Amphetamines are another one that works

@perl4ever: "I don't have experience with dieting or diet pills per se"

If you need to go on a "diet" then your eating too much for the amount of physical excercise you engage in.

People who are morbidly overweight don't seem to have a "I-am-Full" switch. Or have a "I-am-always-hungry" switch that's stuck in the on position. They eat too much, the body responds by burning off the excess. They soon feel more hungry and so on. There's also a psychological component involved, comfort eating etc.

All medications come with side-effects, taking such for long periods is not wise. Certanly not to combat weight-gain. Go for a five-mile run Weekdays and on Sunday. You can have Saturday off.

I think you misunderstood me. I don't need to go on a diet, and I've never really tried. But I've felt and observed that medications change my internal thermostat that governs when I feel hungry. So, similar to lab experiments where they use an artificial proxy for a human illness, I think that bupropion's effect on my induced weight gain might be evidence it works on the natural kind - again, not medical advice, but after all, the FDA approved it for that purpose. I'm not taking it for weight loss precisely, but it is a replacement for an SSRI, and weight loss is a convenient side effect.

In my opinion, psychology, willpower, exercise, healthy foods, are all overrated as driving factors for obesity. All that really matters is your internal regulator of feelings of hunger. There may not be a perfect "diet pill" but it seems to me that if it is straightforward to induce weight gain (and eventually type 2 diabetes) with a pill, then there's no reason to doubt the feasibility of a good diet pill in principle.

Then again, if I put on my "devil's advocate" cap, there could be a fundamental difference between someone whose "thermostat" is stable at a weight that is too high and someone whose setting is stuck on "max". But very few people really gain weight without limit.

Something that really bugs me about prescription meds is, after a while you notice that drugs get invented or first approved for one thing, and then it turns out they are useful for something totally different, which really means that nobody is looking at what the drug truly is, in a holistic sense, in all its dimensions. Like, if e.g. mitochondria are important to understanding one drug, then we should be going back and looking with new eyes at all drugs that we already have to see how they affect that aspect of the body. Because not only maybe the old drugs have new possible applications, but maybe we were all wrong about why they worked in the old applications. I fear there's no incentive to, mostly, because if something's FDA approved and has a market, why bother thinking about it any more.