alli is a weight loss pill that works by preventing your body from absorbing the fat that’s in the food you eat. Since dietary fat has been blamed for obesity and all types of degenerative disease, this could be a diet pill that works for thousands of people who need a fast diet but just can’t control their cravings for fatty goodness. But there are a couple of pretty big catches that make it definitely not the best weight loss pill on the market. Before we get into the side effects of alli, let’s talk about what alli is, where it comes from, and how it works.

alli|Orlistat|Xenical|tetrahydrolipstatin

The alli diet pill, which is pronounced “ally” rather than “alley”, is the FDA approved over-the-counter version of the drug Orlistat, which has also been marketed as Xenical.

To understand how alli works, you should first understand the way that your body processes fats that you eat. The fats in the food you eat, much like proteins and carbohydrates, must be broken down into their constituent parts before they can be absorbed into your bloodstream and used for whatever purposes they are useful for. I personally think that people dramatically underestimate the usefulness of dietary fats, but that’s mostly because I like having a brain and I realize that my brain is mostly made of fat. But I’ll get back to that later on.

The same way that carb blockers interfere with your body’s ability to break down carbohydrates, the alli diet pill interfere’s with your body’s ability to break down the fats that you eat. It does this by neutralizing an enzyme called lipase, which is released into the intestines from the pancreas. Without this lipase doing its job, the fats you eat never get absorbed. Since fat is pretty high in calories, alli reduces the effective number of calories you have eaten. Also, if you believe that dietary fat will increase your cholesterol or risk of heart attack and stroke, then you can also score one for alli in terms of reducing these risk factors.

Before I get around to discussing the side effects of alli, I’d like to spend a little time on the efficacy of the drug.

How Effective Are alli Diet Pills?

Most of the people who participated in clinical trials of orlistat/alli lost between 5 and 10% of their total body mass over the course of one year of taking alli. One thing to take into consideration is that this decrease in body mass does not necessarily equate to a decrease in body fat. As far as I can see, measures of actual body fat were not used in these clinical trials. Also, as I have discussed on the muscle building pills and weight loss pills pages, weight loss itself is not really the ideal goal of a healthy diet plan. Rather you should be aiming to improve the quality of your body composition so that you can be trim, toned, and feel excellent.

After the trials of orlistat were complete and the test subjects stopped taking orlistat, many of them started regaining the weight they had lost almost immediately. A significant number of participants gained back as much as 35% of the weight that they had lost while taking the diet pill. One good thing that came out of the trial, for the participants, was a significant decrease in the incidence of type 2 diabetes.

Side effects of the alli diet pill

I mentioned that the alli diet pill prevents your from absorbing fat, but not what happens to that fat after it has gone unabsorbed. Fat is pretty nutritious stuff; it has lots of calories, and usually carries lots of vitamins and minerals, so your body is very well-equipped to absorb it in the early phases of digestion. Since alli prevents this from taking place, the fat continues its downward course through your digestive tract.

The problem is that these lower intestinal regions are not so well equipped to deal with the fat. Why should they be? If this diet pill hadn’t done its work, the fat would have all been absorbed by that point.

Have you ever carried a sub sandwich around for a while? Even though it’s generally wrapped up pretty well, and you try to hold the waxed paper tight so that nothing will escape, eventually all that oily deliciousness starts to seep out through the folds. That’s pretty much what happens when the alli diet pill works.

Many users of alli report bright red and brown oily discharge—not just leakage, mind you: discharge. And it’s uncontrollable, and unpredictable, and it will definitely show up through those pants of yours.

The makers of the alli diet pill offer a very thoughtful and sensitive and thoughtful recommendation to user of their diet drug:

Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it’s probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work.

Ouch! All you wanted was to lose a little weight and now you’re carrying around spare pairs of pants and soiling yourself in meetings. But the oily discharge is not the only potential side effect of alli. If you’re lucky, you’ll just get loose, greasy stool (called steatorrhea). If you’re not so lucky, you’ll get the oily discharge, and probably some flatulence as well. If you’re really unlucky, alli might just give you a full-blown case of fecal incontinence.

However, the manufacturers have some sound advice for folks interested in using alli to lose weight but who would prefer to minimize these terrible side effects. Are you ready for this? Don’t eat fat. That’s the official recommendation.

But wait, wasn’t the whole point of alli to allow you to enjoy the benefits of a low fat diet without having to give up the fatty foods you love? Is there any point at all in taking the alli diet pill? Well, maybe the fear of oily rectal discharge will inspire you to stick to your low fat diet a little better. And to top it all off, there is actually also some spotty clinical evidence to suggest that alli may produce a type of lesion in the colon that is often an early precursor of colon cancer. This diet pill sounds great! Where do I sign up?? Perfect lazy weight loss!

The FDA approved this diet drug, so it would appear to be somewhat reasonably safe, but I tell you what: if you are even thinking about spending the money on this over the counter diet drug just on the off chance that alli diet pills work for you, then do yourself a favor and take that exact same money and spend it on a book called Protein Power by Drs. Michael & Mary Dan Eades.

Then, when you’re eating healthy, you can browse through the rest of our diet pill reviews to find a diet pill that works for your chosen weight loss program.

Most diet pills simply try to mask the feeling of hunger. Some others try to boost the number of calories that you burn, or to block your absorption of some of the food that you eat. Almost all of them carry long lists of side effects. In this CLA supplement review, we’ll look at the ways that Tonalin CLA is different than these, and try to determine whether it is a diet pill that works safely and effectively.

Tonalin CLA is not a drug at all, but rather a nutrient found in human breast milk. This specific nutrient actually stimulates your body to start growing lean muscle tissue and to start shedding fat, all without any serious side effects. It seems to be particularly good for shedding fat that is stored around the abdomen—belly fat—which is a major problem area for many dieter. Belly fat is not only one of the least attractive types of body fat, but also among the most dangerous. Belly fat has been associated with Type II diabetes and cardiovascular disease, so focusing on shedding this type of fat is a good idea for more reasons than one.

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CLA reveiws by people actually using the diet pill have been somewhat mixed. While many CLA reviewers report impressive fat loss, muscle gain, and improved results from exercise, other Tonalin CLA reviews describe no effect at all. That means that even though some hidden variable seems to be controlling the effectiveness of CLA, there is probably very little risk in trying it out. It could be that Tonalin CLA supplement only works with particular metabolic types, or even only within the context of a particular diet plan.

The good news is that no Tonalin CLA supplement user review I’ve yet come across has reported any side effects at all—a very good sign. Some of the research has suggested that certain people might experience some mild side effects of CLA, but these side effects rarely exceeded the side effects of placebos (which are plain sugar pills, meaning that the effect is psychosomatic.) The side effects you might encounter with CLA are the same kind of diffuse side effects you’d expect from anything, mostly diarrhea or nausea.

Because Tonalin CLA is one of the best weight loss pills by helping to build muscle and shed belly fat, it could be an ideal companion for several different types of dieters. Low carb diets such as the South Beach Diet or the Atkins Diet also focus in on losing belly fat, so supplementing with Tonalin CLA might be able to accelerate the progress of your low carb diet.

Tonalin CLA supplements could also be a good addition to a low fat or low calorie diet plan, as dieters on either of these plans run the risk of losing muscle mass, which makes it much more difficult to keep the weight off. Since Tonalin CLA may help to build new lean muscle mass, it could help to avoid this frustration while helping you to shed fat and feel good about the progress you’re making. On the low fat dieting page, I mention that many essential nutrients are fat soluble and so require some dietary fat in order to be properly absorbed, so I can see how taking CLA along with your other nutritional supplements could enhance absorption of some of those nutrients, like vitamin K and vitamin D.

Now that we’ve got the basics out of the way, let’s get into some more depth with the CLA supplement information that is and is not available at this time. A good place to start will be the actual scientific medical literature on CLA, finding out what it is, where it comes from, and what effects it does and doesn’t have on dieters. After that, we’ll take a look at what people who take CLA diet pills are experiencing in comparison to this.

CLA – Review of the Medical Literature

CLA, short for conjugated linoleic acid is a type of fatty acid called a trans fat. There’s been a lot of concern about artificial trans fats in the human diet recently, and for very good reasons, but certain types of trans fats do occur naturally and may actually be healthy. It is believed that CLA is one of these latter types of trans fats, and there are some reasons to believe that it may actually have significant health benefits.

This is one of the reasons why CLA is not listed on US food labels as a trans fat—it’s chemical structure, which is conjugated, causes it to react with the body in a different way than artificial trans fats which have been shown to cause cell mutation, cancer, arteriosclerosis, and all manner of unacceptable badness.

The main source of CLA in most peoples’ diets is from the meat and milk of ruminant animals like cows and sheep. People are able to produce their own CLA to a very limited extent, and as I mentioned earlier, CLA is also present in human breast milk. In fact, one recent study found that mothers who ate mostly “organic” meat and dairy products ended up with significantly higher levels of CLA in their own breast milk. Since the organic label simply means that the cows were not administered hormones or fed any grains grown with pesticides or fertilizers, I imagine that this effect would be even greater for mothers who ate only the beef and milk of cows raised the all-natural way, eating grass out on green pastures. You see, other studies have shown that cows that eat only fresh grass produce CLA in far greater quantities than cows fed the modern way, on dry hay and grain. Eggs are also a very rich source of CLA, and I’d be willing to bet that the eggs you see marked organic free range with extra Omega 3 probably have a lot more of it than their factory-farmed brethren.

CLA supplementation, as in a diet pill, is tricky, because CLA is actually more than just a single substance. It is actually an entire family of more than a dozen fatty acids that all have a similar chemical structures. Most studies of CLA supplementation have only paid attention to three or four of these, so it’s difficult to distinguish the possible effects of the full spectrum of CLA fats versus the limited spectrums that have been studied.

From the research that has been done, there does seem to be some good reasons to think that even the limited-spectrum CLA that has been studied is probably beneficial for humans. One of the most notable findings on CLA supplementation in humans has been a tendency toward reduced overall body fat and especially reduced abdominal fat when the supplement is taken by people who are healthy and get regular exercise. The most effective dose of CLA for fat loss, by the way, seems to be 3.4 grams per day.

However, there are still some things we’re not sure about with CLA supplementation. Some studies have shown that CLA increases total body glucose uptake, which is a good thing. However, studies have also indicated that it may reduce insulin sensitivity, which would be a bad and fairly contradictory thing. It could be that insulin is reacted to differently in the presence of CLA, or that CLA is processed differently in people with varying body types. Several studies have found no change at all in insulin sensitivity. Overall, I think it seems like there is no way to know exactly what is going on in this area just yet, but caution may be warranted before people who are seriously overweight or who suffer the effects of any metabolic syndrome begin supplementing with CLA.

There are also some concerns that CLA supplementation may increase your levels of C-reactive protein, which is an indicator that is used to determine how well your body’s system for using antioxidants to prevent cellular damage is working—higher levels mean there may be a problem. On the other hand, some researchers suggest that CLA may increase levels of glutathione, which is your body’s own natural super-antioxidant.

The scientists do not seem to know, at present, whether the effects of CLA on sugar and fat processing are entirely positive or negative. It is possible that the two are perfectly balanced, or that supplementing with CLA is simply a wonderful idea, or that it could actually cause some damage. The only research showing any actual potential for damage, however, has been on rats and baby chickens, so there is currently no evidence that CLA supplements are dangerous for humans.

Clinical trials on humans have shown no serious side effects in the recommend dose range (3 to 5 grams per day), and animal studies suggest that serious adverse effects are unlikely even at very high doses.

What is Tonalin CLA?

Tonalin CLA is a patented form of CLA based on a unique manufacturing process in which CLA is created from safflower oil. It is the best-selling form of CLA, and the manufacturer claims that their proprietary process for making CLA results in fewer non-natural forms of CLA than you might find in other synthetic CLA products. Personally, I wish they would just extract the stuff from eggs or milk, but since they’re not doing that I generally assume that animal-derived CLA may not be as cost effective.

Also, to the best of my knowledge, neither Tonalin nor any other manufacturer of CLA make known the final chemical composition of their products. Since, as I mentioned before, there are actually more than a dozen different chemicals that all fall under the umbrella of CLA, this means that there is no way to know how complete or narrow a spectrum of CLA you are actually consuming. For that matter, the research doesn’t go into much detail about the composition of naturally-occuring CLA from animal-based food products either.

Tonalin CLA Reviews

I love this product. I had been using a lower dosage, but bumped it up and see a huge difference in my thighs and belly fat. My legs have never looked better! No change in diet at all, but increase in walking (which I had done before but never had results like this from exercise alone) and I am loving my body.

I have been trying TonalinCLA for about 2 weeks and without changing my eating habits I have lost about 7lbs. I think that this is a very effective addition to my daily regimen.

Hate to be the negative one, but I can’t say I really saw or felt anything worth buying this product. Will not buy again. CLA has many health benefits, but as far as helping cut fat I can’t say it did a lot for me.

I used this product for six months using recommended dosage and above recommended dosage. I experienced no effect.

This worked well for me! I was already pretty lean when I started this product. It helped me get a deep 6 pack and in a few weeks and 8 pack…Yea Baby!! But after about 2 months of use I started to notice my stomach would get a bit upset when I took the first three pills in the morning on an empty stomach! So I had to eat something right away. No jitters, no high BP, or any of that associated with stimulants.

CLA came pretty highly recommended by fellow dieters on a support forum,and after only 7-10days I could see some mild results. However, after the entire bottle was gone, those initial results now seem paltry in comparison to the rave reviews CLA has garnered (to the point I now question whether it was CLA as much as the change in diet & increased exercise).

This stuff is fantastic! It has helped me cut cravings down to a minimum and I have dropped 5 pounds in 2 weeks. I also exercise and watch what I eat. Nothing is a miracle short of surgery/starvation, but this does work if used with a healthy menu and work out program.

I really like Tonalin CLA it helped me lose the last few pounds I needed to lose for a special event and my belly fat really shaped up quite a bit.

Nutrex Lipo 6 is an increasingly popular weight loss pill that contains a number of highly bioactive constituents. User reviews of Lipo 6 report generally positive results, although there are some risks and potential side effects that users should be aware of. However, there is definitely also a high potential for fat burning and weight loss, so it may be that a calculated risk could be in order. In this review of Nutrex Lipo 6 diet pill we will examine each of the constituents of the supplement and their physiological effects in order to help you understand what will be taking place within your body should you decide to find out whether Lipo 6 is a diet pill that works for you.

Lipo 6 Ingredient: Guggulsterones

One the primary ingredients in Lipo 6 is a set of compounds called “guggulsterones,” which are derives from the sap of the South Asian guggul tree. The sap was used for centuries in ayurvedic medicine as a cure for obesity, as well as arthritis.

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Here is a scientific article reviewing some of the research on cardiovascular benefits of the guggulsterones in Lipo 6. There has also been research showing that guggulsterones are effective for reducing cholesterol, improving irritable bowel disease, and reducing cancer.

Therefore, I would say that guggulsterones are a safe and healthy way to burn fat and worth including in the best diet pills.

Lipo 6 Ingredient: Synephrine

Lipo 6 is ephedra free, but it does contain a similar substance called synephrine. This is basically a stimulant, and works in much the same way as ephedrine does, which means that by taking it there is some risk of adverse reactions including cardiac reactions, respiratory dysregulation, skin irritation, and nervous reactions. You definitely want to be careful taking diet pills that contain synephrine, and Nutrex Lipo 6 is one of these.

Other Lipo 6 Ingredients

Lipo 6 also contains the stimulant caffeine and they recommend that you don’t take in any other caffeine while using the product because this will increase your risk of problems. It also contains Yohimbine, which increases testosterone, and this is likely to enhance the stimulant effects of the other components of Lipo 6. There are also problems associated with this included increased risk of heart attack and the growth of body hair. Finally, bioperine is included to aid in absorption and to protect the body from oxidative stress. The guggolsterones also help with this aspect.