Diet pills, patches, teas or sprays: all a big con

The excellent Channel 4 programme "Cook Yourself Slim" has, every week, exposed a dieting product as being useless. It's been gratifying to see slimming patches, a slimming spray and slimming tea (apparently used by Posh Spice) revealed as rubbish. They always run the legend "this does not constitute a clinical trial," but have you ever noticed how few of these products ever go through proper clinical trials? They don't because the results would be so bad no-one would buy the product. We do, however, swallow whatever hype they throw at us, because we're all looking for a quick fix to lose weight.

I recently tried, against my better judgment, a new slimming pill called TrimSecrets. Michelle Mone from Ultimo is their testimonial customer and I suspect she is also co-marketing the product, because I receive emails "from the desk of Michelle Mone," as you do for Ultimo.

So, what's in a TrimSecret? Well, the dinky tin contains a calorie controlled diet sheet. It's a sensible diet. You're encouraged to drink a lot of water and exercise. All good. Then you're supposed to take one of the capsules three times a day.

The capsules, we're told, contain only natural ingredients, and looking at the list, most of the ingredients have been associated with speeding up the metabolism: green tea, vitamin C, chromium for example. There is also caffeine and guarana extract, both stimulants.

In the first week of using TrimSecrets I lost 3 pounds, which was good but not surprising because I was very enthusiastic about my new regime and exercised a lot. The second week it went down to two pounds and the third, one pound, which was a rate of loss of I would have expected without using the pills.

Unfortunately though the pills had side effects for me. Nobody mentions side effects among the glowing testimonials on the TrimSecrets website. But the stimulants meant I couldn't sleep, so I had to take the third pill much earlier in the day; and I started feeling generally nauseous (the caffeine) and quite low. As soon as I stopped taking the pills, these side effects eased.

I have tried herbal slimming tablets in the past - Zotrim comes to mind - but in my experience, they're useless and no substitute for a low calorie nutritious diet, exercise and willpower. Sadly.

The same goes for all the "miracle" treatments you can have at the beauticians which claim to reduce your weight by pounds, a dress size and so on. I mentioned one of them on this site, Universal Contour Wrap. There are many others, and watching "Silicone Chicks" on Discovery Health, you see how gullible women are. An overweight woman tried a treatment which, she was told, would reduce her measurements by an inch in three weeks. She had lots of treatments at around £40 a time I think it was, and did lose a couple of inches, but she was also using a personal trainer and so that's how she lost that weight. I expect the treatments gave her nothing more than smoother skin and a damaged bank balance.

My advice would be to spend the money on a personal trainer or, failing that, some delicious food that will indulge you as you diet - seafood, turbot or steak.