Exercising While Taking Weight Loss Pills?

It's a fast-paced world, and over the past few decades people in the West have become accustomed to quick fixes for everything from food to entertainment and transportation. It should be no surprise, then, that the weight loss industry has followed suit. Promises of quick weight loss, simple changes, and low-effort corner-cutting in the struggle for a trimmer figure have become synonymous with the diet industry, leading to much criticism (and a couple lawsuits).

Diet pills are a natural outgrowth of the race for a quicker, faster, more convenient way to lose weight. Some companies claim that all you have to do is take their pill and you'll lose weight. Others more correctly say that their pills can help you get to your goals faster, but that you still need to maintain a good diet and pursue exercise.

But what of the companies that claim you can lose weight on their pills, without exercising? That's something we'll be looking at today.

What Weight Loss Pills Do

What exactly will a weight loss pill do, left to itself? The fact is that there are different types of pills that will all affect you differently.

Some pills affect your appetite. These are known as appetite suppressants. The principle behind these pills is that they can reduce your hunger levels, eliminating the cravings and hunger pangs that lead so many to veer off their prescribed diet plans and go back to their old eating habits.

Other pills are called fat blockers. They essentially do what their name implies: they block a certain percentage of fat from being digested by the body by deactivating an enzyme in the gastrointestinal tract. With fewer calories coming in from fat, people are supposed to be able to lose weight without significantly changing their diet.

Other pills are "thermogenics," or pills that claim to increase your metabolism. By taking these pills, your body is supposed to more quickly convert blood sugar and fat to energy, making you less likely to store fat and making you burn more calories per day without increasing your physical activity level.

How Exercise Helps

Without increasing your physical activity level, the effects of the pills listed above is seriously hampered.

For example, while appetite suppressants can help you avoid eating as much as you used to, if you're not getting enough physical activity then your metabolism isn't going to be very high. While you're not eating as many meals, your body also doesn't need a lot of energy to support itself, meaning that despite eating less often you can still end up eating enough calories to maintain, or gain, your weight. Exercising will rev up your metabolism, causing your body to need more calories in order to maintain your weight, allowing the calorie-restricting effects of appetite suppressants to work even better.

Fat blockers can prevent a certain amount of calories from fats from being ingested, but that doesn't mean you're going to lose weight. You can still get a lot of calories from other sources, such as carbs and sugars, things that aren't affected by these types of pills. And without exercise, you can end up not losing any weight simply because your body isn't expending enough energy to make up for what you're eating. Exercising makes sure that, while your body is passing on almost 25% of the calories from fat that you take in, you're still expending calories on your own through physical exertion.

Metabolism pills claim to do just that: rev up your metabolism. The problem is that many of these pills are little more than caffeine pills (although some contain other stimulants like theobromine, yohimbe extract, and synephrine) which can increase your energy level, but not necessarily increase the rate at which you burn calories and fat. However, even if a pill could increase your metabolism, it wouldn't likely be able to increase it to the point where the weight is just dropping off of you. That's why exercise helps: it can increase your metabolic rate in a real, significant way, something demonstrated by medical science (as opposed to most metabolism pills). You can make use of the extra energy you're getting from these pills by working out, running, swimming, or doing sports, and you'll be burning calories while you're doing it.

Conclusion

As you can see, exercise is the best way to get the most out of your weight loss pill regimen. Not only does it increase your metabolic rate (so that you burn more calories even when you're doing nothing) it provides a way for your body to expend energy so it can use up excess blood sugar and stored body fat as energy. Pills may help you reduce your caloric intake or (sometimes) increase your caloric output, but they aren't guaranteed to do much on their own.

And exercise has other benefits outside of just helping you lose weight. It releases endorphins, helps you sleep better, and gives you more energy overall.

So get out there and use your body. You'll be glad you did.