Article :: Can Hoodia Gordonii Really Help With Weight Loss
About the author: Mike Adams is a holistic nutritionist with a passion for teaching people how to improve their health He has authored and published thousands of articles, interviews, consumers guides, and books on topics like health and the environment, reaching millions of readers with information that is saving lives and improving personal health around the world. Adams is an independent journalist with strong ethics who does not get paid to write articles about any product or company.
It's a bold promise: a plant that can turn off your hunger like a light switch. The ultimate appetite suppressant. The "sure thing" strategy for losing weight. Almost sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? Pfizer didn't think so: they spent $32 million just for the rights to a patent on chemical compounds they could extract from hoodia. The plan, of course, was to create the next blockbuster drug for treating patients who are overweight or obese.
And that's a lot of people. Nearly two thirds of adults in the United States are now overweight. Almost a third are clinically obese. People are gaining pounds like never before, all across the world, and doctors are being asked to get more actively involved in helping people shed those pounds.
What people need, we all seem to believe, is a miracle drug. A magic bullet solution. Pop it in your mouth and you'll magically lose weight, even while chomping down another bag of greasy potato chips or that second tub of ice cream.
What we all seem to desire is a chemical savior... a substance to redeem us from our unwillingness to exercise. Something to save us from ourselves.
Enter Hoodia Gordonii
And then, like a lone flower blossoming in the desert, a plant quietly appears from the desert itself: hoodia gordonii. Used by thousands of years as an appetite suppressant by the San tribe in South Africa, hoodia seems to turn off the human appetite. Your hunger drive just vanishes. You simply don't want to eat. And the pounds fall off without even trying.The magic bullet has arrived, it seems, and everybody who has heard about hoodia suddenly wants some. Yet there are hucksters and con artists at work. Some are selling worthless products. Others are exaggerating or mislabeling their ingredients. It's a dangerous market and, of course, entirely unregulated.
But to tell you that story, I have to back up for a minute and tell you a different story -- one we all know too well: the recurring nightmare of trying to lose weight.
Weight loss strategies all share the same fault
They tell you to work out to lose weight. They tell you to take metabolism boosting supplements. They tell you to stop eating sugar, ice cream, saturated fat and carbohydrates. Sound familiar?You can do all that and still pack on the pounds. Because what the experts don't tell you is that in order to burn the excess fat off your body, you're going to have to experience extreme hunger. The kind of hunger that's simply impossible for any reasonable human being to resist.
Eventually, no matter how badly you want to lose weight, you're going to eat. And chances are, if you're like me, you're going to eat and eat and eat. You'll gain back whatever pounds you lost, and you'll add a few more pounds on top of that.
Can you stand the hunger?
Every weight loss product, gimmick, diet or contraption you've ever seen shares the same fatal flaw: no matter how much you diet or exercise, and no matter what pills you take, you're going to feel extremely hungry, day in and day out.Think those metabolism boosters will make you lose weight? Sure, they burn calories for a few hours, and then your blood sugar drops and you feel hungrier than ever. So you eat to make up for it, and you're right back where you started.
Think those fat blockers or carbohydrate blockers are going to help you? All they do is stop your body from digesting the food you've swallowed. So you're still hungry anyway and you soon find yourself eating again.
Have you tried the Atkins diet? I bet, like most people, you eventually caved in and headed straight for the carbs, right? That's because our bodies crave carbohydrates.
Tried to exercise your way to being slim? If you're like most people, though, the more you exercise, the hungrier you get.
For most people, the real weight loss challenge has relatively to do with dieting, exercise, supplements, or how many calories you burn in the gym. The real challenge is controlling their hunger drive.
People who are trying to lose weight seem to share the exact same problem. It's not that they're lazy, or that they're slobs, or that they eat junk food all day, it's that they have trouble getting their appetite under control. Hoodia gordonii, it seems, could make that much easier. Because overcoming your own hunger drive seems almost impossible unless you get some help.
Think about it: the last time you tried to lose weight, what was it that finally caused you to cave in? I bet it was hunger. At some point, the hunger just took over, and you found yourself eating again.
So let me share a secret with you: you can't fight mother nature. Your body was designed to survive. And to survive, your body needs to find and consume large quantities of calories. The more, the better. Remember: your body was designed for an age in which calories were hard to come by. Your body was self-motivated to go find some food. In a time when food was scarce, people who found and ate more calories survived better than those who didn't, and therefore passed on their genes to their offspring.
That lineage, after hundreds of thousands of years of scarcity, leads directly to you and me. We live in bodies that were designed and built to scrounge for scarce calories in the natural environment. And the method for that motivation was simple: hunger.
Your body uses hunger to whip you into action. "Go find me some berries!" it screams. "Get me some animal fat!" It's no coincidence that animal fat and sugar are the most sought-after comfort foods: they're rich in calories, and they convince your body that you have enough food. No wonder, then, that ice cream is the opiate of the hungry: it's made primarily of milk fat and sugar -- precisely the chemicals that stimulate a feeling of comfort.
But today, we live in a society where an overabundance of food surrounds us. We have the all-you-can-eat buffet, the Costco-sized food paks, the supersized fast foods. We have restaurants that serve one person what an entire family might have eaten just two generations ago, and at every social event, there's even more food beckoning: weddings, parties, holidays, movies... you name it, there's food.
And so spurred on by our innate hunger motivation, and surrounded by the modern environment of unhealthy food in mass quantities, we all eat. And eat. And we put on the pounds, just like I did, just like you did. It's only human.
But what if you could turn off your hunger like a switch?
When you eat hoodia, the saying goes, your hunger will simply be gone -- gone -- for around six hours. During those six hours, you won't crave anything. You really won't want to eat at all. The food still smells good, as usual, and they taste the same if you eat them, but you don't want to eat them! At least that's what the hoodia advocates claim will happen.To understand how all this works, you have to understand what "hunger" really is in the first place. Hunger is just an illusion. It's a signal in your brain, a chemical message that causes you to feel certain feelings and, ultimately, act on them.
Your body creates the illusion of hunger even when you're not really needing calories. And your body, like mine, doesn't know when to turn it off.
I am your hungry hypothalamus
The hunger signal is only turned off when your hypothalamus thinks you've eaten enough food. Your hypothalamus -- part of your body's endocrine system -- decides this by sensing the rise of sugar (glucose) in your blood. Eat enough carbohydrates, and your blood sugar rises, which convinces your hypothalamus to tell your brain that you're no longer hungry. This is why eating an apple is such an effective appetite suppressant.Normally, to get your hypothalamus to turn off the hunger switch, you'd have to eat a moderate amount of food. And your hypothalamus isn't very quick on the draw either: it takes around 20 minutes to figure out what you've eaten, and by that time, you've probably eaten another 800 calories. So by the time your hunger signal gets turned off, you've already overeaten yet again.
This chemical fools your hypothalamus
Hoodia, however, contains a chemical that gets picked up by your hypothalamus which thinks it's glucose. And as it turns out, this chemical is reportedly 10,000 times more potent than glucose in triggering the chemical receptors in your hypothalamus, and so it only takes a tiny bit of this chemical to trigger the cancellation of your hunger signals.Let me say this another way: eat this chemical, and your hypothalamus thinks you've just wolfed down three plates of food at the local buffet. Your hunger is abruptly cancelled. You just don't feel hungry anymore. Everything else is fine: there are no known side effects. But you simply don't feel like eating. At least that's what the hoodia companies explain you should experience.
Consuming hoodia is surprisingly simple: slice off a piece of the succulent, peel off the thorns, and just start chewing on it. You don't even need to swallow it. The taste is rather bitter by most Americans' palettes, but after several minutes of chewing, you've already started absorbing the chemical. Guess what? Your hunger is vanishing with each passing moment.
The San Tribesmen, the original discovers of the plant, also say it makes you feel stronger, more energetic, and more focused. Nobody complains of any side effects whatsoever, and the plant has been chewed for literally thousand of years by various generations of the San, with no ill effects known whatsoever.