Another scary article in the paper telling about diet pills being sold online that contain high amounts of a suspected carcinogen and sibutramine, a chemical cousin of amphetamines. Don’t you think that’s scary?! For years I wished for a magic pill that would alleviate my appetite and I was sure I would lose weight if I had them. But I noticed that I always ate ‘bad stuff’, regardless of whether or not I had taken an appetite suppressant. And my weight yo-yoed up and down within a 20 pound range. And the pills made me feel weird. Here I am years later, finally learning the lesson and YIELDING to the lesson, that the only way to control my weight is to control myself. Period. Without chemical aids, at least in my case. I had to just make up my mind that I was going to take charge and take responsibility for my health and then do it. It helps that I am a firm believer in taking as little medicine as possible, whether over the counter or prescribed by a physician. When the warnings and list of side effects takes up half of the commercial time on a drug, you gotta figure it can’t REALLY be good for you. And the pills online aren’t regulated at all, so no wonder they are finding they contain lots of bad stuff. So my message today is for anyone struggling with diet and weight issues to stay overweight until you can get a grip on yourself and use simple self-discipline to get the job done. In the long run it’s the only thing that works, whether you are dieting or struggling with some other ‘self issue.’ Lecture over.