body continues resting.
Fat Blockers
Fat blockers enhance the weight loss process by binding to the available fat in one’s meal to make certain that the body absorbs minimum fats in relation to the digested meal. Excess waste is usually eliminated in waste form but in this case, fat blockers consist of a side effect of causing oily discharge.
This is most common after the consumption of large amounts of fats which require to be somehow eliminated. A perfect example of a fat blocker is Alli. Carbohydrate blockers work in a similar manner but with carbohydrates. Fat blockers are also known as fat binders and they are only capable of assisting someone with a high intake of fat in their diet.
Other less common types of diet pills include ephedra diet pills, carb blockers and prescription diet pills such as Phentermine. Prescription diet pills can only be obtained with a physician’s prescription and are meant for use only by morbidly obese individuals or people with health problems related to their overweight situation.