Image by marcobellucci
Any opinions on Alli? I just grabbed a bottle to try — doesn’t seem to make much of a difference. My diet is pretty good, so I don’t have any of the “treatment effects”. (That’s what the bottle calls side effects. If you eat too much fat, you will. . . pass it quickly.)
Having not previously encountered Alli, I did a bit of digging. It’s the non-prescription strength version of a weight-loss medication Xenical. I have to give props to the Xenical folks, who are very up-front about the fact that healthy eating (getting less than 30% of your daily calories from fat) is extremely important, as well as that their drug is intended for folks who are clinically obese, not simply trying to shed an annoying five or ten pounds (like Yours Truly).
No less an institution than The Mayo Clinic has also fielded questions on this drug, and they’ve got a lot of really smart people who can explain what the deal is.
Alli does its thing by hampering digestion of the fat you eat by turning off the enzyme responsible for doing so (lipase). On the face of it, this seems like a pretty good tactic — you don’t have to burn calories your body doesn’t absorb. However, the side-effect of this tactic is going to be familiar to anyone who remembers Olestra (branded as “Olean”), especially the cooked-in-Olean potato chips that featured it so prominently. In short, if that fat isn’t being digested, it’s going to need to leave, in its natural state.
Rather than gleefully engage in what Mr. Spock would doubtless describe as “colorful metaphor,” I will simply quote TMC’s summary: “The undigested fat continues through the intestines and is eliminated through bowel movements.”
As far as the effectiveness of Alli, that seems to be “modest.” Most of the research seems to be done for Xenical, and then the results are scaled back to 50% for the OTC strength version. The statistics seem to suggest that for folks who undertake a moderate improvement in terms of diet and exercise, the weight loss over the course of a year is about eight pounds for the control group, and six additional pounds for the full-strength version, which means about three pounds for Alli. 30-40% more weight loss than diet and exercise alone isn’t something to sneeze at, but it’s not like great slabs of weight were falling off folks, like glaciers calving.
Provisionally? Looks like it’s not altogether a bad compound, but you still need to get your butt moving and watch what you eat. Buying bathroom tissue in bulk just seems like a sensible precaution.
Related posts:
It’s about $30 a month, too, so is that worth it for 8 pounds? I’ve lost 45 pounds in the past five months, and I considered it but don’t think that the added expense would have been worth whatever additional loss I might have had.
(I still have about 40 pounds to go, but I don’t think I’ll add Alli to the mix, now.)
I was in college when the Olean potato chips came out – and had this guy friend who just HAD to find out how many he would have to eat in order to have any sort of “undesirable side effect” His answer… TWO WHOLE BAGS!!! As for Alli, eating with a modest calorie deficit over time will most likely be as if not more effective – without the worry or necessity of keeping an extra pair of pants/underwear at the office… As Julia above said, not to mention the cost! Besides, in her SIGNIFICANT weight loss (45lbs is a big deal, so serious congratulations to you) she has no doubt started up some healthy eating habits which will last a lifetime. You just can’t get that in a bottle.