Sounds like it’s possible to buy a house without help from family. Some people do achieve it but most people will benefit from the help.
This headline is 100% peak NotTheOnion 👌
I actually unironically thought that was an headline from The Onion.
I 100% assumed this was from the onion instance
Headline is dumb, content is not
Ok but the research is actually interesting. I’m very much a supporter of weight loss by healthy lifestyle and calorie reduction (it’s how I obtained and maintain a healthy weight), and even for aiming for a healthier lifestyle even if one doesn’t care about reducing weight (your body is your business, I’m just pro healthy lifestyle). But for those actively interested in weight loss who are finding themselves unable to stick to a reduced calorie diet I support them having the access to the tools that can help.
I’ve known people who wound up fat for a variety of reasons, from thyroid issues, to stressful lifestyles, to disabilities and chronic pain, to genetic propensity, and plenty of other reasons. And when I think about how much happier with himself my friend was after his stomach band helped him lose a ton of weight and then stay thin, it’s just hard for me to not stand by the understanding that while what worked for me is the best first thing to try, I just want people to be happy with their bodies.
I’m always baffled by the lack of curiosity around this subject. It’s just blame the victim for being obese. Just eat less, bro! and then defend that viewpoint to the death. There never seems to be a point where the question comes up “I wonder why only in the last 30 years or so that the western world has seen this dramatic increase in obesity?” Can’t be large food corporations making cheap unhealthy foods highly addictive. Can’t be a significant reduction in nutrition education. Can’t be a reduction in access to mental healthcare.
Nope. Just fatty goin’ to be fat. Such a fucking lazy take.
There’s actually a phenomenon where Americans move abroad, and suddenly start losing a ton of weight. Not because they consciously changed their eating habits, but simply because the food that is available in the foreign stores and restaurants is healthier.
American grocery stores tend to prioritize convenience and unhealthy foods. You have to really search to find anything that is worthwhile, even when the store is packed full of food. There’s a ton of variety in American grocery stores, (Europeans are always baffled by the entire aisle dedicated to breakfast cereals), but basically none of it is healthy. So Americans naturally end up buying lots of unhealthy shit, simply because it’s all they realistically have access to.
But then that gets flipped on its head when those Americans move abroad. Suddenly, the stores they’re shopping at aren’t full of junk. And so they naturally start losing lots of weight. Many Europeans assume that Americans are simply complacent with their weight, but the reality is that the entire infrastructure surrounding them is singularly focused on keeping them fat.
Yes, also walking to the store, walking to work. I don’t use my car much - arranged my life so that I can get everywhere I need to, mostly, without driving but that is unusual as fuck where I live, everyone else in my office arrives by car. I am not usually the only bike in the rack at the grocery but maybe 3, 4 bikes and a hundred cars in the lot. No bike rack at my doctors’ offices, nor dentist, nor aesthetician. None at restaurants.
Walking a lot or even biking on e-bike everywhere like I do, makes a difference in what you can eat without getting fat. But also I cook at home, from ingredients, do make sweet stuff for the kids & husband but don’t like it much myself. Grow some of our food, and lunch biggest meal.
I don’t think it’s impossible here, to have a reasonable lifestyle, I do it and am not an unusual person, not super rich or super ambitious or determined. I do think it’s more difficult and you have to be intentional AND either be lucky (city grew up around me) or flush with money, to create a life that is the “fifteen minute bubble” with everything nearby.
arranged my life so that I can get everywhere I need to, mostly, without driving….
So did I; unfortunately that means not having to leave my house. So I offset that with self-mandated walks and runs.
I actually made a comment about walking elsewhere in the thread, just a few minutes ago.
I saw that recently in a video about food in Japan. Japanese people going to Western countries and gaining like 25 pounds in a couple of months, then returning to Japan and shedding it within weeks.
Sugar content, portion size, nutrition vs empty calories and other factors…
Everything you mentioned, PLUS:
- Increase in stress, leading to “grazing” eating
- increase in corn subsidizes that make HFCS cheaper to add than honey or even sugar
- the campaign against Fat as a flavor enhancer, which pushes companies towards sugar in the first place. Fat, for the most part, passes through you whereas sugar is metabolized
- decrease in walkable cities, or even walking trails. Combined with people having less time to use them.
- unfettered algorithm that prioritizes engagement to keep people in front of their screens, this less physically active
The list goes on.
The single most important thing everyone can do is take a walk. I make sure I do this rain or shine, even if it’s down the block and back.
GLP-1 and other “weight lost methods” gain popularity in the US due to our population’s proclivity of saying “I want x, but I don’t want to change anything about me.” In other words, “I want to lose weight but don’t want to change my lifestyle.”
Study after study has shown that slow, gradual, and intentional weight loss is healthier and will last longer than any fad, drug, or food plan.
Not only will your body naturally learn what it means to eat and be healthy, you’ll actually feel better too.
One criticism of this analysis (which I think is mostly spot on) those GLP drugs help people change their lifestyle by turning off the ‘food noise’. They don’t, by themselves, make anyone lose weight. They help people who overeat be not hungry all the time so that they can eat better and work out more - it’s the eating better and working out more that is causing the weight loss.
I don’t think it’s the criticism you think it is but it’s okay because I think it’s the same point I’m making.
People would rather take a pill (or an injection in this case) than do a better job of regulating their own eating. I understand that GLP helps increase the “fullness” hormone but there are foods that will help with that but people choose not to eat them.
Kale is great roughage and it fills your stomach quickly. But people won’t eat it because they would rather eat a cheeseburger.
I want to be super clear: we (Americans) didn’t get where we are by ourselves. There is an obesity epidemic that is due to a combination policy decisions and terrible personal choices. And I’m not going to lecture lower-class people because they are effectively in food deserts because grocery stores can’t profit off of them the same way they can with middle class people. And I know first hand that food like kale may not be accessible to those people and even if they were, preparing it takes time and resources they may not have.
But as a whole, the USA has a “let me take a pill so I can ignore everything else” epidemic as well. People who are taking GLP-1 could probably make better choices if they desired to. They could order the salad instead of the steak but they don’t.
I want to thread this needle carefully: I’m not shaming anyone for using GLP-1. Or Atkins or Weight Watchers or whatever. The fact you want to make a change is worth celebrating!! If it works for you, fantastic. Sometimes it’s what people need to motivate them to make better choices.
What I am saying is that GLP-1 works to help you lose weight the same way every weight loss program does: decreasing your caloric intake. If you want to lose weight but don’t want to pay for GLP-1 (or any other program), reducing your portion size will work just as well.
Because I will near guarantee that if you lose weight using GLP and don’t do anything else, you will lose weight but you will gain it back within a year.
I’ve noticed first hand the impact of environmental factors.
I moved from a place where I needed the car for EVERYTHING. This include taking off the garbage. Even going for a walk wasn’t possible without taking the car first.
Most of the food I was eating was imported (mainly from the US). I was able to find few local fruits and vegetable but choices are quite limited and the supply erratic.
Then I moved back to France, I now live in a small village where everything is available at a walking or biking distance. School, work, small grocery shop, bakery, doctor, pharmacy, coworking space, kids activity. I’m might be using the car once a week now.
There is plenty of farmers in the area with local produces and even supermarkets have a wide selection of decent fruits and vegetables but I prefer the local producers as I can.
I stopped working out, I have not purposely changed my eating habits but without any surprise I am in a much, much better physical shape now.
I moved from a place where I needed the car for EVERYTHING. This include taking off the garbage. Even going for a walk wasn’t possible without taking the car first.
This is something that can be difficult to convey to non-Americans. The go-to assumption is that Americans are just lazy and dislike walking. At my last apartment, it was literally illegal (and wildly dangerous) for me to realistically walk to my local grocery store. I had to cross a major highway to get there, and there were no sidewalks or crosswalks nearby.
If I wanted to drive to the store, it was a quarter mile. Half a mile for the round trip. Basically just across the highway. Go down to the end of my street, cross the highway, and arrive at the store. Easy.
If I wanted to legally walk to the grocery store, it would be a 16.5 mile round trip. Because the nearest pedestrian highway crossing was ~4 miles away. I’d have to go all the way down to that crossing, make the cross, then march all the way back to reach the store. And that also assumes that I’m going to be able to legally make it to the crossing… There were several sections between my apartment and the crossing that had no sidewalks, so I’d have to walk in the road for at least a mile in each direction. Here is a quick and dirty diagram to illustrate what I mean:
That’s ~8 and a quarter miles in one direction, not to mention the fact that I’d then have to take the same route back, with my arms full of grocery bags. Yeah, it’s no fucking wonder that I choose to drive instead.
4 miles between pedestrian crossings should be illegal. Here, though it’s for sure a car city, the small roads that go under the stupid highway that bisects the city are about 1/2 mile apart. And where there is no sidewalk, on smaller roads, legal to walk in road, off to the side, facing traffic.
Not everyone even has a car. Or license.
Just eat less? Golly, why didn’t I think of that? So simple!
Also if you have basically an addiction to food, this is like telling a drug addict “just use less heroin!” And the survival rate of withdrawals from stopping cold turkey with food is approximately 0%. So you will be managing that addiction for your entire life.
Withour a doubt.
Addicted to alcohol? Stop drinking. You can’t control an addiction so you have to completely stop.
Addicted to cigarettes? Stop smoking. You can’t control an addiction so you have to completely stop.
Addicted to crack? Stop smoking crack. You can’t control an addiction so you have to completely stop.
Addicted to food? Must be your fault for being weak-willed. Just don’t consume so much of that thing that you’re addicted to. You can control your addiction. Just stop being a loser…
The literal solution to every addiction is stop it, cold turkey. One Day At A Time. But you can’t stop eating food.
Well at least part of the “addictive” part of food addiction is sugar, and that you can absolutely ditch.
It’s possible to cut out sugar, yes. But also keep in mind sugar is literally everywhere and the cheapest easiest food substance to access. It’s on every menu, it’s at the check out counter of every store, it’s offered for free by coworkers bringing in treats or birthday cakes, offered in bowls at the exit from some restaurants or other businesses, it’s thrown out at parades, given away on Halloween, etc. It’s possible to avoid eating sugar, but avoiding temptation is basically impossible if you have a habit of leaving your home to work or shop. If you are addicted to sugar, it’s a constant struggle.
Do you mean added sugar? Because cutting out fruit and veg from your diet is pretty unhealthy.
I’m addicted to Tostito’s queso. Of course I know it’s horrible for me. At least it’ll be a queso OD, instead of “horse”.
I’ve always been baffled by how people keep their weight off so easily. I live in a walkable city, love walking, walk everywhere as my primary means of transport, and frequently take 3-5km leisure walks multiple times a week. Yet I only ever seem to gain weight, it’s beyond maddening. My meals are nothing outrageous either
Of course, my weight is the first thing my doctor points out every time like I’m not keenly aware of how much my body hates me…
Are you healthy? I am thin but not as much as I’d like (mental issue) and always have to remind myself that the result of a healthy lifestyle is a healthy body. Not one that necessarily looks like your ideal form. I can walk & dance, stand on my hands & cartwheel, eat healthy, exercise and work on athletic goals not size goals.
If you are happy with your lifestyle and feel like you are nourishing your body and exercising it, weight lands in different places for different people (or as I found, different for same person at different ages.) But you feel good? That seems like a good result.
If you don’t feel good, that is when I would push the doctor for more tests to figure out what the heck is going on.
I’m a performer! I do yoga every night and am generally active. No major health issues, just unhappy I can’t fit into old clothes and tired of my doctor bringing it up
What’s funny is that there are fantastic performers who are much, much larger than me, which further shows the disconnect between effort and result
Changing the framing can help from weight loss to health improvement.
You may always be overweight by health standards (BMI) but if your blood work is good, you’re happy with how you are able to do the activities you like, you feel/are strong, you eat quality foods, and are mostly a happy person then I would say that you’re successful.
If you're interested in what worked for me
Calorie counting is a good step. I’m not skinny because I have an active lifestyle, I’m skinny because I force myself to listen to my body in how much I put into it and when I give it more it’s because it’s telling me it’s doing something good with it.
Calorie counting helps you understand how much you’re actually eating. After a week or two of it you can look up what your maintenance calories should be and create a general plan for how to get that much food in a day. The goal there is to learn what a healthy maintenance portion is and to get your body comfortable with it. Breaking a large meal into smaller plate sizes and only getting more after 10 minutes if you’re still hungry is a great trick too.
Once you’re no longer hungry all the time on maintenance you can start doing a cut (start with 500 deficit, don’t exceed 1000). Have a goal weight and once you hit it maintain your controlled maintenance calories until it’s instinctive.
Also, building muscle and more cardiovascular exercise are great additions to walking. Muscle burns more resting calories and is denser than fat, a good goal weight can look very different depending on how much muscle you carry.
I did try calorie counting and frequenting a gym when I was in college. I barely lost any weight and ended up more miserable because of the regimen, so I stopped. I really don’t think it’s a hunger thing either, I have ADHD and frequently skip meals unintentionally
I really don’t know why my body just isn’t receptive to anything and my bloodwork doesn’t shine any lights
Yeah when I did my big loss it really sucked for like a month or two until my brain adjusted to the fact that I wasn’t going to give it what it wanted. I’ll also admit my big loss was not at a time where my mental state or material conditions were great, so it may have been more obsessive than most people are willing to engage in. And thats key here, the goal in life is to be happy and good, I’m happier skinnier and with an active lifestyle I have no judgment for those who find this process misery inducing and choose not to lose weight or look for alternative means of doing so.
You have adhd you mentioned, so do I. So firstly, actually getting my adhd properly treated is vital, I can’t maintain good eating habits when unmedicated because I lack structure and willpower.
But also, do you eat out of boredom? And have you tried making food in your home inconvenient to snack on. I have to do that sometimes, especially making food that’s easy to snack on out of the way. I’ve also found starting with a seltzer or gum helpful between meals. Aside from stuff like that, putting half what you expect to eat for your meal on your plate then waiting a bit after finishing before deciding if you want the other half is something else I’ve found helpful.
I’ll try the half plate tip, thanks :) Seltzer is the main thing my partner and I drink. We have a sodastream we use heavily (no syrups)
Good luck!
“pEOple WeRe jUsT mORe ActiVe iN thE PasT”
I call bullshit. Like sure, in the early 1900’s and before, people were more active. But in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s? We had cars. People still used them a lot instead of walking. People still chose to sit and watch TV, or read, or listen to music. People still worked in offices and spent the majority of their day sitting. The average number of steps between a person back then and today is really not that different. Maybe a bit higher, but no where even fucking close to explaining the obesity epidemic.
Claims that the extreme increase in obesity is simply due to increased sedentary lifestyle just fucking reeks of lobbied attempts to shift the blame from the real problem.
It’s the food, stupid. High-volume processed bullshit with low-cost additives and filler ingredients SWARMED the shelves and replaced nearly every good product with unhealthy convenience with a longer shelf-life. Our portion sizes didn’t even change that much, it’s just the quality of what we’re eating has dropped tremendously.
You can’t even fully escape it by trying to only buy fresh food. Modern fruits and vegetables have been bred to be full of sugars and starches. Raw chicken is pumped full of salt and preservatives, sometimes making up more than 30% of its weight.
They are poisoning people and then blaming them for the consequences.
100%.
The French are still relatively skinny for exactly that reason; the food is in general much less processed and the rules are very strict. As a North American who lives there, I’ve lost weight just by being here.
We had cars. People still used them a lot instead of walking.
I am going to take this opportunity to shit on car culture. Walking several miles a week because I live in a walkable city is pleasant, and almost certainly good for my health and weight.
I don’t have objections to the rest of your post. I just hate car culture.
Oh totally agree with car culture. Walkable cities are fantastic. But again, it’s not like cities were more walkable in the 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s. Hell, if anything, cities have become MORE walkable in recent decades than they were back then.
What serious person says it’s just fatty being fat?
They can be found in the “never had any issues with weight control/I’m always forgetting to eat/I ate a small bag of chips so I’m not hungry” crowd
I mean to be fair there’s also other reasons to forget to eat (AuDHD gang here, haha)
(we DO get hungry though, and then just… still don’t eat. executive dysfunction is a fuck)
– Frost
As someone whose body doesn’t make enough dopamine, food is one of the few things that gives me the hit I need to keep going consistently. There’s enough variety that in my almost forty years on this earth I haven’t found an end to what I enjoy.
So yes, I’m fat and I eat too much, but for me it’s better than being miserable.
What an incredibly fucking stupid headline.
Headline for Americans choking down a bucket of fried chicken with a “medical problem”.
“The mindset right now is that the GLP-1 hormone itself is the secret sauce to weight loss,” DiMarchi said. "What we’ve found in rodents and monkeys is that the combination of glucagon and GIP activity alone are sufficient to achieve comparable weight loss, without the lengthy dosage adjustment and adverse GI side effects
This article is saying that slightly different products can also produce weight loss.
It’s the zeitgeist of the AI age; outsourcing our intention and tomorrowing our resolve.
I find the fact you’ve learned to speak clickbait concerning
Be less concerned, I was going for Bumper Sticker or T-Shirt slogan.
I don’t know whether that’s a quote from something or fresh off the dome but that’s an absolute banger of a line.
It is a fresh assembly of deeper thoughts by smarter people. So it’s just an internet comment essentially.
What a breakthrough, as we know no one ever lost weight before 5 years back or whenever these stupid drugs came out.
Of course you can lose weight without GLP. But these drugs are very helpful to people who have difficulty doing so.
It doesn’t do this for me except make me have random morning sickness and it unfucked my blood counts. I’ll take it though. My numbers look much better on it than otherwise.
One day GLP-1 is going to be the catalyst for some kind of I Am Legend type shit… Mark my words.
No one is screaming how it gives you “autism,” like they do for any vaccine, so I expect a lot of really fat MAGAt zombies any day now.
People will do anything for vanity. Botox is contains one of the most potent toxins known on earth, and people will happily inject it directly into their face just for the chance of a slightly smoother face.
Botox is contains one of the most potent toxins known on earth, and people will happily inject it directly into their face just for the chance of a slightly smoother face
And fentanyl can kill an entire city, but hospitals still keep it around for pain control. Diphenhydramine will make you hallucinate spiders everywhere, while you slowly die. But you can buy it over-the-counter to treat allergy symptoms. The foxglove flower can cause you to go into heart failure… But we use it to treat heart conditions.
Dosis sola facit venenum, as the medical world likes to say. “The dose makes the poison.”
I don’t want to lose weight for vanity. I want to live beyond my 50s.
I feel it. Living in an industrial society you really need to go against the grain to do it. As someone who has experienced substance dependency, it really is the same lizard brain urges. Avoiding hyperpalatable foods really helps. I cannot over eat oatmeal and yogurt, but bacon and hash browns absolutely. Carb portion control is really important for me, because I was eating easily over 400 calories of starches in a meal not counting anything else.
I forget the exact statistic, but it’s like a spoonful of botulism toxin can kill millions of people. It really is potent.
But the difference between poison/toxin and medicine is often just dosage. There are myriad, countless medicines to discover in toxins. The toxin of an animal for instance a snake, is not one toxin, it’s hundreds, each with individual action.
There is a reason the ancient greek symbol for medicine has two snakes on it. Anyway here’s an old article on it in case anyone is interested.
*This is not the article I originally read as that was easily ten years prior but search engines and enshitified and have decided this is the closest they will give me.
There’s only one snake on the medicine symbol. The two snake version is the one that represents Hermes. Everything else you said is correct though
Yes but these same people are often scrutinizing vaccine ingredient lists.
The trick to staying young is to never move your face muscles, and use lotion. Can’t get wrinkles if you don’t wrinkle your skin 🧠
avoiding the sun is more important than lotion
But if the lotion has SPF
It’s what skin craves.
And sleep hanging upside down so the fat deposits in your face don’t drop downwards.
That’s how I get my sexy thick neck
Yet…
Fox already had that angle covered, and they are ahead of schedule.
Nah, it just leaves you in worse health with 2/3 of the weight gained back in less than a year after stopping. And likely keep gaining after that.
Bug Pharma got their opioids grift shut down, so they coincidentally found out this unrelated drug was a magic weight loss pill with no downsides?
It’s way more likely they’ve known from the start these drugs only work while taking.
They’re not selling 2-3 years of responsible drug use, people will be on these drugs for life, because they won’t stop if it means gaining weight.
Edit:
Actually, were at full weight regain in 2 years now…
That’s on top of the cardiac damage, and how your blood sugar is even more fucked up…
People are paying all this money, fucking up their bodies…
For something that doesn’t work if you ever stop taking it
“If there’s no solution, there can still be a buck made by prolonging the problem.”
Elaborate on the negative health effects please because everyone I know that’s on them is having positive health effects, except some common side effects which aren’t permanent (fatigue, anhedonia).
In fact the main reason I hear people stop taking them is insurance coverage, but they’d continue if they could.
everyone I know that’s on them
I’m talking about after they stop…
I thought that was pretty obvious.
It works like it’s supposed to while taking it, and your body adapts to it just like anything else. (Edit: well, there’s chronic fatigue, vomiting, vertigo, all sorts of shit, but people on it already know about that, and you should get warned before starting. What people don’t get warned about is after stopping. So that’s what I’m focusing on)
And when you stop your body doesn’t have what it’s used to, don’t forget this is a medicine for diabetes, it will change how your body regulates blood sugar, and without it, it’s not going to know what the fuck to do
https://medicine.washu.edu/news/stopping-glp-1-drugs-can-quickly-erase-cardiovascular-benefits/
That talks about cardiovascular issues, but again, remember that while this passed trials for diabetes treatment, there hasn’t been many long term studies about what happens to people who stop taking it. And as time goes on, more people that need it less try it.
All the studies are at ~2 years out after cessation, and those were the people who were seriously obese. The people who started later and just “chubby” are likely to see diminished gains, but the same damage. Damage that we have no reason to believe will stop accumulating after 2 years…
That’s just as far as we’ve studied, all this shit should have done before released to the public.
all this shit should have done before released to the public.
yea, but… $$$$$$$$
Here’s the gov.uk page on adverse effects: https://www.gov.uk/drug-safety-update/glp-1-receptor-agonists-reminder-of-the-potential-side-effects-and-to-be-aware-of-the-potential-for-misuse
82 deaths linked to averse reactions to GLP-1 agonists, BMJ: https://www.bmj.com/content/388/bmj.r390 Unfortunately not open access.
These drugs are bad for them? I had only heard of other benefits from them. No doubt a PR campaign, along with aggressively shutting down any negative stories/studies with the usual tactics, pioneered by big tobacco and now adopted by all the polluters and poisoners.
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.
people have been losing weight by a variety of methods
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.
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.”
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?
You know, people can just choose not to have sex right?
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.
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
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.
the price of processed vs healthy food
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
I’ve heard there is this great drug for morning sickness. It doesn’t have any side effects on the mother, it is called thalidomide.
Edit: I also forgot about the other promising weight loss treatment, I believe it is called Fen-Phen. Totally easy to lose weight and heart valves with that one.
Huge if true
Very big
Bigly
