Trying Hunger Blocking Pills to Lose Weight

***Please note, this is not a sponsored blog post and contains no affiliate links. This is just something I decided to try on my own.***

A “magic pill” to lose weight

Diet pills have a bit of a controversial reputation. I’m not so ignorant as to assume that a pill is going to do all of the work for me. It’s not the work that is keeping me from hitting my goals. I’m dedicated in my workouts, and I’ve been using My Fitness Pal to track the calories that I consume each day.

It’s eating where I struggle.  Being hungry, dealing with the stomach pain, headaches, and the lethargy that comes from cutting calories can be a problem. And eating less is the key element to losing weight. But the goal is to feel better, not worse. So, I try to avoid any methods that might bring about these symptoms.

Avon’s line of Espira diet pills includes various types of weight loss supplements. There are pills for energy, metabolism, sleep, multivitamins, etc. It was the hunger block that appealed to me. To be able to extend my time between meals and reduce snacking is exactly what I needed help with. Then, I could take care of the rest.

Hunger blocker

The hunger block pills cost $25 for a bottle of 60 pills – a 30 day supply. Some of the supplements cost more. Some less. I’ve never seen them on sale or promoted in Avon’s emails.

The hunger blocker pills are vegetarian, and the label boasts that hunger block “naturally reduces hunger to help avoid overeating and to extend time between meals.” They also have a 3 ½ star rating on the site.

The pills themselves are large capsules that are filled with a gray, ground up powder. I personally never had a problem swallowing pills, even those as large as these. But if large pills bother you, these are pretty big.

Eating and work-out routine

I start work at 7am. So, breakfast is early. I also do a lot of small snacking throughout the morning in order to put off lunch until as late as 1pm to make for a short afternoon.

For exercise, I typically ride a stationary bike, burning between 500-1000 calories per day. I also factor in yard work, cleaning, and other physical activity that I might do while at home.

I log all of my food intake and exercise into My Fitness Pal. This app. tells you the maximum number of calories you can eat in a day in order to reach your predefined weight loss goals for your body type and daily activity level. I’ve been using it for most of the year, trying very hard to log in accurate food consumption and my daily exercise in order to stay within these parameters.

While it makes me aware of what I’m putting into my body or how much more I need to exercise in a day to burn off extra calories consumed, I haven’t seen great results on the scale.  I weigh in roughly once a week, usually on a Saturday morning before I’ve dressed or eaten. 

Day 1

I began taking Espira on August 1, 2019. It was a Thursday, but I had happened to take a vacation day. So, I treated this day like a weekend.

It’s apparent now that I should have read the directions more carefully. Instead, I casually glanced over them and knew to take two at a time but ignored the part that said you’re supposed to take them before a meal. It doesn’t say how long before, but I took them with a bowl of cereal.

It also says on the bottle to take two capsules daily with eight ounces of water before a meal. I took that to mean that you could take two with every meal of the day if you wanted. So, in the first week, there were a few times when I took more than two pills a day. Not a good idea.

I ate my cereal at 9am on that first day and then went about my day, trying to keep busy, hoping that they would hold me over until at least noon. I was hungry by 11am. So, I ate lunch early and then I took two more pills at 6pm and began to make dinner.

By the time dinner was ready at 6:30, I wasn’t hungry, but I ate anyway. My stomach started to growl at 7pm, even though I still felt full. At 8pm, I ate some watermelon for a snack and didn’t eat again for the rest of the night. I tried not to read too much into their effectiveness after one day.

Day 2

At the time of this experiment, I had Fridays off. So I was still in weekend mode on Day 2. I took two pills at breakfast at 9:30 am and didn’t eat lunch until 12:30. Even then, I wasn’t super hungry. So, it seemed like the pills were kicking in. I was going to a baseball game that night. So, I took two pills at 4pm and ate a light dinner, intending to snack at the game without pigging out.

By 5pm, I had a bad stomach ache. It was hard to pay attention to the game, and I wasn’t feeling well enough to eat anything until I got home that night. Stupidly, I ate some candy I had brought along to the game but hadn’t eaten, just to have something in my system.  Then, I went to bed early.

The next morning, I took two pills at 9:30 before eating a bagel. By 1pm, my stomach ache was back. Also, my mouth and chin started to feel slightly swollen, like the beginning of an allergic reaction. It wasn’t noticeable, but the feeling came and went throughout the next few days. This had happened with some metabolism boosters that I had purchased from a drug store the year before, which did nothing to help me lose weight.

The remainder of week 1

On day 4, I skipped the pills and decided to just eat when I was hungry. Coincidentally, I didn’t feel hungry between meals that day, though the swollen feeling lingered. I began to wonder if it was the pills or just allergies making me feel that way. Still, I had paid for 30 days worth of pills, and I wanted to keep going as long as I didn’t have any major side effects.

On day 5, I was back to work. So, that meant an early breakfast. I took two pills before I left the house at 6:30am and brought a Pop Tart with me which I ate when I got to my desk at 7. I was hungry every few hours throughout the day until I stopped eating at 7pm. Then I felt full for the rest of the night.

Over the next few days, I took two pills at breakfast but struggled to stay full all day. I would eat my lunch in small portions to try to stave off my hunger, but I was ravenous before I got home at 3:30 each day, and it was a struggle to put off dinner until a time when I could feel full for the rest of the night. A lot of the time, this meant just dealing with my growling stomach for an hour or so before eating. This is a big part of dieting anyway, at least until your body acclimates to not gorging yourself throughout the day. But I expected the pills to curb this symptom.

Week 2

It wasn’t until day 10, a Saturday, that I decided to weigh myself. Despite feeling like I was struggling with reducing my food intake, I had lost a pound. I was taking the pills pretty consistently each day, but if I felt like skipping a day, I did.

I also discovered that the fine print said not to take more than two a day. So, from then on out, if I was going to take two pills, I took them right before breakfast, anywhere from a few seconds to a half hour before I ate.

By the end of the second week, I found that I wasn’t hungry in the morning and got hungrier in the afternoons. So, I was able to put off eating until I really needed to.

In this way, I think the pills were helpful. My being hungry had nothing to do with the hunger blocker. It was just whatever my body was feeling that day, and that’s true of my eating habits in general. Staying busy and eating foods that make you feel full dictated whether or not I was hungry at any given time.

What the pills helped me to do was to recognize when I was truly hungry and when I was just bored. It forced me to have the willpower to tell myself not to eat yet and to hold off until I was truly hungry. 

I still had moments of weakness where I would go over my calorie limits on My Fitness Pal and not do enough exercise to make up for it, rather due to time constraints, exhaustion, or just feeling bad, but I still managed to exercise everyday to at least maintain my weight and build muscle, something I’ve been doing all year which has stalled any weight gain but failed to actually drop pounds.

Week 3

In week 3, I recorded daily that I wasn’t as hungry between meals. Also, that swollen feeling in my mouth no longer resurfaced. At least one day a week, I would burn 1000 calories on the bike and burn 500 calories every other day of the week. I remained conscious about not eating if I wasn’t hungry and allowing myself to be hungry for an hour or so before a meal as long as I wasn’t in any physical pain.  Still, I saw no change on the scale that Saturday when I weighed in, despite feeling like I’d done pretty well.

Week 4

On the third Saturday, I weighed in to see how things were going and found that I had gained almost two pounds. Of course, there’s always that week of the month where women retain water and bloat. So, I always take that into consideration before throwing the scale against the wall.

I then decided to weigh in the next day to see if there was any change. There was a change. The next day, the scale read that I had gained almost another two pounds.  The next day, I weighed myself again, and the number had gone up nearly another pound.

Frustrated, I stepped on the scale the next evening, just to see what it would say, and the number was almost back to normal. Sometimes the scale really does lie.

I did pretty well with my eating and exercising the final week. On Thursday, my work threw a pizza party, and I did over-eat, but then I skipped dinner and exercised more to try to make up for the cheat day. Of course, by bedtime, I was hungry and ended up going over my calorie limit for the day.

Final weigh-in and thoughts

That final Saturday, the scale hadn’t changed from the week before. So, I took my last two pills on Sunday, just to finish the bottle. I was glad to be done with them.

I wish I could say that I lost at least a pound or two that month, but I pretty much ended up right back where I started. The pills had no effect on my hunger or the scale. This being my second attempt to use diet pills to aid in my weight loss, it’s likely going to be my last.

My early schedule, limited activity desk job, and aging body are a challenging combination of roadblocks when it comes to losing weight. My next step is to try some short-term diets that have worked in the past. Then, maybe I can start to see real results on the scale. If nothing else, these pills have reiterated that it takes willpower, hard work, and a more active lifestyle in order to see real weight loss results.

What weight loss fails have you encountered? Share your stories in the comments below!

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