Fat Burning Supplements (Fat-Burners)
The desire for athletes to be leaner, along with a need for many non-athletes to lose weight, has created an explosion of fat burning supplements (weight-loss supplements). These supplements are one of the most popular types of products on the market, although they are almost completely ineffective and dangerous. It seems like a new “wonder ingredient” takes the media by storm every couple of months. It’s quite astonishing that many people incorrectly believe that a pill can trigger massive fat loss. This simply isn’t true.
What is a Fat Burner?
Fat burners (sometimes called thermogenic stimulators or metabolic enhancers) are drugs or supplements that aim to speed up metabolism, thereby promoting the loss of fat. They are intended for people who want to lose weight and maintain a sleek body.
Mechanism of Action. How Fat Burners Work?
They work via a process called thermogenesis, causing a natural elevation in your metabolic rate, allowing you to theoretically burn more calories while at rest and during exercise. The more calories burned, the greater the weight loss. The active ingredients in fat-loss supplements are typically natural extracts thought to support thermogenesis, enhance fat oxidation, suppress appetite, and increase calorie expenditure. Currently, such ingredients include caffeine, Garcinia cambogia (hydroxycitric acid), green tea, and hoodia.
Fat Burner’s Effectiveness
Are fat burners effective? Fat burning supplements, with perhaps a few exceptions, are highly overrated for the most part. They provide a very small additional boost that could be used in conjunction with a consistent workout plan and proper diet. No pill or potion will magically transform your body. There are, however, certain fat burner supplements can help speed up the process of losing weight when you’re dieting and training properly. In conjunction with caffeine, fat burners often also contain green tea extract (green tea contains small amounts of caffeine it self but also contains compounds that help to metabolize body fat for use as energy), grapefruit extract, white willow bark extract and many other ingredients such as ginger and black pepper extract.
Different Types of Fat Burners
Most fat burners and weight-loss supplements can be assigned to one of three categories:
- Stimulant based: These contain stimulants such as caffeine, grapefruit extract, epinephrine, synephrine, green tea, guarna, and many others. Product claims include the ability to speed up resting metabolic rate and burn fat.
- Appetite suppressants: These include Hoodia gordonii and others that assist in controlling appetite and limiting calorie intake.
- Fat malabsorptive: These ingredients limit the amount of fat absorbed during digestion, resulting in lowered calorie intake. Chitosan, which is a structural element found in the shell of crabs, shrimp, and lobster, is a popular ingredien of such fat burners.
Side Effects of Fat Burners – Are Fat Burning Supplements Safe?
Most of them are considered dangerous for your health. Extreme caution should be used when choosing these products. Synephrine and epherdrine used to be part of all major fat burners before it was linked to hearth attack and stroke, which makes sense since it raises your hearth rate. The new “ephedra-free” fat burning supplements rely on ingredients that don’t have much research behind them and can have negative side effects almost as bad as ephedra itself. One of the major fat burner brands was linked to liver damage.
Another concern is that these supplements are often adulterated and tainted with ingredients or pharmaceutical drugs not listed on labels that may have powerful (often harmful) effects on the body. Unwanted symptoms may include headache, sleeplessness, tremor, anxiety, dizziness, irregular heartbeat, behavioral changes, and high blood pressure. All fat burners are not necessary bad, but not every individual who buys a supplements does research every single ingredient before purchase.
Conclusion About Fat Burners
Your discipline is the most powerful fat burner. There is not a single fat loss supplement available in the entire world that could ever take the place of a proper fat loss training approach and nutritional program. Even if you get some positive results after using a fat burner pill you must understand that you can’t live on fat burners forever. You will get much better results by properly targeting your nutrition and training and relying on your naturally-enhanced metabolism than you can by looking to mildly or non-effective fat burning supplements. There are no shortcuts to any place worth going, and the notion that the “secret” to rapid fat loss lies in this pill or that powder is completely and totally false.
