Does anyone know if prescription diet pills (if so, which ones?) or those B-12 injections really work?

Which prescription pills? The success rate tends to very depending upon which pill.

I don’t know :( I am going to call my primary care doctor tomorrow and make an appointment. I just want to have some suggestions under my belt before going in, so I know what to ask for.

@MCBeat Diet pills are usually a bad idea. They help you loose weight, but they screw with the rest of you quite badly, especially your emotions.

I heard something about taking them with an antidepressant, now that makes sense as to why. How do they mess with you? I honestly feel like they’re my only option though…

@MCBeat Why do you need to loose weight so badly? Isn’t it better to be a little overweight – hardly in the danger zone of health – than have an emotional roller coaster every minute of every day?

It’s not that they make you depressed, but rather that they make you emotionally unstable – first you’re depressed, then anxious, then laughing, then horny… It’s more like extremely stereotypical severe PMS, all month long.

The pills are only helpful for SHORT TERM weight loss.

As already mentioned, they REALLY mess with your emotional/mental stability. That same rollercoaster effect happens with your weight. Well respected documented medical studies have shown that yo-yo dieting (constant up and down weight loss patterns) are significantly WORSE for your overall health than simply being overweight.

As soon as you stop taking the pills, you’ll start to gain the weight back. Then you reach a certain gain and decide to go back on the pills. You lose the weight, stop the pills and guess what? It becomes an endless destructive up/down yo-yo cycle.

Years ago they thought they had found the magic combo of two drugs which could be taken together longterm. Read about the Phen/Fen situation for yourself. People ended up dead from or permanently debilitated from a fatal heart condition precipitated by the combination of the two.

There is no magic pill. If you start down that road, you’ll eventually regret it.

Your best bet is to find a competent nutritionist to develop a balanced plan that you can adopt for life.

Unless someone is morbidly obese and qualifies for surgery, typical medicine really doesn’t have any magic solutions for sustained weight loss and any HONEST Dr. will state that. The best they can do is suggest a balanced diet. And most medical school curricula devote little time to diet and nutrition.

You’re better off going to a nutritionist who has specialized in this field.

The average MD is great for running tests to pinpoint any abnormalities and treating for those. But if there are no abnormalities, there aren’t any magic pills that will do the trick without doing far more harm in the long run.

The multi-million dollar drug and diet industries would very much like to convince us and our Doctors otherwise, but the plain fact remains that there are no easy quick solutions that can work for any length of time.

Weight Watchers is at least based upon a pretty well balanced diet without extremes but it’s gotten more complex and commercialized over the years.

A competent nutritionist could do the same.

From your description it doesn’t look as if you’re that horrendously overweight. You’re tall for a woman and obviously athletic so you’d do well to get some study done to determine your muscle to fat ratio.

You might also want to do a little research on a model named Emme (sp). You may find her story interesting.

Before your doctors appointment, start journaling everything that goes into your mouth. It will help him/her look at your diet and determine if you have a calorie problem or some other problem.
It’s easy to get calorie amnesia. Journaling keeps you accountable to yourself as well as to the doctor. You might just find yourself avoiding high calorie foods because you don’t want to write them down.

The doctors I use to work for prescribed Phentermine for a few patients. It can have a big effect on the users blood pressure and heart rate and it isn’t always effective for weight loss. Every patient that was on it had to come in at least monthly to have their weight, blood pressure, and heart rate checked. If their blood pressure and heart rate increased, they had to stop the medicine. If they didn’t lose weight within the first few months, they had to stop the medicine.

@SOC

I noticed that it was just the one “phen” so I’m assuming that was AFTER the horror of combining it with the other “phen” became obvious. Is that correct?

Just for curiosity, do you know what was the longest period of time for which it was prescribed? It would also be interesting to know how many of the patients slowly regained the weight after stopping the pills.

I forget where I read this, but the long term failure rate for the diet industry and pharmaceutical indrusty is around 98%.(regarding weight loss specifically). Do you have any info anecdotally or statistically how true that may be? Or maybe the patients for the office you worked in?

Just curious.

@Buttonstc these were all within the past 2 years while working at the doctor’s office I was at. The longest I personally saw anyone on it was 6 months. The doctors would always stress the importance of lifestyle changes with their patients and made sure all of them knew it was just something to give them a little help in the beginning. Most of the patient’s I saw on it didn’t really benefit from it. Most ended up either having blood pressure/heart rate issues or just not losing weight while on it. Of the patients that lost weight, I’d say maybe half kept it off while I was there.

Thanks for the info. It doesn’t surprise me.