194 Obesity Treatment
Exercise, therefore, seems to relate to weight loss maintenance and
improvements in both physical and psychological health.
Drug treatments of obesityIf both dietary and exercise treatments have failed then an obese individual
may turn to drugs; as Hirsch said in 1998, “Who would not rejoice to find
a magic bullet that we could fire into obese people to make them perma-
nently slim and healthy?” (p. 1136). Doctors have been offering weight loss
drugs for many years (see figure 9.3), and often used to prescribe amphe-
tamines, but this practice was stopped due to their addictive qualities.
In 1987 it was estimated that in the UK the National Health Service spent
£4,000,000 per year on appetite suppressant drugs. A Which? magazine
survey in the 1980s suggested that up to half the women who consulted
their doctors about their weight were offered drugs. Further, The Observer
newspaper carried out a study in 1988 involving three journalists who went
to dieting centers and asked for help to lose weight. None of them was obese,
or even overweight, but they were all offered different forms of “diet pills.”
They were given no counseling, and asked no questions as to why they wanted
to be thinner. The drugs varied from placebos to amphetamines, and were
presented without any medical advice.
Nowadays, drug therapy is only legally available to patients in the UK
with a BMI of 30 or more, and government bodies have become increasingly
restrictive on the use of anti-obesity drugs. Current recommendations state
that drugs should be used only when other approaches have failed, and
that they should not be prescribed for longer than 3 months in the first
Figure 9.3 Searching for the magic bullet for obesity. (Source: Advertising Archives.)
Image not available in the electronic edition