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.
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.