A diet pill for women can help you increase your energy expenditure, tamp down on your appetite, and shed fat quicker. These weight loss supplements use a combination of ingredients to target fat oxidation, hunger cravings, and metabolic rate, amping up the efficacy of your weight loss diet.
Since women have lower metabolic rates than men, and don’t have the advantages of high levels of fat-burning, muscle-building hormones like testosterone, they can have a particularly hard time getting a diet and exercise program to work. Diet pills formulated specifically for women aim to alleviate these disadvantages.
Although there are a lot of dodgy diet pills on the market, we’ve uncovered several ingredients that really do have strong evidence supporting their use for weight loss.
The best diet pills for women combine these ingredients for a powerful weight loss effect. Here are eight reasons why women can benefit from a diet pill.
Research
Diet pill for women benefits
1. Losing weight is hard for many women, but a diet pill might help
Diet pills specifically designed for women try target specific mechanisms of metabolism. These supplements include thermogenics, fat burners, and appetite suppressants to shift your body’s energy expenditure and caloric intake in a more favorable direction.
2. Women have a lower metabolic rate, but this can be boosted with a diet pill
Because of their lower levels of testosterone and less lean body mass, women’s baseline metabolic rate is lower than men’s. Men have an easier time building up muscle mass over the course of a diet and exercise program, and adding muscle mass increases their body’s baseline metabolic rate.
Unlike with fat burners for men, diet pills for women aren’t trying to boost testosterone or growth hormone levels. Instead, they’re cranking up your metabolic setpoint through herbal extracts and micronutrients.
3. Diet pills for women can work for women who have already lost weight too
One study pegged the amount of weight regained in the first year following a diet plan at 50% of the amount of weight originally lost, on average (1).
Another study specifically on obese women showed that after completing a low-calorie diet and returning to a maintenance diet, the women’s level of fat oxidation dropped sharply (2). Diet pills might be a way to counter this problem.
4. Garcinia cambogia is a popular ingredient in diet pills for women with a lot of promise
According to some nutritional research, garcinia cambogia (an herbal extract) has a statistically significant effect on short-term weight loss (3).
That’s why you’ll find it in many diet pills for women, since nutritionists believe it can increase your body’s thermogenic set point and help you melt off body fat.
5. Caffeine is one of the most reliable diet pill ingredients
Lots of low-quality diet pills only deliver caffeine, but that doesn’t change the fact that moderate amounts of caffeine can have a real impact on body weight.
Research shows that consuming caffeine helps people who have lost weight maintain their overall health (4).
Experiments done in the Netherlands shows that caffeine shows promise as a powerful thermogenic supplement (5), meaning that it tells the body to “turn up the heat” by increasing metabolism and overall calorie expenditure.
6. Caffeine can augment the efficacy of other diet pill ingredients
As mentioned above, low-quality diet pills aren’t much more than repackaged caffeine tablets. But a high-quality diet pill can use caffeine in combination with other ingredients to boost the overall weight loss efficacy of the supplement.
In the case of green tea extract, for example, caffeine interacts synergistically with the fat burning properties induced by the EGCGs in green tea (6), creating more weight loss than you’d expect from either ingredient alone.
7. Green tea extract is both safe and effective for weight loss in women
A single dose of green tea extract increases fat oxidation and total energy expenditure over a 24 hour period when compared to a placebo (7).
The consequence? Faster and more effective weight loss. Green tea extract is one of the “must-have” ingredients for a diet pill for women.
8. Green coffee bean extract in a diet pill can help with rapid weight loss
Green coffee bean extract might be considered a “cousin” of green tea extract, and while the research on it is not as robust as that on green tea, the results are promising.
According to a meta-analysis of five different studies that examined green coffee bean extract’s effect on weight loss, green coffee bean extract may produce substantial weight loss in a short amount of time (8).
That’s why you’ll find green coffee bean extract in many of the best diet pills for women.
Diet pill for women side effects
The negative effects of diet pills are mostly centered around compounds that try to artificially boost your body’s resting metabolism.
Diet pills that use synephrine could cause abnormal heart rhythms. Research from 2011 cautioned use of synephrine (bitter orange) due to reported abnormal heart rhythms and lack of safety data (9). However, a later analysis stated that no cardiovascular events are associated with synephrine doses of 100mg or less per day. (10)
Still, however, there are concerns that it can have deleterious effects on your health, so you won’t find any synephrine-containing compounds in our rankings.
Some diet pill ingredients can cause headaches or gastrointestinal discomfort. One study on weight loss supplements cited these as the most common adverse effects (11).
Diet pills with caffeine can cause sleeplessness, anxiety, and jitters. Caffeine is a widely-used ingredient in diet pills thanks to its potent fat oxidation effects, but it can cause trouble sleeping and leave you feeling anxious if you take too much or take it late in the day (12).
Diet pill for women dosage
The effective dose of the active ingredients in a diet pill often depends on product formulations, absorption rate and the individual themselves. Studies show varying dosages and duration of consumption for each ingredient. Here are a few guidelines:
Caffeine: keep it at or below 200 mg if possible. Caffeine is an effective weight loss agent, but you can get most of its benefit from pretty moderate dosages, according to one study (13).
Garcinia cambogia: aim for 1-2.8 grams per day. This dosage comes from the typical range used in dietary research on this supplement (14).
Green tea extract: 400-800 mg total. Again, this number comes from effective studies on using green tea extract or its active ingredients for weight loss (15).
The best approach is to use a top-ranked supplement, with that is carefully designed to have optimal doses of all the important ingredients, and avoid supplements that hide the exact amounts of their ingredients by using them in a “proprietary blend” (16).
Diet pill for women benefits FAQ
Q: What are some medically proven weight loss supplements for women?
A: The strongest medical evidence for weight loss supplements supports green tea extract, caffeine, and orlistat (also known as Alli).
Green tea extract is an incredibly safe and effective way to suppress appetite and increase energy expenditure; evidence for its efficacy ranges from observational research on frequent green tea drinkers to randomized controlled trials on green tea extract in obese women.
Caffeine is also known to be an effective weight loss supplement, though it does have some additional side effects compared to green tea extract.
Finally, orlistat or Alli has United States Food and Drug Administration approval as an over-the-counter treatment for weight loss.
Q: Are diet pills bad?
A: Diet pills for women certainly have a checkered history, due to dangerous side effects from ingredients like ephedra, and the continued presence of supplements that have potentially risky ingredients such as synephrine.
Still, there are several high-quality diet pills out there with well-thought out ingredients whose efficacy is backed by scientific research, so it’s not accurate or fair to paint all diet pills across the board as “bad.”
Q: How do you lose weight without a diet pill?
A: Losing weight the old-fashioned way involves shifting your body’s metabolism so that it steadily burns more calories than you are consuming in your diet.
There are a huge range of weight loss programs designed to achieve exactly this effect through a combination of specific dietary rules and exercise, usually without any diet pills or weight loss supplements.
Q: Can you take a diet pill and a fat burner at the same time?
A: Usually it’s not a good idea to mix and match diet burners and fat burners. The reason is that there’s often a lot of overlap in ingredients, so it’s easy to go outside the optimal dosage range, especially for ingredients like caffeine, which have undesirable side effects at higher dosages.
Related: Our best picks for diet pills for women
Summary
Women looking to accelerate their weight loss, or who aren’t having much luck with a basic diet and exercise program, might consider adding a diet pill specifically formulated for women.
By combining ingredients that exert thermogenic, fat oxidizing, and appetite suppressing effects, a well-made diet pill for women can help address some of the reasons why women can have a harder time losing weight, leading to better and faster weight loss results.
When choosing a diet pill for women, you can maximize your chance of success by looking for ingredients with solid evidence behind their efficacy, like green tea extract, caffeine, green coffee bean extract, and garcinia cambogia.
