PhenQ Review

Our PT and Nutritionist James Dixon brings us this PhenQ review after testing the supplement for 30 days.

There are a few things that can halt your weight loss journey.

Temptation to snack or overeat is one of the bigger ones. So too is the fatigue and lethargy that maintaining a weight loss diet with restricted calories can bring.

Finally, if you follow a restricted eating plan, you may find your metabolic rate dropping, meaning that your body will struggle to burn through much of the fat that your new lifestyle is set up to combat.

This is where a good quality thermogenic fat burner can help. It can solve all of the above problems to a greater or lesser degree. They aren’t miracle cures – you will still need to put the work in – but they can make life easier and your diet far more effective.

And, if you’re looking to invest in a good thermogenic fat burner, there are few better than PhenQ. Today, I’ll deliver an unbiased assessment of it as part of this PhenQ review, as well as looking at the company behind the product and the science behind the ingredients.

About PhenQ

PhenQ is manufactured by Wolfson Berg, a supplement company who are generally very well regarded, known for the rigor of their scientific, clinical research. Everything in PhenQ is data-led, as we will see below.

In fact, Wolfson Berg have been going strong for over a decade, which counts as an eternity in the fast-moving marketplace that represents modern supplementation.

Their success largely rests on PhenQ, which has been shown to be a very potent thermogenic fat burner, able to burn through an extra hundred or so calories per day, among other benefits. The ingredients are all top shelf, combining to give you that extra burn whilst also helping out your energy levels and lightly suppressing your appetite.

Do note, there is no such thing as a magic weight loss pill. Fat burners like PhenQ are often criticized for not being a quick fix.

They don’t promise to be one.

This isn’t the point; it’s not what they are designed for. Rather, they are designed to make everything on your weight loss journey a little bit easier and a little bit more efficient.

PhenQ does this very ably. Very, very ably.

You can’t buy them, take them daily, and expect to see results. You will need patience, staying power, and a good diet and lifestyle.

You will need to build a calorie deficit into your daily eating plan. Roughly speaking, if you can maintain a daily deficit of 500 calories, you can lose around 1 lb. per week. If you have a lot of weight to lose (if your BMI score is 35 or over, say), you can double this – put a daily deficit of 1,000 calories into place to lose around 2 lbs. per week. That being said, a 500 calorie per day deficit is going to be much more sustainable in the longer term.

You should still do this if you’re taking PhenQ. In fact, think of it the other way round – do this, and then begin taking PhenQ.

Most of your deficit will come from tactically under eating. Some of it will come from increased energy expenditure, or simply being more active.

This is where PhenQ begins to work. It will give you an energy boost, helping you to stay more active. It will burn more calories, making that deficit more achievable and effective. And it will suppress your appetite, making it easy to under eat.

How PhenQ works

We’ve already seen what PhenQ is about – we’ve seen the benefits it can offer. These benefits unite to enable an easier, more efficient weight loss journey under the right conditions. Put a calorie deficit into place, take PhenQ, and stay strong. Your weight loss will come on steadily as the weeks progress.

As above, a daily deficit of 500 calories will bring about a weight loss of around 1 lb. per week. Most of this will be from fat loss. Anything above this 1 lb. per week will begin burning through lean mass – your body will metabolize muscle mass for energy – unless you really do have a lot of weight to lose.

But how should you structure this calorie deficit? As mentioned above, this should come from both under eating and doing more – take in fewer calories and burn more. For example, you could try eating 300 calories fewer than your body needs per day. Couple this with an extra 200 calories worth of extra exercise. This could be as simple as a 45-minute stroll around your local park, or could be far more intense, like a ten minute HIIT session.

As long as the calories add up to around 500, you should start to see results.

There are a few issues with this, however. It’s simple and straightforward. This doesn’t mean it’s easy. If it was, far fewer people would struggle with their weight than currently do.

Hunger pangs hit. Habitual overeating is hard to overcome!

A calorie deficit will also mean a lack of energy (calories are a measurement of energy as heat, after all), which can make you sluggish. This sluggishness can halt your activity as you find yourself lacking the energy to get up and go. It can also diminish your cognitive strength and willpower, making it far harder to stick to your well-laid plan.

It’s also quite common to see your metabolism suffer on a calorie deficit. Your body doesn’t want to lose fatty tissue – that fat is its energy reserves, set aside for a rainy day. It will fight you to hold onto it. It does this by using less energy overall – it slows its metabolic rate down.

This is where a good fat burner like PhenQ comes into its own.

It will hit your weight loss efforts from three sides. As above, it is designed primarily to boost your energy levels and elicit increased rates of thermogenesis.

It is also designed to aid satiation and increase mental clarity and cognitive energy. In short, it is made to help you to live with and overcome many of the side effects of a sustained calorie deficit, all whilst keeping your metabolism firing optimally. It manages all of this quite naturally, using a formula made up of all-natural, well-tested ingredients.

Thermogenesis is a bit of a watchword here. PhenQ is, after all, a thermogenic fat burner. As a placeholder, you can think of thermogenesis as being something like the rate at which your body uses up energy. This is how you should view it in practical terms. However, the truth is at once simpler and more complex.

Thermogenesis has a very telling etymology. We get the word from thermo, meaning heat, and genesis, meaning creation or beginning. It is the creation of heat from a complicated biochemical process. This process represents the rate at which your body releases energy, in the form of calories, from fat, in the form of heat.

Thermogenic ingredients, like those included in PhenQ, increase this rate. They cause your body to use more energy, as calories, to create heat. This results in increased weight loss as more of your body’s energy resources go towards thermogenesis.

Then there is the hunger satiation. PhenQ is explicitly designed to help you deal with the hunger pangs and cravings generally associated with a restricted eating plan, such as a calorie deficit diet. These can be accompanied by low mood, anxiety, depression, and a lack of energy and drive. This can break a diet plan abruptly and often irrevocably.

PhenQ is designed in large part to overcome these effects, too. It should help you to feel fuller for longer, no matter your calorie deficit. It should nip cravings in the bud, helping you to stay strong, helping you to put your willpower to good use elsewhere.

PhenQ should also give you plenty of energy from a couple of sources, most notably from a decent dose of caffeine. As we’ve seen, this will help you to overcome the lethargy associated with under eating, both physical and mental. You will be able to maintain a more active lifestyle, moving more and thus opening up that deficit you need to lose weight. You will be more mentally switched on, which will both help you to navigate day to day demands and responsibilities a lot more ably and to maintain the willpower needed to stick to your diet plan.

In short, as above, PhenQ will make your calorie deficit easier to maintain, more pleasant to maintain, and more efficient, whilst helping you to stay feeling yourself throughout.

Everything in PhenQ’s formula is completely natural, completely vegan friendly, and backed up by a wealth of scientific data. There are no fillers, no hidden junk – it is good quality, clean, and effective. This should put to bed any lingering skepticism surrounding it, skepticism born from it sounding to be too good to be true.

It’s not too good to be true, it is simply a useful collection of ingredients that will augment a healthy, calorie-appropriate lifestyle. You should be able to achieve some fantastic results with it.

PhenQ Ingredients

We’ve seen the benefits to be gained from PhenQ – more energy, more calories burned, less hunger, in brief. But how does it manage this? The same way that any supplement achieves its results – a stella list of high-quality ingredients, dosed optimally for the best results possible.

It begins with one of my favorites, the trademarked formulation of A-Lacey’s Reset. It’s a mix of alpha lipoic acid, magnesium and cysteine. Taken together, these should do a lot of the metabolic work – they have been shown to boost your body’s natural metabolic function. The whole lot is well researched, backed up by good quality data, with several respected studies testifying on its behalf.

Every ingredient in A-Lacey’s Reset can help the body to reduce fat levels, enabling greater overall weight loss.

A-Lacey’s Reset has also been shown to promote physical recovery and hypertrophy (muscle growth). Magnesium in particular is a resource for athletic advancement.

You get 25 mg of A-Lacey’s Reset per serving of PhenQ, which is a perfectly workable amount for the results you will want.

Next up, we have chromium picolinate. Chromium picolinate is a trace mineral that plays a central role in the metabolization and storage of macronutrients – protein, fat, and carbs, all of which come with the calorie contents which fuel your body.

Taking chromium picolinate daily has been shown to enable overweight participants to shed body fat and bring their BMI in line with healthy recommendations.

Chromium picolinate can also help to even out blood sugar levels. This should lead in turn to fewer cravings and hunger pangs, suppressing your need or desire to snack.

You get 80 mcg of chromium picolinate with each PhenQ serving. This is quite low. If you were relying on chromium picolinate on its own, you would want to look at more like 400 mcg per serving. However, in concert with the other ingredients, this appears to be just about workable an amount.

A lot of PhenQ’s benefits rest on caffeine. It comes packed with 142.4 milligrams of caffeine anhydrous per serving, which is equivalent to around one strong cup of coffee.

Caffeine performs a couple of roles in any thermogenic fat burner. Firstly, it elicits thermogenesis in and of itself. It helps fat oxidation, too, making it a handy tool for shedding weight. Secondly, and pretty obviously, it gives you a good energy kick. It’s the main ingredient included to help you clear your head and escape diet-induced lethargy.

Alongside these heavy hitters, we have several other ingredients that have been proven to help with weight loss, eliciting greater rates of thermogenesis and helping to curb your appetite. These include l-carnitine tartrate, which has a mild fat burning effect and helps your body to better utilize energy; calcium carbonate, which contributes towards thermogenesis and has been shown to help people to lose weight; nopal, which aids weight loss, allowing you to better absorb, fat and sugar, better control your blood sugar levels, and see a reduction in your appetite, whilst also helping with fat metabolization; and capsicum extract, one of the most potent thermogenic compounds going.

The formula is rounded out nicely with 3 mg of piperine. This has few direct benefits to your weight loss. However, this isn’t the point of piperine. You’ll often find piperine in supplements because it works to improve the bioavailability of every other ingredient – it will allow your body to better absorb and use everything else PhenQ offers. It is also a fantastic anti-inflammatory, which will help you to recover more effectively form exercise (always a good thing when calories are scarce) and can help to ward off certain chronic diseases.

Does PhenQ Work?

PhenQ works incredibly well.

Firstly, I want to talk about the experience of actually taking it. There are plenty of fat burners out there that need you to take them three or four times per day. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it can be a bit of hassle.

PhenQ only needs you to take it twice, one capsule before breakfast and one before dinner. This is good – it’s high in caffeine, so you don’t want to be taking it too late in the day or you’ll never be able to sleep at night – and this could have carry a negative impact in terms of your quest for weight loss.

This being said, PhenQ doubles up nicely as a bit of a pre-workout supplement. If you train during the day, it may be worth saving a dose for a half hour or so before you begin. The caffeine should give you enough oomph to get through any workout quite ably.

There are a wealth of positive PhenQ reviews and impressive commentary out there around the supplement. User testimonials lending weight to its claims are kind of a dime a dozen, with plenty of people around the world citing it as their go-to supplement whenever they need to cut a bit of fluffy fat whilst retaining their hard fought for muscle gains.

I like to take user testimonials on board. The digital age has many ups and downs, with consumer advice being one of its many positives. We should all try to make the most out of it. However, I always make sure to take them with a pinch of salt.

There are many amateurs out there who may not know what to look for; there are also lots of sponsored avertisements out there who are paid to say nice things about products.

I went into PhenQ with my eyes open. I was far, far from disappointed. It more than satisfies expectations, no matter how high your hopes are going into it.

The caffeine didn’t do too much for me. But then again, I’m a professional writer who spends his down time training – in short, I drink a lot of strong coffee. It comes with the job. I have built up a very high tolerance. Most people would get a good buzz from it though I reckon.

This being said, I didn’t get much of an immediate buzz.

I did however find my energy levels being overall quite a lot higher on PhenQ.

As I said, I spend my down time training, often going at it pretty hard. I rarely sit around on the couch – my life is pretty much go, go, go. This is fun, but it can sometimes be a little much, especially when I’m running a calorie deficit.

Not so on PhenQ. I had more than enough energy to do everything I wanted to do. In fact, I actually found myself drinking less coffee than normal when I was on it – it simply wasn’t needed, my body was providing natural energy so ably.

I need to move around a lot. I find it hard to stick to a low calorie diet, so I need to constantly burn through extra calories!

I have found few supplements that have enabled me to comfortably restrict my calories – usually, I have to grit my teeth and rely on willpower (willpower which could be better spent elsewhere, like in the gym).

Again, this wasn’t the case with PhenQ. Hunger pangs disappeared, I didn’t need or even want to snack between meals, and I didn’t feel like I was going without. I even tried a few days of intermittent fasting and found that I wasn’t getting at all hungry until an hour or so before I was due to eat my first meal, which generally wasn’t until about midday.

In short, it definitely seems to fulfill at least two of its three key functions. It gave me more energy and allowed me to stick to a restricted eating plan without it seeming overly draconian. So far, so good.

It’s tricky to talk about thermogenesis. It’s hard to know how much extra energy the PhenQ formula was having me burn without dieting in controlled conditions. I wanted this to be a real-life test, so kept it far away from any lab as I went about my daily business. I therefore don’t know how many extra calories I was burning each day.

I will say this, though – I certainly burned more calories, and lost more weight, than I would have done without PhenQ.

It allowed me to train as I needed to and eat (and not eat) what I needed to. This alone was a bit of a godsend as I trimmed down. The weight loss was consistent, too, which it often isn’t with me – this hints that perhaps there was a bit of extra metabolic burn going on.

Either way, it certainly made my weight loss more efficient and achievable.

I didn’t experience any side effects on PhenQ. I wasn’t expecting to, to be honest. The most common side effects people tend to report revolve around caffeine content – restlessness, jitters, sleeplessness, nerves, and so on.

As above, I’m pretty inured to caffeine, so this didn’t trouble me. Some people report a little nausea and stomach upset when they first begin taking it. I didn’t experience it, but I’ve been told by those who have that it goes away after the first few days.

Do take care as you begin it, though, especially if you know that you’re in any way sensitive to caffeine. If in doubt, run it by your healthcare provider first. They will be able to advise you on the best course of action to take and may have some insight into your ongoing weight loss journey.

Evidence to Support PhenQ

PhenQ can back up pretty much all of its claims with high-quality clinical research, which is often dispiritingly rare in the supplement industry. Each ingredient used in its formula is there because of a good body of data.

The ingredients included have been proven to serve at least one of PhenQ’s principal roles – they are all potent for thermogenesis, energy boosting, and/or appetite suppression. Many, like caffeine, are good for a couple.

For example, a study in which participants took A-Lacey’s Reset were found able to lose an average of 7.24% of their body fat whilst gaining an average of an extra 3.80% of muscle mass. Thus, it has been shown to be a good tool for those looking to recomp – ‘recomposition’, the process of losing fat whilst building muscle, which is incredibly hard to do.

Another study looking into Capsimax powder, the form of capsicum used in PhenQ, found that it could be very beneficial for eliciting ‘clinically significant levels of weight loss’, whilst a third found that chromium picolinate can indeed ‘reduce appetite and [curb] cravings’ in participants suffering with depression.

Caffeine anhydrous is a distilled, more concentrated form of coffee, made using dehydrated coffee. As we have seen, PhenQ gives you 150mg of caffeine anhydrous. 

Caffeine has been proven to raise metabolic rates by up to 13%, though this was when taken in a particular large volume (around seven cups of coffee for the average person). Nevertheless, it shows caffeine’s thermogenic viability. Research also shows that daily caffeine intake can help improving weight management, preventing weight gain.

According to recent research, caffeine has also been shown to decrease hunger levels by suppressing the hunger hormone, ghrelin. Thus, we can see that caffeine isn’t just for energy and thermogenesis – it can actively reduce your appetite. 

Chromium has been shown to be able to help in reducing calorie intake, suppressing cravings, and increasing satiation. An 8 week study looking at overweight women who were taking 1000mg of chromium picolinate every day found their hunger levels and food cravings reduced, and with them their overall food intake.

Similar research has gone into verifying each and every ingredient contained in PhenQ, all of it vindicating the formula as it stands with everything included in it. Few supplements can boast such a degree of clinical justification.

Verdict

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend PhenQ to anybody looking to lose weight.

As I said at the beginning, it isn’t a weight loss miracle cure. It’s not a magic pill. Such things obviously don’t exist. If you take it, change nothing about your diet and lifestyle, and expect to lose weight, you will be sorely disappointed.

However, if you build a calorie deficit into your diet, take up an active lifestyle, and plan to lose a pound or two per week for a prolonged period of time, PhenQ might just be your new best friend.

It will make your weight loss journey easier to stick to, increasing your quality of life in a way not often seen during a restricted eating plan. You’ll have all the energy you need to do everything you want to do, including getting and/or staying as active as you need to meet your health and fitness goals.

It will also be a lot easier to maintain a calorie deficit without suffering any hunger pangs or cravings. As we have seen, multiple ingredients in PhenQ’s formula have been proven to suppress your appetite, level out your blood sugar levels, and keep you feeling fuller, for longer, on less.

The evidence is there to support PhenQ’s claim as a thermogenic compound, too. Your calorie deficit won’t simply be easier to put into place and stick to, therefore – it will be far more effective, with an extra hundred or so calories burned per day simply by taking a couple of capsules.

It does everything it promises to, making your weight loss journey that bit more productive.