Glucagon-like peptide-1 agonism - GLP-1, common in obesity medicines - is not essential to weight management, according to preclinical research led by Richard DiMarchi and Matthias Tschöp, with funding from their startup company Bluewater Biosciences.
No shit Sherlock, doesn’t take a fucking genius to see that people have been losing weight by a variety of methods since weight management was even a thing. It’s just fucking easier with GLP-1 agonists. I haven’t read the article, is the blurb supposed to be dripping in sarcasm or something?
No, they actually talk about other drugs that have a similar effect as alternatives.
They just really didn’t think that headline through.
They probably did, they just wanted it to be clickbait as with most things online these days
Yeah that was my suspicion, thanks for clarifying.
Amphetamines? I bet the other drugs are amphetamines. They do work, they used to sell them as diet pills in fact, then some valium to level you off for nightime. Back in the 50s not sure when they shut it down.
As to the headline, it’s clickbait, people see a false statement on the title and want to come onto the thread to correct it. At least sometimes that’s a tactic people use to get engagement on social media, maybe on articles as well for people rage clicking the article.
The article says what the drugs are in the second paragraph…
No, it’s not amphetamines.
I was joking in the beginning part there. But if you knew what they were why didn’t you say what they were? Now if you excuse me I need to order some tapeworms off of the dark web.
Surprisingly, they have not.
Before GLP1s, weightloss was a myth. 99. something % of people (edit 99.2% of women) who meet the medical definition of obese will always be obese despite a lifetime of effort.
We know for certain from decades of research that weightloss from willpower alone, even with diet plans or excersize plans is functionally impossible. The best they do is yoyo effects - no diet has ever produced perminant weight loss on a real scale.
Very rarely a statistically insignificant sample size enjoy permenant weight loss and these individuals are held up to show it’s possible and you can do it too! But that’s just not true, and we know it’s not true because decades of stats show again and again that perminant weight loss just does not happen.
I don’t say this often…that was a great article. Thanks for sharing.
😊 Right? It really stuck with me. One of those articles that ties together so many obvious and not so obvious pieces into a really clear picture. And in HuffPo no less!
Horseshit. I literally know multiple people who have lost weight and kept it off.
If you know several people who met the medical definition of obese and have perminantly left that category then you know several outliers, which is entirely possible.
But that is just not representative. Over 99% of obese people do not lose weight. Those few outliers are heavily visible and celebrated so it feels like there must be more.
Yeah, I’m not trusting an article that makes a lot of claims that are contrary to my lived experience and everything else I’ve ever read but cites nothing.
If 99% of people aren’t a thing, then 1% of people are. That’s like 80 million people.
Yeah, I’m not trusting an article that makes a lot of claims that are contrary to my lived experience and everything else I’ve ever read but cites nothing.
Fun fact: glp1 weight loss isn’t permanent either.
You have to keep taking it.
So now all you’ve done is added some pills.
How is that different from like antidepressants or thyroid medication, etc? You’ll have symptoms again if you stop the pills.
The difference is the social understanding.
Nobody gets thyroid-shamed. People understand hyper-/hypo-thyroidism as an objective symptom of a physiological problem.
Obesity is not viewed the same, though it really should be.
Did I say anything about other medication?
No?
Why bring it up?
“These other things aren’t a permanent cure either!” Is a lazy response.
The original comment was acting like gold-1s are a cure where traditional weight loss isn’t. The reality is if you go off them, the same thing happens as going off your diet.
They’re a cure for having an uncontrollable appetite, which makes dieting difficult to impossible.
So if you stop taking them, you retain your controlled appetite?
Spoiler: nope.
They’re not a cure for anything.
Yep!
The altered hormone balance is what allows weight loss and if that reverts than so does weight loss.
I know this “you have to keep taking them” argument is big in anti-glp1 circles, but I don’t think it’s very good - the same is true of vitamin supplements. You have to keep taking them or the deficiency comes back. They still help.
I don’t care for glp1s myself but i’ve heard how happy they make some, so i don’t judge others’ choices.
“I know this ‘if you go off the diet plan you gain weight’ argument is big in anti diet plans, but…’”
I get that gol1s help people regulate their caloric intake. Don’t get me wrong.
But acting like they’re some miracle when they’re not is counter productive, particularly given that the core issue is ultimately behavioral in the first place.
People who’ve gotten to obesity have done so are more likely to revert to the same habits that led to it in the first place. Unless there’s something fairly radical about their lifestyle.
For me that change was finding a few gymbro friends who both cared enough to keep me going and genuinely celebrated my losses (and gains, weightlifting was part of the exercise thing.)
I’m not a gymbro, and I never will be, but being around them is sort of like a smoker finding new friends who don’t smoke. It makes it easier.
The other more important change was therapy. Lifelong habits don’t change easily, and therapy makes that much easier.
The point being here that GPL1 is not the only way to get there; and in terms of society’s health, almost certainly not the best solution. (That solution would require prevention, and corporations don’t like that.)
And blood pressure medicine, and plenty of other drugs. If benefits > risks & costs, who cares?
And?
Beats the shit out of having to weigh and track every calorie for the rest of your life.
People act like willpower is an infinite resource.
Sounds like a miracle, doesn’t it?
Miracles don’t exist.
What is so different about this than a doctor telling you that this statin will help to lower cholesterol, but if you stop taking it, the cholesterol will come back?
Or a doctor saying that this PDE5 will make your dick hard, but if you stop taking it, you’ll go back to having a limp dick?
I kinda get what you’re saying…but what doctor in their right mind would use that as a reasoning against statins and boner pills?
I think a couple of important things need to be realized…one being that there are a ton of factors that play into obesity.
If you want to cure obesity, it needs to be done at a societal level. You have to be Socratic about it. Nobody ever gets past the first easy “but why” to “what causes obesity.”
Doctors realize this about statins, and they prescribe diet and lifestyle in tandem with statins. Why they can’t apply the same methods to obesity baffles me.
Whataboutisms are wild.
Then original comment said that traditional weight loss isn’t a permanent cure.
Neither are gpl-1s.
And bringing other medications into it is irrelevant.
And of those who do, no one ever gets past the easy pill, that makes corporations rich.
The reason the US in particular doesn’t have the political will to press for the societal change we know will solve things is because it hurts profits of corporations like nestle or General Mills (and many of these mega corps are also profiting off the medical issues the fist creates.)
If GPL1 is the only way it works for you, that’s between you and your doctor, but long term, it’s not a solution. It’s just another subscription making life more expensive than it needs to be
I don’t disagree.
But.
People like you make it sound like sustained weight loss is easy.
It is not. And acting like it is exacerbates the problem.
It is a lifetime of awareness and shutting out signals. It’s maintaining willpower for as long as you can eat solid food. And possibly longer.
Getting weight loss advice from somebody who has never been fat is like taking tax advice from a toddler. Or if MLK were white. You don’t know. You do not understand. That’s fine.
If you’re one of the lucky < 1% who manage to lose weight permanently, great, good for you. You are an exception, not the norm. But you don’t know that yet. Give it a few years. A seemingly small lifestyle change can start setting you back on old habits.
And that’s the next problem, because when it does, it’s a personal failure. And that puts fuel on the fire.
Very, very few people successfully break out of that cycle forever. And they never will without everyone else understanding that obesity is a symptom of a larger issue.
Science is finally starting to look at that, and GLP-1s are a great place to look…because your body also creates GLP-1s to control appetite and regulate digestion. However, the synthetic form tends to stick around longer.
Perhaps, then, one cause of the overeating that leads to obesity is either a deficiency, or a malabsorption of the natural GLP-1s.
In which case, trying to fight that without medication sounds like a losing battle, without first understanding what is causing that. And in which case, saying that people should avoid GLP-1s sounds an awful lot like telling diabetics that they need to stop taking insulin.
Do you read studies produced by pharma to arrive at those facts? I call bullshit.
Do you know any chronically obese people?
Like, seriously. I’m not joking. What your parent described is something that is entirely true to a lot of people.
Losing weight is “easy”, in the sense that how to do it is pretty obvious and well known.
The hard part is keeping it off.
Think of alcoholism. It’s easy to just stop being an alcoholic right? I mean, conceptually…just stop drinking alcohol. Simple.
Now stop drinking alcohol for the rest of your life. You can never touch it again.
Not so easy.
Now imagine you need a small amount of alcohol every day or else you will die, but if you ever start to think “oh well I worked hard today I can have a second beer”, then before you know it you’re a full blown alcoholic again.
That’s chronic obesity.
My weight has dropped and rebounded countless times over my life. I know what to do, I know how to do it, I’ve done it countless times. I’m fucking tired. The idea of having to weigh my food and track my calories for the rest of my life honestly makes me anxious, because I know that as soon as I stop, I’m going to lose all that I’ve worked for. Because it’s happened so many times before.
GLP-1s are different. It’s honestly like a light switch. Like “oh, this is how I’m supposed to feel”. There is no more thinking about food. Even when starting to feel hungry, it’s not “I have to eat right now”, it’s “I’ll get to it when I get to it”. It’s not all-consuming.
If you are counting calories you aren’t doing it right in the first place. Fruits and vegetables are your friend, you can gorge endlessly on them, no one got fat off northern fruit, or vegetables (obviously excluding staples like corn and potatoes.)
Find a way to make vegetables palatable. The other big factor is your gut biome, which can be improved by eating raw veggies, some fruits, and by things like making your own pickled mixes, non distilled vinegar on raw cut veggies, like peppers, cabbage, garlic, onion, peppercorns, and the like. No salt needed if you ask me.
Then the excercize of course, if you can get into an activity, something you look forward to doing.
The biggest drivers of obesity are pop for starters, diet is even worse in other ways. But also all the processed garbage. Whole grains, whole foods in general. Good luck.
Also I should add, sugar propaganda has fobbed off harms on fat, which is important, you want healthy fats obviously, but the stomach doesn’t recognize being full until it has it’s portion of fat and you will overeat.
Unsolicited dieting advice. Cool. Thanks.
You know I’ve managed to go 41 years without ever hearing any of this, or incorporating any of it into my daily life.
Hard to believe, but I’ve spent all that time under a rock, eating pasta and donuts. A very large rock.
Who the fuck are you? Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? Did you read a fucking word I said, or any of the parents above this?
Or do you just come here to fat shame under the guise of providing “advice” to people who have been hearing it from literally everybody in their life? Does that make you feel better about fat shaming? By thinking you’re doing a good thing?
You know what’s really fucked is I’ve talked the same way you do, when I’m at my lows. Goes to show how much self-loathing is involved in being fat.
Eat less, move more. It’s so simple. Why didn’t I think of that.
Even if you sincerely don’t think you’re fat-shaming, you are. The way you are speaking, is, ironically, belittling. Talking down to me like I’m an idiot. Sorry if that’s not the case, but fuck you regardless.
I’m not the person you’ve been responding to. You’re not wrong that it’s hard, but it really is simple. It doesn’t have to be one or the other.
People keep comparing it to drug addiction and that’s pretty a pretty good comparison. Telling a drug addict to stop using drugs is not usually productive on its own because doing so is extremely difficult. However, quitting or severely limiting usage is still the ultimate goal of any addiction treatment plan. The steps are simple but difficult to implement.
No this predates glp1s, the article i linked is from 2018.
GLP-1 medications have been around since about 2005, just fyi. Though it’s only recently they have been marketed for general weight management.
wait a minute… are you reallly saying all these studies come to the conclusion that “weight loss is just a myth” rather than the much more likely scenario of “this many people simply refuse to give up pastries, pasta, and fried food”
i can see how big pharma would love more $tudies like this, but i’m not fucking buying the “if you’re fat, it’s not because of anything you did”
edit: LOL in other words, human beings, the only mammals that stuff their face with donuts, bagels, and pancakes and calls it “breakfast” are also the only species that has an epidemic (mostly in america) of morbid obesity that no one can do anything about, short of GLP. riiiiiight…
How do you feel about “abstinence only” sex education? You know, people can just choose not to have sex right? And how well does that work?
lol are you really arguing against that sentence?
i think i’m done with this whole thread. nice talking to you all
Yeah - you just want to slut and fat shame people while feeling superior. Best you leave the convo anyway.
You do not understand what happens to hunger regulation.
The human body fundamentally don’t have a concept of too much fat. It only really has a concept of “close to the highest fat mass we’ve had” or “below highest”. It keeps recalibrating for your new highest and will make you want to eat more until you get back there. That’s it’s mechanism to drive you to avoid starvation, because it doesn’t know what “overweight” is.
Any long term treatment needs to focus on that regulation mechanism and recalibrate it down. We don’t know how to do that yet, all we can do is silence the hunger or change absorption.
i mean yea, i’m sure a lot of people would rather blame hunger and say “i have no control over what i put in my mouth” than actually start limiting the intake of garbage food all day every day. but it’s still a false dichotomy. people absolutely CAN decide not to eat, even when they feel like they’re “starving”-- find me the studies that show how many people have died because they skipped a meal or two?
You’re being purposely obtuse. If you believe addiction is a disease, then overeating is also a disease. We have drugs and research guided methods to help deal with both. If its cruel to force addicts to quit cold turkey, then its also true of forcing clinically overweight patients to entirely change their lifestyle. (All the while being vocally judged and mocked)
Most of these people have tried losing weight through diet and exercise and want to get better, but as the other commenter has mentioned, their mind and body works against them. That’s also ignoring the societal conditions pushing us all to calorically dense, quick-n-easy meals and a working schedule that doesn’t allow us much free time to exercise.
As a disclosure, I am 6’0" and 200lbs. Down 30lbs from 3-4 years ago using strictly diet and exercise. BUT I’m also an athletic trainer and my office is in a gym I can use for free.
You have absolutely no idea how difficult it is to eat correctly when your body screams at you that it’s wrong. Starvation is used as a torture method, and deliberate unassisted weight loss triggers the exact same regulatory reaction in the body even if you’re not actually starving, because the body only sees “loss of fat levels”.
i thought we were leaving personal experience and anecdotal evidence out of the discussion, but since you brought it up-- yes i do know. last year i went from 230 lb (my heaviest ever) down to 180 lb. due to other health issues in addition to being way fatter than i’m comfortable with, i decided to eat better at the least, if not always “correctly.” i drastically reduced the junk, sugar, and ultraprocessed food, and did IF (poorly). those few changes brought me from a size 38 pants down to 34.
i love pizza, donuts, french fries, bacon cheeseburgers, and all the other stuff just as much as anyone. no it’s not easy to cut back on those things, and i know the pain of choosing an apple over potato chips. but i’ll say it again (and again and again): “not easy” does NOT equal impossible, and removing agency and responsibility from people is the opposite of helpful
That’s an exceptionally ironic response to scientific studies pointing mapping out the chemical processes behind the above. You’re just desperately trying to justify feeling better than others.
Some people can drop severe drug addictions on their own. Most can’t. Do you treat ex addicts that way too? Tell them it’s agency and responsibility when their fucked up chemical response messes with their head?
If you actually wanted to help others, you’d spend less time condemning people you don’t know and spend more time figuring out why they have problems
i mean, if you’re addicted to heroin, then at some point you’re going to have to make the conscious decision to quit. methadone, rehab, interventions–yea all that stuff can help, but it’s not going to replace people having to make decisions about whether they want to go back to the drugs again
if you insist you’re powerless, then i guess you are. best of luck to you
Well if you’ve looked into this at all you’d see people CANNOT. Hypothetically people can, but in reality, people can only lose weight short term and then they gain it back.
You’re arguing a point that has no evidence beyond “well I personally think it SHOULD work like this!”
This attitude is the problem, yep.
There’s no other medical condition which only 0.8% of people ever recover from where we tell people to just keep trying treatments that we know don’t work.
An individual’s behaviour is a contributing factor in most diseases. But the hormones, social factors, etc. which determine that behaviour are beyond the control of willpower. GLP1s work because they treat the hormonal imbalances which cause the behaviour that causes weight loss.
We don’t tell people they’re pathetic for catching a cold, though our social organization put them in a place where their biological weakness to that disease was triggered.
I am not downplaying the psychological effects of obesity but…Willpower is quite literally the ability to overcome your hormones/emotion and resist social pressure. It IS all you need, it’s just really hard to learn. Especially nowadays with the societal pressure to be hot and how depressing the world is in general.
Comparing obesity to a cold is a false dichotomy as you most people can’t simply avoid asymptomatic carriers. But if you insist on the comparison, we were absolutely vicious to people who got COVID because they chose to not wear masks (and rightfully so). I’m not suggesting we SHOULD be similarly mean to fat people, though.
I want to reiterate I’m not looking down on anyone for having weak willpower, mine is shit when there’s a sweet treat in front of me. But I lost 5kg last year just by practicing at the grocery store. If there’s junk food in my house, I know I’ll pick it over real food every time. So I choose not to buy it.
“social factors” = “i have NO CHOICE but to eat this pie because everyone else is”
LOL ok bud.
nice talking
edit: i have to be honest: i too would love to adopt the stance of “i ate 5000 calories yesterday and it’s everyone and everything else’s fault except for mine,” and everyone’s free to believe that, or whatever they choose. but i’ll never sit here and say that’s a valid argument, or that weight loss is a “myth.” no, it’s not easy, but “not easy” does NOT equal impossible, and my opinion is that making such claims is dishonest and harmful
No, social factors like the price of processed vs healthy food, the amount of sugar and salt companies are allowed put in food specifically to addict consumers, the food our culture uses to celebrate, the stressors and social pressures that we know drive people towards dopamine sources like high caloric foods, cities designed to discourage walking, etc.
Edit: no one’s claiming what you’re saying. Individual behaviour is a factor in most disease. Focusing on the individual behaviour piece has proved to be completely ineffective at producing weightloss. That’s just a fact. And yet we keep doing it like it’s suddenly going to work. It won’t. You could tell people not to go to work in winter so they don’t catch a cold, but they won’t do that.
Plus highly engineered garbage designed to fuel addiction. But it’s not impossible. I’m not paying $8 for 3lbs Mandarins; but I’ll pay $4 for 3 lbs of naval oranges.
Eating less donuts is cheaper than eating more donuts. If price is your motivator, I have good news for you!
Okay, but hear me out, have you tried this pie? It’s delicious!
I read this whole thread thinking I was on /c/TheOnion, not /c/NotTheOnion, and thought the joke just went over your head.
Wow, it’s really not the Onion. What a headline. I gave the article a brief skim and it seems to be sarcasm-free.
!pukedtheonion