The New Diet Pills

Karen Mullin had always been able to eat what she wanted with no worries of packing on pounds—until she began battling “middle age spread” last year at age 44. Despite eating right and exercising, the scale wouldn’t budge. Frustrated, Mullin took Ritalin, a drug used to treat attention def-icit hyperactivity disorder, “borrowing” it from a friend. One of its side effects is weight loss, making it a popular diet drug for everyone from soccer moms to starlets. “You hear about how some drugs like Ritalin can just melt the pounds off,” she says, “so you figure why not?”

Should you try it?
Mullin tried the drug only once on a lark without a doctor’s guidance (not recommended). But more docs, frustrated with the handful of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)–approved weight-loss drugs with inconsistent results, are prescribing medications that are used to treat everything from depression to seizures—all with the side effect of weight loss—to help patients drop pounds.

For doctors, this off-label prescribing is legal. In fact, a study that appeared recently in the Archives of Internal Medicine suggests that 21 percent of prescriptions for 160 common drugs (some 150 million prescriptions) are being written to treat conditions for which they aren’t specifically approved. But some experts believe it can set both patients and their doctors up for big letdowns.