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Ten Pounds in 10 Days?

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Appetite Suppressants: "Trick the brain into thinking you’ve eaten!"

Whether they claim to make you feel fuller or help you forget your hunger, many products promise to curb your urge to eat. One that’s getting a lot of attention is Hoodia gordonii, a milkweed relative native to South Africa and Namibia. African Bushmen reportedly chew on hoodia stalks to ward off hunger during long hunting trips. Preliminary clinical research is intriguing; mice given injections of P57, a steroid compound identified as hoodia’s active ingredient, suppressed their food intake significantly. But for us humans, hoodia’s weight-loss effects “are not strongly substantiated by significant large clinical trials,” says Roberta A. Lee, M.D., medical director at the Continuum Center for Health and Healing at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. “That makes the ­evidence weak for weight loss at this time.”

The Bottom Line

As I expected, none of the quick fixes had strong scientific backing. So I turned to my friend Jean Harvey-Berino, Ph.D., chair of the University of Vermont’s Nutrition & Food Sciences Department and author of The EatingWell Diet (The Countryman Press, 2007). “The best way to give yourself a jump-start,” she said, “is to create rules that add structure to your diet.” Jean suggested dialing down calories but still eating a balanced diet of real foods. Normally she would say not to drop below 1,200 calories per day, but for a quick fix, you could shave off a few more—going absolutely no lower than 800—for up to 3 days (no longer). She also recommends getting enough protein to prevent muscle loss and curb hunger. (That’s easy: most adults need about a third of a gram of protein per pound of body weight each day. For a 150-pound person that’s 50 grams—the amount, roughly, in 10 ounces of chicken breast.)

Now when I need to lose a few pounds, I cut my calorie intake to about 1,000, well below my usual. I also add a two-mile morning jog (in addition to my usual noontime exercise class). These changes help me feel more in control and, before I know it, the unwanted pounds come off. It ’s not “10 pounds in 10 days” but it does the trick for me.

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