Your mileage may vary with the ones still available in the UK. Most of the proven effective ones were taken off the market for various reasons, mostly because they were just amphetamine derivatives or similar.
Drinking a shitload of water is a good and much cheaper way to suppress the appetite too, and has other obvious benefits. Maybe just chug a pint of council pop every time you feel hungry.
Any really effective drug is going to come with side effects, so I'd encourage you to think about the underlying causes first.
The biology for hunger and satiety is a bit more complex than most people acknowledge. You might do well to read up on hormonal regulators like leptin and ghrelin, and what affects them. For example, losing sleep can affect how we experience hunger and how we digest food.
The solution to your problem could be something as simple as eating slower, giving you a chance to feel satiated before eating too many calories.
It's well known that people are capable of eating a lot more calories from hyper-palatable foods like chocolate or salted chips/skinny fries. Something as simple as adding highly satiating foods like protein or vegetables, in place of snacks, might help.
Also, are you on any drugs for which increased appetite is a known side effect? Antidepressants, steroids, etc.?
It's also worth asking, are you currently underweight or overweight? Often our perceptions of our bodyweight dont line up with the reality. Have you experienced any kind of disordered eating in the past?
>>4738 I drink quite a lot of water at work. This might sound daft but it feels a bit... thin and hollow is probably the best way to describe it; not filling. Perhaps I just need to add lemon or honey to it.
>>4739 I'm not on any drugs. I'm about 5'11" and I'm not entirely sure on my weight; I think it's somewhere around 12 stone. I'm reaching the point where I'm going to have to go from 32" jeans to 34" ones.
I do eat vegetables with most meals. I think the issue might be that I follow a largely vegetarian diet and it simply doesn't fill you the way that meat does.
>>4740 Did you change to this mostly veg diet recently?
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that you're consciously registering cravings and mid-morning hunger pangs more because you're naturally climbing a jean size as you get older. 34" is fine and the increase is expected at this time of year with the winter gorging and Christmas treats. Eat and be merry now but get on the old bike come January to burn it off before summer.
>>4740 > I'm going to have to go from 32" jeans to 34" ones
I'm 5'7 and a healthy weight and my waist is about about 32" you sound fine.
From a medical point of view you sound perfecly healthy, my crude math says your BMI is 23.5 and your body fat is under 20% if you want to be slimmer you are probably at the point where exercise would be better then dieting.
>>4740 Get some scales. Healthy BMI was 20-25, but lower bound was taken down to 18. Sorry to say, but it's highly unlikely you have some hormonal leptin secretion defect that's influencing your weight. The answer is the same as it's ever been; and it's as horrible as it ever was -- eat less, exercise more.
>>4739 There's a proven link between increased stress and weight gain, and a link between <N hours of sleep and increased stress. Aside from the other bad side effects, this is one way in which caffeinated beverages might hurt somebody on a diet even though they're 0-calorie. They're also diuretics, which I think is bad for appetite regulation.
That's another mechanism to link lack of sleep and overeating. Dr. Cheke's other research is interesting. The strength of your memory of how recently you eat, will influence when you eat next. If you eat with distractions (eg. using your phone, in front of the TV), you remember the episode less well, and eat your next meal sooner. She's investigating a hypothesis of a causal link between age-related memory impairment, and weight gain in middle age -- people gain weight in middle age; middle age is when memory begins to decline. Lots of interesting research, lots of academics and medics with lots of explanations as to why everybody's fat now. But there's a consensus on the solution, which is, "eat less, exercise more".
