Financial & Travel Musings » Technology

Do diet pills actually work?

Arnold — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:42:08 +0000

Yes, but the question isn’t so much “do diet pills work?” but what kind of diet pill you need.

There’s simply no use picking up a diet pill at random from the shelves these days. For one thing there are way too many different types of diet pill in a typical health food shop. You need to sit down and think about what you need the pill to do for you and, of course, bear in mind that it’s going to work much better if you combine it with a better diet and more exercise.

Say, for example, you have a very sedentary lifestyle then chances are that you need some kind of metabolism enhancer. But it’s not so simple as that because they tend to come with the problem that their side-effects mean that they’re usually not suitable for people with high blood pressure (which is quite common for those that are very over-weight) so you’re going to need to check with your doctor first. Or, perhaps, you eat too much fat in which case you need a fat absorber. Fine, but if you stick with a high fat diet then you’re going to get what’s quaintly called “leakage”.

So, not so simple after all, is it?

Working out at home

Arnold — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:34:59 +0000

With the escalating price of health clubs and the falling prices of the equipment that they have it has become quite economic to consider at home ab workouts.

Indeed putting your monthly subscriptions towards equipment for your own home is a reasonable choice for an increasing number of people.

If you’re going to the gym to lose weight or improve your body tone then this is almost certainly a better way to go long term. Within the amount of a typical gym subscription it would be easy to buy one or possibly two good quality pieces of equipment per year. Since each item of equipment will last many years it’s easy to find that you’ve a fully equipped gym a year or two down the line.

Is “natural” any better than regular?

Arnold — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 20:29:24 +0000

One of the ongoing fads in marketing is to add the tag “natural” to the ingredient list.

I laugh when I see the list of “natural” ingredients on one of the packets of sweets that the kids get sometimes. It’s a list of ingredients that you’d definitely never find in nature yet it can call itself “natural”.

So too it is with the diet pills. Thus you can find natural fat burners on the shelves these days. There are some truly natural diet “products” available of course although you’d hardly want to take most of them as there’s quite a tendency for them to give you the runs. Not so the natural fat burners to be fair but, as with all diet pills, you need to check that this is the dieting action that you need and that the side-effects don’t outweigh the benefits.

An interesting route for the experimental blog

Arnold — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 16:09:02 +0000

I thought I’d try a little experiment with one of the blogs that I’ve not really used in quite a while.

What I did was to write a post matching the searches coming in to the blog and see how that did. Now, before you do that you obviously need some content for searches to find so seeing as we were in the depths of winter I wrote a few posts about that to begin with.

The first trickle of searches coming in were for things like Russian clothing and cold weather clothing. Fair enough as that matched some of the posts in a vague kind of way. So I wrote some more on the clothing angle. Next stream up was along the lines of rain wear which also seemed reasonable enough. However, a month down the line and it’s more along the lines of shiny winter clothes and girls in wet clothes which do follow the progression of the searches and subsequent posts but which seem a long way from the original ones!

As I’m only doing it as a side-line I’m only writing one post a week so it’s taking a while to bring in the search traffic but if you’d like to add it, pop on over to On a Postcard.

Doesn’t Internet time flow quickly?

Non-global brands

Arnold — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 15:33:19 +0000

A few years ago renaming brands so that a single product name could be used across the world was all the rage. Thus we have Snickers instead of Marathon, Starburst instead of Opal Fruits and so on.

Oddly though it seems to have passed by gateway laptops who sell as Gateway in America but until quite recently as eMachines in Europe. Quite why that should be so is something of a mystery as computers are a product that you’d expect to see marketed similarly around the world these days.

Why, of course, leaves the puzzle as to why they’re absorbing eMachines into Acer at the moment and offloading a lot of eMachines at bargain basement prices.

Do you ever get attached to technology?

Isn’t it worrying that swine flu is killing “normal” people?

Arnold — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 13:14:29 +0000

Nobody knows. The problem is that normal flu also kills people and, for the most part, there’s no great investigation into how they were before.

Obviously most of those who die are weak in some way whether that be through being old or sick or having some medical condition that weakens them. The difference with swine flu is that each case is investigated and usually overall details are published too. That doesn’t happen with normal flu deaths: at best you get the overall numbers at the end of the year.

So, despite all the publicity, nobody actually knows if we should be worried about the number of healthy people dying from swine flu as it could well be that just as many (perhaps many more actually) die from normal flu.

No related posts.

Way too many acne treatments

Arnold — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 13:02:35 +0000

It’s nice to have choice, but when the choice is too wide it’s a bit of a problem, isn’t it?

That’s the case with acne treatments with row upon row of seemingly identical treatments on offer in the pharmacies. Enter acne treatments reviews at this point. If only there weren’t so many review sites around it would be a simple matter. Sometimes it seems like what’s really needed is a review of the review sites!

Is it a fat burner or a fat absorber that you need?

Arnold — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 12:58:55 +0000

Chances are that if you’ve been overweight for a long time you may well need both fat burners and fat absorbers to get you back to normal again.

The fat burners essentially turn up the knob on your metabolism and get rid of any excess fat that you have already. Side-effects of that turning up can include heart problems so do keep an eye on how your heart is doing when you’re taking them. The fat absorbers act at the other end and basically eliminate the fat that you’re currently eating. Their side-effects can include leakage if you’ve got a lot of fat in your diet so they aren’t a long term solution.

Incoming search terms:

Do you self-prescribe?

Arnold — Sun, 16 Jan 2011 11:26:35 +0000

You’d never think of prescribing medication for yourself, would you?

What about when you do something like buy Fenphedra though? It’s drug after all. That it doesn’t require a prescription doesn’t change that. After all, you’re planning on taking it to cause a medical change in your body, aren’t you?

It’s not so much that nobody should self-prescribe but it makes the point that you are taking medication and should at least read the leaflet on side-effects before just downing a whole heap of pills.

Time to buy another TV?

Arnold — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 19:53:11 +0000

One of the problems in buying something like an LCD TV is that there rarely seems to be a good time to buy them. Get one today and tomorrow you’re sure to find that it’s obsolete.

However, there are times when technology stabilises for a reasonable amount of time. Times like when TV first came out or when colour was first introduced.

With the introduction of 3D TV this feels like one of those times so if you do buy a new TV you’ve the choice of some excellent value from HD sets or technology that will be around for quite a while if you go for 3D instead.