Ep. #182: What Are the 3 Best & Worst Fat Loss Supplements?

[00:00:00] Hey, this is Mike and welcome to another installment in my in five minutes or less series, where I answer one common question quickly and simply, because while long form content is great, sometimes it is also nice when someone just gets right to the point and tells you what to do and how to do it in five minutes or less.

And that’s what I do in these episodes. Hey, this is Mike Matthews from Muscle for Life and Legion Athletics. And let’s talk fat burners. Let’s talk about one of the biggest cash cows in the supplement industry. And let’s take a look at a few of the best and worst options on the market. And let’s go. Also, why they do and don’t work respectively.

And let’s start with a quick explanation of what makes for a good or bad fat loss supplement. So a good fat loss supplement will either [00:01:00] directly help you lose fat faster by increasing energy expenditure or positively impacting various fat burning mechanisms in the body, or it will indirectly help you lose fat faster by improving mood or reducing cravings, which then make it easier to get in the gym and exercise and also stick to your diet.

And a bad fat loss supplement, of course, either doesn’t do any of those things or does do some or all of those things, but also comes with. Unacceptable side effects or even harm to the body. So with that, let’s now take a look at three of the best fat burning supplements you can buy. These are supplements that are going to either directly or indirectly help you lose fat faster without making you weak or lethargic or overly hungry or overly fat.

And the first one is predictably caffeine because caffeine not only promotes wakefulness by blocking the receptors [00:02:00] for a substance called adenosine, which promotes sleepiness. It also can increase metabolic rate by increasing adrenaline level. Now, the only downside here is that Studies show that chronic usage of caffeine tends to lessen its metabolic effects so much so that just a few weeks of daily usage doesn’t look very promising from a fat burning perspective, especially when you get into that second and third week of regular usage.

If you want to get the most fat burning out of your caffeine, then you really want to limit your intake. So you could do it one of two ways. One way is you could save your caffeine for your heavier workouts. So maybe one, two, three times per week, maybe before your heavy squats, your heavy deadlifts, you could have, in that case, if you wanted to maximize performance, you want to have a.

A higher dosage, you wouldn’t want maybe just one or 200 milligrams. You probably want anywhere from three to 500 milligrams depending on your body weight. [00:03:00] That’s one way of doing it. Or you could have caffeine every day for a week and then take a week off so your body doesn’t build that tolerance. Okay.

So the next fat burning supplement that works well is ephedrine. And this is a drug that is found mostly in nasal decongestants and it works by increasing your metabolic rate. That’s the long story short. The physiology is a bit more complex, but in the end you just burn more energy at rest when you are taking ephedrine.

It also works even better when it’s paired with caffeine, which is why many people in the bodybuilding space use the EC stack, ephedrine caffeine stack. And studies show that It’s effects are variable kind of depends on how well you respond. Some studies have shown a metabolic increase of about three to 4 percent and others have shown metabolic increases of 10 to 11 percent and especially when paired with caffeine, you normally see those higher numbers.

Now those effects aren’t all day increases, of course, they’re transient, but they add [00:04:00] up when you’re taking it two or three times a day, which is the common prescription for weight loss. Now, the downsides are that some people don’t respond well to it. Some people experience unwanted and unacceptable levels of side effects.

Also it doesn’t have the built in safety buffer that caffeine has. So if you don’t know what you’re doing with your dosing, you can hurt yourself. And also for those of you out there that have high blood pressure, it is not for you and really stimulants in general are not for you. And for those of you that don’t want to use ephedrine or know that you don’t do well with ephedrine, you can go with the natural alternative, which is synephrine.

This is an ephedrine like molecule with very similar effects in the body. It’s just not as potent, which also means that the side effects aren’t as bad either. And interestingly, you can combine sinephrine with two other natural molecules called naringin and hesperidin, as well as with caffeine. And you can see very [00:05:00] similar metabolic increases that you see with ephedrine.

So when you take sinephrine and you add in those two other molecules, You already are coming close to ephedrine’s effects, and then when you add caffeine in, you’re basically there. And that’s why I included a clinically effective dosage of synephrine, not ephedrine, but synephrine, in my natural fat burner, Phoenix.

Okay, so the next fat burning supplement that works well is yohimbine. And yohimbine is quite similar to ephedrine in that it’s a stimulant, it works, and if you take too much, it can hurt you. Now yohimbine works a bit differently than ephedrine in that while it does stimulate the production of adrenaline, which also raises metabolic rate, it also blocks the activity of a certain type of receptor on your fat cells that blocks fat burning.

And I know that’s not very technical and I actually don’t want to get into the technicalities because it’s fairly complex. But the long story [00:06:00] short is that your fat cells have two types of receptors that can accept adrenaline and noradrenaline. And one of them, the beta receptor, when adrenaline or noradrenaline pairs at that receptor site, Fat burning occurs.

The fat cell releases its energy for burning the other type of receptor, though the alpha receptor. When an adrenaline or no adrenaline molecule binds to an alpha receptor, no fat burning occurs not what we want. So what Yohi being does is it blocks the activity of those alpha receptors so then the adrenaline noradrenaline in your blood can bind to the beta receptors.

And more fat burning can occur. And this is why yohimbine is often promoted as a supplement to help you lose stubborn fat faster because one of the primary reasons certain fat stores are just harder to get rid of than others. So for us guys, it’s usually our lower abdomen and for girls it’s usually hips and thighs.

So one of the reasons why that is because [00:07:00] those fat stores Have a lot more alpha receptors than beta receptors. So it just makes them more resistant to our bodies, fat burning chemicals. And when you take yohimbine and yohimbine gets in there, it shuts down a lot of those alpha receptors. So then the adrenaline and noradrenaline in your body can bind to the fat burning receptors, the beta receptors, and therefore you can lose that fat faster.

Now, like all stimulants though, johimbine, even though it’s a natural molecule extracted from a plant, it isn’t without side effects. And the most common one is anxiety. So if you suffer from any sort of panic or trauma disorder, then johimbine is not for you. And also if you have high blood pressure levels, then johimbine is not for you.

But if you don’t suffer from any mental health issues. Health conditions and your blood pressure levels are normal, then you definitely can benefit from yohimbine when you are cutting. You just want to respect the dosage and [00:08:00] the clinically effective dosage for fat loss purposes is about 0. 2 milligrams per kilogram of body weight.

And most people will take that in one dosage. Some people like to separate it into two dosages, but most people take it in one go. And I should also mention that you need to be in a fasted state for yohimbine to work, at least as a fat burning supplement, meaning that your insulin levels have to be low.

They have to be a baseline. So what most people do is they will work out first thing in the morning because after six, seven, eight hours of sleeping, you are in a fasted state. They will take their yohimbine. And they will usually combine it with caffeine and sometimes even synephrine as well, because all of those molecules work very well together.

And then they will do their fasted workout and then eat after.

Hey, quickly, before we carry on, if you are liking my podcast, would you please help spread the word about it? Because no [00:09:00] amount of marketing or advertising gimmicks can match the power of word of mouth. If you are enjoying this episode and you think of someone else who might enjoy it as well, please do tell them about it.

It really helps me. And if you are going to post about it on social media, definitely tag me so I can say, Thank you. You can find me on Instagram at Muscle for Life Fitness, Twitter at Muscle for Life, and Facebook at Muscle for Life Fitness. And in terms of specific supplements, you can find yohimbine in my pre workout fat burner, which is called Forge.

And it contains not only yohimbine, but it also contains a molecule called HMB, which suppresses muscle breakdown rates. And that is relevant because if you’re going to be using Forge, you are going to be in a fasted state to make sure the yohimbine is working. And one of the Downsides of training in a fasted state is that muscle breakdown rates are higher and particularly after you work out.

So the HMB is in [00:10:00] there to negate that. And FORGE also contains CDP choline, which can improve mood and intentional control or focus because one of the other downsides of fasted training is it’s harder to focus. It’s just harder, both physically and mentally. And quickly, an honorable mention goes to whey protein.

Yes, as a fat loss supplement, not because it helps you lose fat faster directly, but because it’s very convenient and it helps you hit your daily protein targets and eating a high protein diet. Absolutely does help you lose fat faster. And I like whey in particular because it is relatively inexpensive and it’s a very high quality protein.

It is well digested. It is well absorbed. It is very rich in essential amino acids and particularly in leucine, which is the essential amino acid that directly stimulates protein synthesis. And lastly, whey is generally pretty tasty, and I say generally because not always. Some whey [00:11:00] powders actually taste pretty bad, but others taste pretty good.

And although I am biased, I’m going to say that my protein powder, my whey, which is called whey plus, and it’s a 100 percent isolate, naturally sweetened, naturally flavored is one of the. Best tasting that I’ve ever had. And that’s why it has thousands of reviews online of people raving about how good it tastes.

Go check it out. Anyways, let’s move on now to the three worst options for fat burning supplements on the market. And the first is Hoodia, which isn’t as popular now as it used to be, but it used to be hugely popular and it was promoted primarily as an appetite suppressant. It’s found in a desert cactus that is eaten in various African countries to reduce hunger pangs and thirst when food and water are scarce.

And when supplement marketers caught on to it, light bulbs went off or more like cash [00:12:00] registers started ringing and they thought Hey, If that’s what it does for starving Africans, it probably works for obese Americans too, right? And so it hit the markets hard before any research was done on it. And then when research was done on it, scientists found that it was not only ineffective for reducing appetite and increasing weight loss, it actually increased blood pressure and liver enzymes, which signified that it was damaging your liver.

And it had those effects in just a Two weeks of use. And that’s pretty impressively bad because as far as supplements go, you’ll usually see effects like that from overdosing over the course of several months, not moderate dosing over the course of a couple of weeks. So hoodia bad, don’t take it. All right, moving along, let’s go to the next bad fat loss supplement.

And that is conjugated linoleic acid, CLA. And this one is [00:13:00] funny because it has been shown to increase weight loss in some people, but it has also been shown to be less effective than a placebo. And it has even been shown to cause weight gain. And despite the fact that quite a bit of research has already been done on this molecule, we still don’t quite know why it seems to work decently in some people and do nothing in other people and even cause weight gain in other people.

Is it the initial body fat level? Is it? The body composition. Is it the health state? Is it some other untested variable? We just don’t know. And so when you take CLA, you are basically spinning a roulette wheel. If it comes up red, Hey, great. You’re going to lose fat faster. If it comes up black, sorry, it’s not going to help you lose fat faster.

And if it comes up green, it may actually get in the way of your fat loss. And so for that reason, It’s just a shitty supplement. And the third and final crappy fat loss supplement that is everywhere these days, [00:14:00] hugely popular and has been hugely popular for some time and doesn’t seem to be losing steam either is Garcinia Cambogia.

Now there was a time when Garcinia Cambogia looked promising. There was evidence of increased fat burning in the animal model. The initial human evidence was lackluster. And so what should have happened is it should have been backburnered for further investigation before being blasted out into the mainstream.

But of course that’s not what happened. Supplement marketers grabbed onto it. And supplement marketers with very deep pockets, I will add grabbed onto it, making it really the best selling fat loss supplement of all time, which is why you will see it endorsed by big athletes and you will see ads for it everywhere.

And you’ll see it on the shelves of every supplement store and also every big box store that sells supplements. Again, the supplement marketing machine [00:15:00] has done a very good job associating weight loss with. Garcinia cambogia. But the long story short is there is no good evidence that it works.

And there is even evidence that shows that it doesn’t work. So avoid it, avoid any product with it. And I would go as far as saying, avoid any company that sells it or that includes it in any of its products, because that indicates that supplement company either doesn’t understand The science of fat loss supplementation or doesn’t care.

And it’s just making bullshit products to take your money. Hey there, it is Mike again. I hope you enjoyed this episode and found it interesting and helpful. And if you did, and don’t mind doing me a favor and want to help me make this the most popular health and fitness podcast on the internet, then please leave a quick comment.

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Thanks again for listening to this episode and I hope to hear from you soon. And lastly, this episode is brought to you by me. Seriously though, you. I’m not big on promoting stuff that I don’t personally use and believe in. So instead, I’m going to just quickly tell you about something of mine, specifically my fitness book for men, bigger, leaner, stronger.

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