I was that there are so many people are asking about whether certain miracle weight loss drug would work...

I was once very overweight before. I'm not saying I look perfect now, in fact I'm far from it. But I have come a long way from looking the way I did before and this is all through dedication to exercise and commitment to healthy diet.

We all know that if we are consistent with a proper exercise regime and watch our diet, we WILL LOSE WEIGHT!

So why are there so many people looking for the magic bullet fat loss pill or drug? Are these safe for us? Are you sure you want to risk your health just for a slight chance at being able to lose a bit of weight? The natural way is the way to go! Stop looking for the next hydroxycut or ephedrine or mahuang! Put in some effort and look for a proper training program instead.

Yep.

I think for some people it's that when they finally make their mind up that they want to lose weight, they want their body to immediately get with the program and start shedding pounds like crazy.

But it's like trying to turn a battleship. First you have to run the engines backwards just to get the thing to try to slow down and even then it keeps going forward for a bit, then you've got to turn it which takes a while and you might not even see progress for a while, even though there are things happening.

Slow and steady wins the race.

In a consumerist society, we are bombarded with advertisements every day and promises that sway us. Also, many of us have been overweight our entire lives and have tried many diet plans, only to not have them 'work'. It is not hard to understand why someone may be under the sway of some promise of making weight loss a little bit easier. Unfortunately, the consensus is the products do not work and can even be harmful. Since the question comes up so much, this subforum is dedicated to ask and discuss products.

We have a few useful stickies including the Magic Pill sticky
http://www.3fatchicks.com/forum/does...agic-pill.html

Overall, the best way to find out what actually does work is head over to the maintainers forum where we have people who have lost between 10 lbs to over 200 lbs. I've yet to see any of them credit diet pills as part of their weight loss and maintenance.

I agree! It always makes me laugh when people drill me about what I "did." When I tell them I simply ate only nutrious foods, watched my calories and exercised regularly, they don't believe me.
I'm not one to just put my own opinion and advice onto someone, but since EVERYONE asks I eventually try to explain it to them. The concept of losing weight is simple. A calorie deficit and a balanced diet paired for exercise. Its the execution that is hard. It takes a huge amount of willpower to lose weight in a healthy way and sustain the new lifestyle/weight.
A lot of people don't want to be challenged.

Basically, we're lazy and want instant gratification. People don't want to change, change is scary. People also don't want to put in any effort. My God, plan, dice, chop, stew, bake, count, measure, huff, puff, sweat! The horror! *swoons*

couldn't have said it better myself! it really is all about instant gratification. putting in effort is too harddddddddddd.

A very well said.

Plus I, personally, fear those pills.

We are bombarded by media messages of intant fixes - lose 10lbs in a week! Miracle diet will get you 5lbs thinner by Friday! Diet!!!! Exclamation marks!!!! Nobody is going to sell a magazine saying "Lose 35lbs in 6 months", so that is not what we all see.

Also, social attitudes, people laugh at you if you are fat and dieting. For some reason only thin people should eat salads, request nutrition information, etc. If you are fat and you buy a Lean Cuisine and a diet soda just watch the eyes burn into you - she thinks that will make her thin, bet she eats fries every other night.

It's odd, though, as soon as I started to think of my weight loss much more like I thought of other major undertakings such as my degree, driving lessons, etc. then the speed became instantly less important. I calculated how much I had to lose and how long that was going to take and set my sights on a date many months in the future and just started. Much as I don't imagine I can open Beginner's French and be fluent by the end of the week (though that is for sale also!) I realised I can't rush this and I just ahve to put in the investment.

And finally, speed of weight loss is a HUGE thing also, every TV weight loss show concentrates not just on how much weight has been lost but on how fast it's happened. Even in situations where weight loss starts out extreme, it's speeded up for the TV audience, Biggest Loser (here in the UK anyway) is shown once a DAY not even once a week, so not only are you following someone who is losing 12lbs in a week, that week happens in only 24 hours, and the next day they are even smaller, and by the end of 3 weeks they are tiny. If you "admit" to "only" losing 1lb or less a week people just look at you like you fell out of the sky.

There is a pill for everything, high blood pressure, hormonal imbalance, headache, fatigue, cholesterol so must be one for weight loss. Wishful thinking in my book but I must say that the marketing techniques use to promote this type of product practically make you feel as a fool if you do not take it.

So if you have tried the conventional way have failed numerous time I can understand that someone might say they have nothing to loose. Then when it fails the person can say that no matter what they do they cannot loose weight.

But it is not only the pills, how many books about weight loss, funky diet that are not sustainable and quite unhealthy. It is as if we lost the ability to make healthy choice. We all know that excess of food equal weight gain, sedentarity again weight gain. Do we need that much help to understand the , I think we dont but we are made to beleive that we do not have enough judgment to make the right choices. Beside it is a huge industry that need your money to exist.

I LOVE this analogy!!!

When you think about it, changing your life style is not only HARD work but it can be very time consuming with constant planning and modifying and exercising, etc. What it is not, however, is rocket science. To some people to count calories or watch daily intake of sugars, protein, fiber, fat, cholesterol etc. is to much work for them. It requires to much thought and planning. But if you look at it from the perspective of unprocessed, fresh natural food versus prepared, processed packaged food, it can be very easy to figure out. I think people also have to take into account the emotional ties to food from a personal, familial and societal perspective, and that can sometimes be too painful for people to deal with.

I love 3fc because I feel like the majority if not all of us kinda "get it." healthy sustainable weight loss is not easy and no magic pill/cleanse/diet/gimmicky easy exercise equipment(shake weight anyone?) is going to change that fact.
You ladies all took the words right out of my mouth, as I was reading your posts I was losing the comments I wanted to say lol
Unfortunately everyone has to come to that realization on their own if theyre serious about living a healthy lifestyle.

I think that when possible, it is human nature to take short cuts and look for the easy way out... Unfortunately the media and marketing magnates are well aware of this and take full advantage of it.

The reason these products sell so well is because they basically tell people what they want to hear. Even though I am sure people are smarter than that, they live in hope of a miracle.

I guess they lack the self confidence to make the decision to change their lifestyle and nutritional habits by themselves. This is confounded by continually failing with fad/crash diets and so the cycle continues.

Weight loss is complicated, and I don't think everyone is looking for the easy way out, they're looking for ANY way out, and we learn about weight loss the way we learn about everything else - and mostly that's by watching what other people do and say about weight loss. And most of what we learn is wrong.

"Do what I say, not as I do," doesn't work well as a teaching strategy, because we do learn by what others do, not what they say. And while everyone SAYS consistent, sensible changes are the most effective, that's not what most people do.

How many people when handed the employee handbook work "by the book." Every employee manual I was ever given, had procedures in it that no one, including the CEO followed. You learned to do it the way everyone else did, because you got flack if you didn't.

The unwritten rules are always more important than the written ones. People (even when they know they're wrong) 9 times out of 10 will do it the way everyone else does, even if they know a better way.

We learn to do it wrong. We learn to do what everyone else does, and unlearning that can be damned difficult.

I don't believe it's laziness at all, because I worked crazy hard at weight loss when I was younger, but I also followed the path everyone else follows. The worst of which feeling that slow success didn't count as success. Just like everyone else, when the weight loss slowed, I got discouraged and gave up.

I gave up because I was taught (without even realizing I had learned) to give up when the weight loss slowed. I learned that losing slow felt as bad as gaining (because it's what I saw everyone else feel and say).

Finding success for me has been more about unlearning than learning. Learning how not to follow the path everyone follows. Learning to still the voice inside myself that says I must be wrong for taking a different way.

I also had to unlearn some of the common wisdom. I never gave low-carb dieting much of a chance because I didn't see it as healthy and sustainable. I've learned that it's the only way for me to avoid feeling ravenously hungry 24/7, and that more and more of the science is backing up my experiences (that a high-carb diet fuels hunger and weight gain).

It's been decades since I fell for weight loss miracle scams, but I just recently learned to see reduced-carb diets as healthy. If I had been open-minded to low-carb eating, I would have learned that I can lose weight and maintain weight loss easier when I am extremely carb-conscious. But the mainstream view was and is that low-carb diets are unhealthy and unsustainable.

Learning what helps and what doesn't can be extremely difficult, because even when you study the science, it can be difficult to tell the reasonable advice from the ridiculous. Sure the extreme scams are dead give-aways, but low-fat vs. low-carb, which is healthier and why, is still strongly debated even by the experts.

Sometimes "miracles" can come in pill form. I didn't get debilitating arthritis, fibrimyalgia or autoimmune disease with a pill either, but several pills (medications and vitamin supplements) have helped tremendously.

When I had to give up NSAID pain relievers for my fibromyalgia and arthritis, because they were causing lung issues, I had read only one study finding significant arthritis pain relief/anti-inflammator for arthritis patients on large doses of Omega-3 supplements, spread out in three doses over the day (not cod liver oil, that's toxic in high doses).

Even though I was skeptical, it fell into a very tempting category, the "can't hurt, is affordable, and might help." People fall for weight loss scams because they seem to fit that category.

With the Omega 3 supplements, I got lucky. I never would have expected the dramtic difference I got. I started taking a vitamin D supplement for the same reason, and my doctor recently told me to triple to dose. I'm finding symptom relief from that also (to the point I've been able to exercise more than in decades).

I did do research to make sure there were no hidden risks, but they were long shots that paid off.

Finding the only food plan that has worked well for me long-term was also a long-shot. I didn't believe low-carb was sustainable or healthy, so I never gave it much of a chance. When my doctor did recommend it, and I researched it more thoroughly, I found research support for it's healthfulness. I hadn't realized there was some pretty compelling evidence for low-carb dieting (and some good arguments against as well).

I think it's naive to assume that all people who fall for scams are naive. I think there are many different levels and areas of susceptibility involved. Many people who won't take a pill, will try every diet on the best-seller list. Or will try to turn every significant weight loss research result into their own personal experiment of one. I did it twice with amazing results, but went against my better judgement to do it. The "can't hurt, might help" is a pretty strong argument, but you do have to do the research to make sure it truly "can't hurt."

I didn't feel that confidence with low-carb, initially. I expected that it could and probably would be harmful. I was very apprehensive during the first couple of bloodtests (I get bloodwork quarterly because of medications I'm on). I've been pleasantly surprised, as my bloodwork keeps getting better and better.

There can be a fine line between skepticism and closed mindedness. Just as there can be a fine line between open-mindedness and gullibility.