Do Fat Burners Help You Lose Weight? (Recent Study)

Here is an idea: let’s consume the crap out of large quantities of unregulated and questionable fat burners and hope for fast and easy weight loss. Fun!

But do fat burners help you lose weight? Well, a new meta-analysis looked at the effect of fat burners on body composition:

Researchers looked at 21 studies with duration greater than 8 weeks and participant populations of BMI greater than 24.9

What did the researchers find? They found that fat burners do work! Apparently, they are great at smuggling high quantities of money from your wallet while doing absolutely nothing for weight loss. Fun!

The researchers concluded that:

There appears to be limited benefit that may be derived from the inclusion of thermogenic dietary supplements to reduce body mass.

Green tea, ephedra, garcinia cambogia, thermogenic agents… You name it. They investigated all of them. Anything they could buy legally — sucked. According to the researchers, it was so funny they forgot to laugh (They didn’t laugh, I’m totally making this up. But it’s funny).

In many of the studies that researchers included in their meta-analysis, fat burners had no effect on fat loss at all.

Menno Henselmans, physique coach, summarized the use of fat burners like so:

The term fat burner is a marketing term to begin with. Fat burners don't actually make you directly lose fat. They increase your energy expenditure and this generally only results in fat loss if you end up in greater energy deficit as a result of that. Taking a fat burner while bulking, for example, won't make you lose any fat. ⁣Moreover, the increase in total daily energy expenditure of even the strongest thermogenics, such as ephedrine, is only around 5%.⁣

So stop buying dumb shit that has been named “fat burners.” They don’t work. US Food and Drug Administration is very clear about fat burners and weight loss supplements in general:

“These tainted weight loss products pose a great risk to public health because they contain undeclared ingredients and, in some cases, contain prescription drugs in amounts that greatly exceed their maximum recommended dosages. Consumers have no way of knowing that these products contain powerful drugs that could cause serious health consequences.” - Janet Woodcock, M.D., director, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, FDA.

Instagram fitness numbnuts recommend people to buy their magic products and pills. I too have a recommendation when it comes to fat burners. My recommendation is that they suck balls (both fat burners and Instagram “influencers”).

The most reliable (and free) multi-ingredient supplement is caloric deficit combined with strength training, consistency, and patience. You don’t need any supplements to lose weight. Fuck them in every hole.

Further Reading: Fat Loss Fundamentals (And Shit That Can Just Piss Off)

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