How to Choose Diet Supplement to Help You Lose Weight

A diet supplement may make a variety of claims and the only way to find out more is to carefully research the ingredients.

How Do Diet Supplements Work?

Diet supplements can help you in your weight loss goals but how do they actually work. Well without getting into graduate science here are the basics.

There are many different types or properties to diet supplements and they all work in different ways. Diet pills can fall into different categories, pills that block fat or carbs, pills that suppress your appetite, and pills that burn fat and/or boost your metabolism. But many diet supplements may be a mixture of each.

Blockers

Some diet pills are blockers that prevent the absorption of SOME of the calories you consume from either fat or carbohydrate. They work by blocking enzymes in your stomach and preventing them from absorbing calories.

You instead will pass the calories when you go to the bathroom. In many ways, they are a dieters dream but oily stools are a downside. Typically you shouldn’t take blockers such as orlistat unless you have a BMI of 30 and even though you can get hold of them over the counter, due to certain issues with the medication it’s best to be under a doctor’s care.

Appetite Suppressants

Your appetite is the often the biggest battle when your dieting thus any pill that can ease hunger pangs or make you disinterested in food is always tempting. Some diet pills have soluble fiber which swells and produces a fuller feeling so your less likely to overeat.

And then there are stimulants that affect the brain and nervous system receptors. When the receptors are tricked by amphetamine-like substances you won’t feel hungry.

Metabolism Boosters/Fat Burners

Closely related some pills aim to boost your metabolism so that you burn more calories. And there are fat burning ingredients that are supposed to make you burn your fat to create a lean look when you slim down. Metabolism boosting pills increase thermogenesis or heat production in the body so that you burn more calories.

These ingredients include caffeine, green tea extract, l-carnitine, capsaicin, synephrine, and 5-HTP, conjugated linoleic acid (CLA), and glucomannan.

What To Avoid With Diet Supplements?

Make sure you follow a few rules when taking dietary supplements.

Stick to the dosage: Don’t be tempted to double drop diet pills thinking they will work twice as well. This can have serious implications and cause side effects.

Don’t combine supplements: Ingredients in one supplement may have a bad reaction with another.

Using supplements with medications: Even innocent-sounding ingredients such as Evening Primrose Oil can have serious contraindications when taken with other medications. So, don’t do it. Talk to your healthcare provider first.

What To Look For When Choosing Diet Supplement

Buy the wrong diet pill and you could suffer serious health implications. But for the most part, you will be handling your money over for ineffective pills.

The diet space has an extraordinarily easy barrier to entry and is infiltrated with over-priced MLM products as well as snake oil companies mostly selling close-to-useless, poor quality products and sometimes dangerous products.

So what should you look for when choosing a diet supplement?

Avoid Excessive Stimulants

Watch out for stimulants. While of course, the allure of stimulants is appetite suppression it’s wise to be cautious. Ingredients like green coffee beans and guarana are packed with caffeine. This can dangerously raise heart rate and blood pressure.

It also makes you jittery, agitated and nervous and can cause insomnia and hallucinations. It can sometimes be difficult to sleep when your dieting as you may be a little hungry at bedtime. That can make drifting off hard. Add caffeine to that mix and you could be up all night.

Avoid MLM’s

It’s up to you if you take this point. There are a huge number of MLM companies that operate in the diet space. MLM’s are only good for those that set them up and a few other people ONLY. The salespeople pay to work rather than being paid, and the vast majority lose money. MLM’s are bad for consumers because the prices are inflated for large commissions to be taken out of the selling price. Google the company to find out if you are about to buy an overpriced MLM product.

Research, research & research

Diet supplements often use wild claims and sales pitches that make you think this is the best supplement on the planet. That’s finally the answer to your weight problem. Well, in short, that product doesn’t exist.

The stark truth is that lots of people these days sit at home and want to earn an income. They know a little about something and a lot about nothing. A good way to make an income from home is to sell a supplement. It’s easy enough to pick out some ingredients, order a few batches of the product and put together a bad site with bad English, bad reasoning, and bad science.

Not everyone sat at home who wants to make an income is untalented. There are plenty of slick sites put together in the diet space that has been put together by a team of high-quality professionals in their field of marketing, design, sales, and branding.

But it’s still the same snake oil products that contain ingredients that were picked because of poor reasoning for the consumer. They are usually picked because they are cheap, the same and slightly different from competitors.

It’s your job to find a diet supplement that has been put together by experts. Therefore, you should choose a supplement linked to a trusted health brand or a reputable brand with lots of repeat customers.

Check, Check & Check Ingredients

Read through the ingredients scrupulously. You are putting this stuff inside your body. Cross-reference any ingredients you are not sure about. Dangerous ingredients are still getting into diet products. For example. Phentabz as we reported still use the banned substance DMAA. They do so because it works in burning fat and suppressing appetite. But it’s also banned because it’s dangerous.

Also, make sure that ingredients are clearly labeled with the amounts listed at least for the active ingredients they are making claims about. That way you can check they have added the optimal dosage in the supplement.

The ingredients are a good place to start in terms of any claims that a supplement may make. They may show relevant studies claiming they ran trials. Usually, it is a study based on ingredients and they have therefore added that ingredient product to their product with the express purposes of being able to quote said study.

Nevertheless, the research may prove an ingredient to be effective. If that’s the case you could go right ahead and take that supplement.