Does Alli work? The answer is yes and no.
As the prescription medication Xenical, it was promoted as the only weight loss pill that really worked. Then it became an over-the-counter pill and has made millions for the company that makes it. But does it really work to solve your weight problem?
(The author is a psychotherapist who lost 140 lbs. when he discovered Therapeutic Psychogenics, and he’s kept it off for over 25 years. He has helped thousands to lose weight permanently with this approach. More about it at the end of the article.)
Alli works by preventing your body from digesting and utilizing fat, so when you take a pill when you eat a fatty food, the fat passes through your digestive system undigested, and you don’t acquire or accumulate the calories from it. For most of us, 30% of the calories in our diet or more come from fat. So, if you were eating a 1000 calorie per day diet in three meals with a pill at each meal, you’d only be taking in 700 calories, and if it was a 1500 calorie per day diet, you’d only be taking in 1050. If you stuck to your plan of eating only that amount of calories at those meals, you’d probably do well losing weight.
For this to work in actually producing weight loss, you’d first need to maintain the kind of control of your eating that my clients achieve with The Anderson Method (www.TheAndersonMethod.com) described in my book of the same name. With it, you enjoy real weight loss with or without the pill. With the pill, the weight loss is faster. Sounds good, right?
However, there are some other results that you need to think about before you start eating Alli pills. The most attention-getting is what they describe as “anal leakage”. Fats, like butter and the fat in meats, become liquidy at body temperature. Fats like the oil in salad dressing and cooking oil are already liquid. With Alli, this oily liquid passes through your system without being digested, and then ends up in your colon, where it does not form a solid stool like the rest of your feces. You have the equivalent of cooking oil seeping out on a regular basis, or worse, all the time. If you are not controlling your eating, you have a lot of oil running, so not only are you not losing weight, but you also have poopy pants with oily stuff that seeps through layers of clothes. Not a pretty picture. I’m always all ears when I hear about some way to make weight control easier, but “anal leakage” is all I need to hear about Alli. Like other drugs, they have a whole list of possible nasty side effects, but I don’t need to know any more than “anal Leakage”.
Here’s the facts: to solve your weight problem, you need to shape your habits so that you eat the right number of calories per day, and these habits become permanent so that the weight stays off. There is a way to train yourself to do this so that it is not hideous and you don’t have to deny yourself good food or eat diet food. That’s what The Anderson Method teaches, a method of behavioral medicine that has helped me and thousands of my clients and readers to lose weight the right way, and keep it off. More about it at www.TheAndersonMethod.com
As long as you are looking for pills or procedures to relieve you of the need to change your behavior and figure out how to live on less, you’ll be putting off what you need to do to solve your weight problem. If you use Alli and continue to live and eat like most Americans, you’ll still have your weight problem, and you’ll have a new problem on your hands (and elsewhere too).
Bill-Great post. I personally have been so afraid of the absorptive side effects of Alli that it served as an Antabuse effect. That is, I knew that if I ate a fatty meal/snack then I would have diarrhea or anal leakage for several hours. It sure can keep you on track when you know you may suffer punishment like that. I found that it can help if there are certain times when I know it will be hard to deal with availlable food. The problem is, you can always choose not to take the pill. I find it is useful as an additive tool, but certainly no miracle.
Thanks, Lungman. Yes, getting to the point where you can choose to abstain and actually abstain instead of changing your mind and deciding to eat is real achievement. It takes practice, and plenty of high-fives to yourself when you do, and like everything we do, practice makes permanent.