[Thighs Be Gone]

Hi Ladies.

I blog on another website that is much smaller than 3FC. Most there meet criteria for morbidly obese/super-morbidly obese. In other words, the posters have an urgent need for REAL answers and not malarky!

Recently, we have a new poster that is advocating a pill called PROACTOL. I am wondering if he is just trying to sell something or it's legit. He says he has lost a large amount of weight using it. I did a GOOGLE on it and couldn't find anything negative about it. However, I know there is no "magic bullet" so to speak and want to provide the posters there with some definite information.

Does anyone here have any experience with this pill or know anything about this?

[nelie]

Thighs Be Gone - The weight loss pill market is a multi-billion dollar industry so it is not unusual to get people advocating pills in an effort to make money. That isn't to say that the user in question isn't legit but here is what I found about the pill. It is made from the fiber of the Opuntia Ficus-indica cactus. This is actually a cactus I grew up eating and is common in the southwest US as well as Mexico. If you've ever seen 'Nopales', this is the cactus that it is made from and there is a really good tasting fruit that comes from this cactus. It is extremely cheap and easy to grow which is part of its popularity.

Anyway back to the claims of the pill. The pill claims that the fiber of this cactus can act as a fat binder similar to Alli and similar to another off the shelf pill that came out years ago which the name escapes my memory. Proactol advertising is deceiving in that they claim they were recently featured in a reputable news publication as being recommended but if you go look at the news site, it is clearly a paid advertisement.

Does proactol work? Who knows. If it does, it'd work similar to Alli in that you need to follow a low fat diet and your colon isn't too keen on fat passing through it so you'd expect to have 'issues' if you ate too much fat. Of course that would be one way to test the pill although its not a test I'd want to perform.

It also costs more than Alli which is an FDA approved and tested medication. So if someone truly wanted a fat binder, I'd tell them to go with Alli over Proactol which is a lot of advertisement, a lot of money and doesn't appear to have any independent studies showing its efficacy.

[bindersbee]

Be VERY wary. Someone recently posted and expose' on the Acai berry sales tactics and these weight loss pill people generally use similar tactics.

For example, they manipulate google results to 'hide' anything negative back further in the results. Try looking at the page 6 or 10 feedback instead of the first few pages. Google works by links, the more links, the higher the site places in the search results. These so-called average folks are often paid sales people.

If you can buy this product at Costco or some other store, fine. Give it a try. DO NOT, however, order it online! What these companies are after is your credit card and they will send you refills every month after your 'free trial' ends. It is almost impossible to get it cancelled. The scam isn't necessarily the product but rather in the company's business practices.

Does the specific 'supplement' you asked about participate in this? I don't know but just on the possibility of that happening, I would NOT buy it online. If it is only offered online then it's probably a pretty good guess that it's worthless. There is no magic pill as we all know. The super-obese would obviously be more desperate and overwhelmed about getting the weight off and therefore more vulnerable to the kind of 'marketing' described above.