Many women take diet pills to help increase their weight loss or maintain the losses they’ve already achieved.
Women looking to lose weight have the additional challenge of a hormonal profile that’s tilted towards keeping more fat mass on their body.
There are a lot of different diet pills for women, and they don’t all have the same efficacy. Many of them don’t work at all.
To sort out the diet pills that work from the ones that don’t, our researchers completed a comprehensive review of the options currently on the market. Here’s what we found:
Our advisory panel and our research team rank the best health products and supplements based on performance, label accuracy, and the efficacy of the ingredients in the products.
- Best Overall: LeanBean
- For Weight Maintenance: PhenQ
- For Losing Belly Fat: Powher
- For Rapid Weight Loss: Transparent Labs Fat Burner
- Works Without Exercise: Burn XT
Research
Rankings
Last updated: October 21, 2022
Diet pills considered: 27
Hours of research: 39
Experts reviewed: 8
Scientific papers referenced: 15
| IMAGE | PRODUCT | |
|---|---|---|
Best Overall  | 1. LeanBean
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for Weight Maintenance  | 2. PhenQ
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for Losing Belly Fat  | 3. Powher
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for Rapid Weight Loss  | 4. Transparent Labs Fat Burner
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Works Without Exercise  | 5. Burn XT
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 | 6. Evlution Trans4orm
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 | 7. Skinny Gal
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 | 8. Atrafen
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 | 9. Alli
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 | 10. Slim Tighten Tone
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1. LeanBean
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LeanBean is the trendiest fat burner for women in 2023.
The premium product has success that comes from a formula specifically engineered for women, making it a morning ritual with professional bodybuilders and Instagram models.
Main benefits
LeanBean has a formula designed to control diet (suppressant) while accelerating metabolism as well (like many thermogenics). The result is faster weight loss allowing for increased fat burning all over the body. No harmful additives. All natural.
How it works
Each serving of Leanbean is stuffed with garcinia cambogia, green tea, green coffee, turmeric, cayenne pepper, konjac, and chromium.
The result: Better energy and strength as well as a lower body fat percentage.
Our verdict: The premium (and most effective) diet pill for women we’ve seen.
And results like these, as shown by these LeanBean users:
(Tip: choose the 3-month pack so you can save money and get a month free)
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2. PhenQ
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PhenQ is an all-in-one weight loss formulation that targets multiple elements of the weight-loss process.
At 142.5 mg per serving, it packs in a bit more caffeine than some of the other options on our list. So this may make an excellent choice if you tend to need an extra ‘boost’ to get you through the day as well.
Although it’s not specifically targeted for women, it has been proven to be super effective for both women and men.
In addition to helping with fat burning, it also works to stop fat production, suppress appetite, boost energy levels, and improve mood.
It boasts an entire list of other powerful weight loss staples… including chromium picolinate, nopal, caffeine, and l-carnitine furmarate.
An easy top-3 option for female diet pills.
3. Powher
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Powher’s fat burner is the latest supplement from Ultimate Life.
It’s a premium product, but definitely worth it.
It has been designed with more natural stimulants to give your body a bigger boost than other products.
The formula focusses on appetite suppression to help with weight loss, achieved through the use of glucomannan – or konjac fiber.
This soluble fiber expands when it soaks up water. The expansion in your stomach promotes feelings of fullness and reduces the amount of food you need to eat.
3g per day of glucomannan can help with weight loss, and that’s how much a daily dose of Powher contains.
The result: an effective supplement for people who want a bit more of an energy boost.
4. Transparent Labs Fat Burner
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There are only 3 proven ways to lose weight fast, increase your metabolic rate, eat less, and be consistent with whatever you do. Transparent Lab’s fat burner helps you do all three.
It’s packed with thermogenic ingredients like green tea extract help increase your metabolism. It includes HTP-5 and other similar ingredients which have been shown to help fight cravings and suppress your appetite. And it comes in one easy to take the pill, which means it’s easy to be consistent.
On top of all this, Transparent Lab’s delivers a fat burner that’s non-GMO, has no artificial sweeteners, no artificial coloring, and no preservatives.
If you’re looking for a no-nonsense fat burner, you’ll have a hard time doing better than this.
5. Burn XT
Burn XT focuses on thermogenesis, leveraging the fat burning effects of cayenne pepper, green tea extract, and caffeine to accelerate your body’s oxidation of fat. It’s a super simple and super effective diet pill if your goal is amping up your metabolism.
6. Evlution Trans4orm
Trans4orm is particularly suited for women because it blends weight loss herbal extracts like huperzine A and green tea extract with B vitamins and amino acids to make sure your body isn’t lacking in any metabolism-boosting nutrients.
The caffeine content (175 mg per serving) is moderate, and will synergistically interact with its green tea content, creating higher levels of fat burning.
7. Skinny Gal
Skinny gal has a lot of the most popular and well-known herbal extracts that promote weight loss: African mango, garcinia cambogia, raspberry ketone, white kidney bean extract, and green coffee bean extract, to name just a few.
There aren’t so many ingredients that it seems purposeless, but it would be nice if the ingredients list was more clear about the amounts of each supplement included in the mixture.
8. Atrafen
Nutratech’s Atrefen relies on a relatively small number of targeted ingredients to boost weight loss.
The only downside is that the caffeine content is hard to estimate, so if you are sensitive to caffeine’s adverse effects, look elsewhere.
9. Alli
Alli is an over-the-counter medication that’s effective for weight loss if a significant percentage of your calories come from fat. By blocking fat absorption, it reduces your overall caloric intake. Though it’s a targeted option, it’s a good fit for people in the right niche
10. Slim Tighten Tone
Slim Tighten Tone makes a focused effort on controlling appetite with conjugated linoleic acid. It does this well, but lacks when it comes to fat burners, which lands it lower on our list.
Category winners
Best overall diet pill for women: Leanbean
Leanbean combines all-natural ingredients that promote both suppress appetite and boost fat oxidation. It’s free from harmful synthetic additives and it’s a hit both with everyday women and serious athletes, making it our all-around winner.
Best diet pill for weight maintenance: PhenQ
For maintaining weight, you want to lean away from diet pills that rely on heavy doses of stimulants—the effects just aren’t sustainable long-term. That’s why we chose PhenQ, which has only a moderate amount of caffeine and a solid combination of metabolism boosters and fat oxidizers to sustain weight loss.
Best diet pill for rapid weight loss: Transparent Labs Fat Burner
The math is simple: if you want to lose weight quickly, you need to boost your caloric expenditure and cut down on your caloric consumption. With solid doses of green tea extract, caffeine, and cayenne pepper, Transparent Labs is definitely going to kick your metabolism up to the next level.
Best diet pill for losing belly fat: Powher
While it’s hard to target any specific area of your body for weight loss, Powher is hard to beat if you are trying to drop that last bit of belly fat. With a great combo of appetite suppressants and fat burners, but only a modest 100 mg dose of caffeine, it’s the perfect pick for shaving off stubborn fat.
Best diet pill for women over 50: Leanbean
Leanbean uses all-natural ingredients and is easy on the stimulants, including only a small amount of naturally-occurring caffeine found in green coffee bean extract. It’s the perfect fit for women over 50 looking for a diet pill.
Best diet pill that works without exercise: Burn XT
Exercise is a great way to lose weight, thanks to its fat oxidizing effects. But if you can’t make it to the gym, you should at least try to replicate some of its effects—that’s where Burn XT comes in, with a synergistic combination of caffeine, green tea extract, and B vitamins.
Who should buy diet pills for women?
Diet pills are a good option for women who fall into one of a few categories:
Women looking to drop weight quickly. Diet pills can accelerate the weight loss you get from diet and exercise by ramping up your fat oxidation and tamping down on your appetite.
Women who aren’t losing as much as they want from a traditional weight loss program. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to try to rely on a weight loss pill to shed pounds if you aren’t also making changes to your diet and exercise routine. But if you’ve made these changes and still struggle, a diet pill is a logical next step.
Women whose hormonal profile makes it difficult to lose weight. Since women have lower testosterone levels than men, and higher estrogen levels, women’s bodies naturally find it more difficult to shed fat and build muscle. A diet pill that specifically leverages women’s hormonal profile is a natural choice if you think your hormonal profile is holding you back.
How we ranked
The diet pill industry is fraught with imitation products, low-quality supplements, and downright dangerous ingredients.
Because of this, we had some pretty stringent requirements for the products that we were ranking.
No risky ingredients. We immediately excluded anything with potentially dangerous ingredients, like synephrine.
Caffeine in moderation. We were also careful with the caffeine content—while caffeine pills themselves are a potent fat burner in and of themselves, women are particularly prone to some of the negative side effects of caffeine, such as jitter, anxiety, and sleeplessness.
So, high doses were a definite no-go for a high quality diet pill for women.
Powerful ingredients beyond just stimulants. We also eliminated products that didn’t have much in the way of weight loss supplements other than caffeine—some low-quality products rely on the buzz from caffeine to do all of the heavy lifting. We required products on our list to include additional fat burners and appetite suppressants.
Ingredient synergy. After eliminating products with unwanted ingredients and too much caffeine, we looked for supplements with synergistic effects.
One easy example is the interaction between theanine and caffeine, most often taken advantage of by including green tea extract.
Theanine amplifies some of the positive effects of caffeine, while tamping down on jitters and anxiety. Another example is the combination of appetite suppressants and thermogenics used in a product like Leanbean, which helps with both reducing energy intake and increasing energy expenditure.
Transparent formulation. Finally, we penalized products that had ingredients masked behind a proprietary blend instead of being listed separately.
Some companies have good reason to keep the specifics of their supplements under wraps, but too often, this strategy is used to hide the fact that the actual dosage of the effective ingredients in a diet pill is just not that high.
FAQ
Q: Are Alli diet pills effective for women?
A: Alli diet pills are one of the few diet pills and weight loss supplements that has been approved by the FDA as an over the counter treatment for weight loss.
Alli diet pills actually work by blocking the absorption of fat in your diet. This has two consequences.
First, Alli will work much more effectively for women who are eating a diet that is high in fat. If you are already on a low-fat diet, Alli won’t affect your energy intake very much.
Second, Alli does come with some side effects that are linked to the fats that aren’t getting absorbed by your stomach. They can stick around in your digestive tract and cause gastrointestinal side effects like gas and diarrhea.
Not everyone gets these side effects, though, and Alli does certainly have clinical evidence supporting it.
Q: What kind of diet pills for women work fast without exercise?
A: If you are looking to lose weight without exercise, the biggest challenge you’re going to face is burning fat. Exercise is an excellent way to up your body’s rate of fat oxidation, so if you aren’t exercising, you’ll need to try to accomplish that another way.
We like the fat burners and thermogenics included in products like Leanbean, PhenQ, and Powher when it comes to diet pills for women who aren’t going to exercise, as they all include some of the top supplement ingredients for increasing fat oxidation.
Of course, the best solution would be to start exercising as well—though we realize that this isn’t an option for everyone.
Q: What is a good diet pill for women who eat less than 1000 calories per day
A: For women who are on a very aggressive diet plan (often used in women who are very obese), you have to battle against two ways your body will resist the changes your diet is inducing: appetite and metabolism.
Diet pills with appetite suppressants, like Leanbean and Evlution Trans4orm, might help you stick to your meal plan, while diet pills with fat-burners, like BeLive Fusion Burn and Atrafen, can up your metabolic rate, keeping your rate of weight loss high.
Q: How do diet pills work?
A: Diet pills focus on the two key determinants of weight loss: energy intake and energy expenditure.
A diet pill that includes appetite suppressants can reduce your feelings of hunger, which will in turn reduce the number of calories that you eat at your next meal.
More sophisticated supplements might also include a carb blocker, which prevents your body from absorbing some of the carbohydrates that you eat. This way, even if the food you eat stays the same, the calories you absorb actually go down.
On the other side of the coin you have supplements included in diet pills that increase your energy expenditure: these are fat burners and thermogenic agents, like green tea extract or garcinia cambogia. The connection to weight loss here is more straightforward.
Q: What does the fiber in diet pills do?
A: Fiber is one of the simplest and safest appetite suppressants out there. Dietary fiber signals to your digestive system that you are full, and decreases feelings of hunger.
It also slows the rate of absorption of calories that are already in your stomach, preventing steep rises and falls in blood sugar that can drive overeating.
Related articles
- Appetite suppressants
- Natural weight loss supplements
- Thermogenics
- Multivitamin for women
- Garcinia cambogia
- Green coffee bean extract
Recap
For a woman trying to lose weight, a diet pill can help increase your rate of weight loss.
A high-quality diet pill will both ramp up your fat burning and reduce your hunger cravings, helping on both sides of the weight loss equation.
Whichever route you choose, using a high-quality diet pill with safe ingredients to assist you in reaching your weight loss goals and always check with your doctor to minimize the risks.
For BodyNutrition’s #1 diet pill for women recommendation, click here.
