My Bad Experience with Weight-Loss/Fat Burner Pills

Hi guys

I heard on the radio today that more and more people are taking diet pills to help with their weight loss without fully understand the effects they have on your body. Often people become reliant on these pills. I thought I would share my story of my awful experience with fat burner pills and why I would never take them again or let anyone close to me take them either. This is so anyone who is contemplating fat burners can see what kind of effect they have on people in ways you couldn't imagine and how they ruined my life and almost ended it.


A lot of the horror stories you hear about diet pills are often surrounded the thermogenic effect they have, such as people burning to death from the inside out or the way they can cause heart problems due to increasing heart rate, etc.. all the usual suspects you would expect from taking a supplement that increase metabolic rate or heart rate. However, a lot of people are unaware of the psychological effects some fat burners can have and my story supports the little known fact that diet pills can ruin your head.

In August 2014 I was in a very comfortable long term relationship and had just come back from an all inclusive holiday. I have a very sedentary job and I had just got my first car. Put it this way, I was fat, grossly so. I weight around 200lbs, had a double chin, a huge belly that make me look pregnant and was a UK size 16. For my 5"3 frame, I was obese. I hate the way I looked so long story short, I started taking Excel Pharma T500 fat burner tablets and started going to the gym.
Now I won't lie- the tablets worked wonders for weightloss. My heart beat was so fast I could feel every pulse, I feel out of it dizzy and disorientated most of the time, I completely lost my appetite and I had violent shakes. But I got down from 198lbs to 182lbs in about 3 weeks.

I could cope with the physical effects the tablets had. But what I didn't realise was how it was effecting me mentally.. I was certain I was feeling depressed over my weight and the anxiety feeling was just the fat burner pills making me feel a bit weird. But from starting the tablets mid August to getting down to 13 stone by the end of September, my moods had completely dropped so I felt sluggish, irritated and sad all the time. I began getting paranoid and my terrible moods were taken out on my boyfriend, which ended the relationship. I was snapping at my family and friends and didn't have the energy to speak to people at work. My concentration was that of a goldfish and my memory was lacking.

I went away to Edinburgh in October and forgot to take my pills all week because I was so busy. When I came back home I thought I had left them in Edinburgh so I had a total of 10 days off the fat burners. In those 10 days, I felt a lot better and thought I was making progress with my mental illness. However, I found the bottle of pills in a shoe that I had taken to Edinburgh with me and started taking the pills again- baring in mind I had absolutely no idea that these pills were making me depressed... to me, they made me better because they helped me lose weight and I thought my depression was due to my hangups about my appearance. Within 48 hours of taking the pills again, I felt the worst I had ever felt. Over the next few weeks, my depression was so deep and my anxiety so extreme I had anxiety attacks on an almost daily basis and had began self harming and even contemplating suicide. Yet still clueless, I continued to take the diet pills for the whole of November.

Another month passed and I felt truly awful- I felt I was never going to escape my head and the pain I was suffering so my suicide plans grew and my self harm became more dangerous and frequent. I could barely get out of bed to go to work and all I did when I was at home was cry until I worked myself up enough to be physically sick and I couldn't sleep for more than two hours a night. I had even had an episode of psychosis which was the scariest night of my life. By now, I was on antidepressants that were doing nothing to help me. One night I was messaging my friend who has been an absolute saint throughout it all and supported me 100%. She suggested giving the fat burner pills a rest for a few days and see if that made a difference since I have tried everything else. Out of interest, I googled "effects of fat burners on mental health" and found this:



Interesting. So I delved a little deeper.
Having studied psychology at A-Level, I had a fair idea of how the endocrine system works. The endocrine system is the collection of glands that produce hormones that regulate metabolism, growth and development, tissue function, sexual function, reproduction, sleep, and mood, among other things. As I had been taking fat burner pills for almost every day for 3 and a half months, the damage I had caused my endocrine system must have been ridiculous. Even though I was exercising, I wasn't giving my body the chance to repair the system as it was trying to flush out the toxins from the fat burners. And as I wasn't sleeping, my body had even less time to repair its self. The damage the diet pills had caused was excessive and was going to take a lot of work to repair.
I stopped taking the tablets there and then. The next day, which was the first Tuesday of December 2015, I didn't take a tablet for the first time since Edinburgh (2 months ago). By the Friday, I felt the best I had felt in 4 months. I started taking vitamin B to help repair the damage to nervous and endocrine systems. My antidepressants kicked in and by Christmas, I was actually happy.

On New Years Day (last week) I tried taking a weaker fat burner (T5's). Two days in I started to feel myself slipping back into depression- the pills that weren't even half as strong as the original fat burners had damaged my endocrine system in just over 24 hours.

I threw my tablets away on Sunday just gone. I will never touch another diet pill again.

I can't even stress how depressed I was and I kick myself daily for not realising sooner what was damaging my mental health. I could have saved my relationship, saved my parents a hell of a lot of stress and saved myself from the worst few months of my life.

Please do not take diet pills or fat burners guys. There is nothing on the internet that isn't sales-driven that points towards them being good for you. True, I admit that I lost weight with them, but it just wasn't worth what I suffered. I would rather work harder and the gym and diet harder than go through any of that pain again. Without sounding dramatic, fat burners ruined my life. Even if they don't effect you mentally, they are so bad for your heart. Please guys, just push yourself a little harder and do everything naturally. I wouldn't wish the last few months of my life on my worst enemy, let alone all you guys who are trying so hard to do the right thing and better yourselves.