Unrelated to 12-step programs or religion or whatnot, but maybe helpful:
my doctor wants me to lose weight, and recommends some supplement beverage drink mix junk called Bioslife Slim.
It's expensive as hell if you buy it outright, but if you call the company and do auto-pay monthly shipments and some membership it's about $60 for a month's supply. I bought a short supply of bios life (regular, not slim) from my doctor directly a while ago, but haven't tried it long enough to report on any benefits yet. it's supposed to help lower cholesterol, blood sugar with chromium, and basically thickens in your stomach to help you feel full without eating as much if you chug it a bit before a meal. It does do that, at least to me. Maybe it'd help you eat less.
But, an important aside: the annoying part is, and consider this carefully, that the company pushes it as a multi-level marketing thing where you can open a 'franchise' and sell it to other people, so i am wary of it a bit, but my doctor swears he has seen results from it in patients who have tried it, both in weight loss and blood sugar reduction, to the point of having at least one patient able to lose weight and stop taking insulin. I'm type 2 diabetic myself, so that is of rather great interest to me. i don't take insulin yet, and i'm trying to keep it that way.
I wouldn't EVER buy INTO anything from them (or a similar company) as far as a "business opportunity" goes, but I may give their product a try for a couple more months and see if it does anything. It shouldn't hurt anything but the pocketbook at worst, and I keep meticulous logs and trend graphs of my blood sugar so I'll have a little bit of data to watch. I need to get a good scale while I'm at it to watch that. Of course, diet and behavior modification, exercise, and calorie counting also goes hand-in-hand with it. I'm not conducting a "real" research study either so as far as confounding variables go those are something that I'll have to consider too.
http://www.unicity.net/usa/page/slim is the url for the stuff, if you dare.
And speaking of similar companies, another one called Melaleuca sells all sorts of junk in a similar fashion - but one of their products I tried actually I really, really liked. They also have a fiber supplement drink called "Fiberwise" that fills you up in a similar way, though doesn't have the weight loss claims attached. It's got a lot of different fiber sources, vitamins, and nutritional supplement stuff that may or may not do much, but as a whole the fiber content alone was actually excellent and it did its job (ahem) well.
http://businesscenter.melaleuca.com/...=1&sCatId=2156 is a direct link to the product. I went through a jug of the peach flavor over a couple of months. The upshot is that it's far, far cheaper than Bios Life Slim.
A disclaimer, to be clear: i don't sell the stuff, not affiliated in any way, etc. And, I can't stress enough, if you try either one, I strongly encourage that you don't get sucked in by the multi-level marketing part. It's *way* too easy to get burned doing that. But the products do seem decent, good even, so it might be worth a shot to try buying some. YMMV.
No matter how you choose to do it, I'd truly like to hear that you're able to succeed at this. It really makes me happy to hear about people making positive changes in their lives.