Weight loss medicines seem to be one of the most effective obesity treatment methods! Ask why?  Weight loss medicines work because the side effects are so unpleasant that you’d want to stop taking fatty food all together. When you have fatty food and take a diet drug, you’re going to pass liquid stool and have a leaky anus. Urrrrgh! Thank God I’m not fat! How many of us would want to have such an unpleasant experience?

Psychologists Ameila Hollywood and Jane Ogden, University of Surrey conducted a research on why the prescription diet drug, Xenical(Orlistat), worked for many people. They found that many obese people found the consequences (that leaky anus and liquid stools) of taking the drug too unpleasant and that’s why they stopped taking, not the weight loss medicines, but fatty foods altogether. They came to realize how much their excessive addiction for fatty foods can be problematic for them.

I remember, in a psychology session in school, I learnt that one of the ways to make people get rid of an problem behavior is to subject them to an unpleasant consequence on doing that behavior. In order to avoid the consequence many people stop that behavior. Aversive Therapy has been successfully used for getting rid of alcohol addictions and weight loss medicines seem to be working on the same principle.

Although I personally don’t advocate punishment as a means to teach good things in life, but this does work well when everything else fails. You might have followed dozens of weight loss programs where you’re asked to restrict your diet. Were you able to do that? Sadly enough for us humans, many times negative motivation seems to work better than positive motivations and prescription weight loss medicines seem to be cashing in on that psychological flaw of ours.

Zikkir’s got an interesting further read on the subject.

Image credit :Fatty Beauty