All hail our Lord and Saviour, the GLP-1 Agonist drug.
I’ve lost the weight I put on 20 years ago many, many times, and spent my every waking moment hungry. Now, I take a pill every morning, and eat like a regular human.
I’ve lost the weight I put on 20 years ago many, many times, and spent my every waking moment hungry. Now, I take a pill every morning, and eat like a regular human.
How did you get into GLP1 RAs and where did you initially search for information about them? Was it a recommendation from your doctor?
Like almost everyone else, I heard about them through the media, and then booked in to see an endocrinologist. Various subreddits have been great, with a particular shout out to the Mounjaro one
I'd love to hear about what you were going to do! If you want to chat I'd love to -- reach out to victor@<the domain> or admin@<the domain>.
> Like almost everyone else, I heard about them through the media, and then booked in to see an endocrinologist. Various subreddits have been great, with a particular shout out to the Mounjaro one
Yeah, there's a ton of great information on the subreddits -- I've found some to be more about encouragement, and then others to be more about fact finding (which I'm spending a lot of time doing now -- working on a research roundup for January 2024).
Thank god these drugs came along, really, because we were never gonna accomplish that.
The dark pattern of food. Honestly, that first kidney stone was a godsend, however unpleasant; having to be extremely intentional about salt got me off all that junk except for old times' sake, and set me up to discover how pleasant things can taste when you can actually taste them.
That one change also made more of a difference in my ability to lose and keep off weight than did quitting a 20-year, pack-a-day smoking habit.
Quitting smoking added about ten pounds. Having to get serious about eating well took off fifty. This stuff is a problem.
We won't fix that problem at a societal level, of course, because that's no longer something this society can achieve. But we could.
So the way to reverse the ever worsening obesity trend in the US (and elsewhere, though we’re leading the charge) was “fix culture”. That’s very hard (it’s not even entirely clear exactly which bits would have to change) and basically nobody (who had a prayer of making a dent in the problem) was seriously trying.
But now we have the “sell everyone drugs” option which is actually gonna work, relatively easily and quickly compared with the sole plausible alternative. We lucked out.
This is resetting obese people to the baseline, not preventing obesity in the first place. We still have that problem, and that does require a culture (or rather regulatory) fix.
I'm not a US resident so I can only give a view from my trips there, so forgive my limited nuances. Also I speaking generally, culturally, individuals can (and do) behave counter-culturally.
A) there's a general focus on money. Sure money is important everywhere but in the US its different.
B) Time is money. I've heard that a lot too, and seen the effects. Longer working hours, very limited holidays, working on weekends and so on.
C) this leads to "convenience" and "labor saving " as key priorities. So supermarkets (are big so you can get everything, and also have the illusion of choice) stock a lot of "convenient" foods - typically processed and high in sugar. (Factory food is cheaper, see A)
D) Americans are trained young to like "sweet" and lots of things have lots of sugar. It starts with drinks (sodas, coffee), and then things like candy [1], bread, microwave meals, restaurants, salad dressings, and so on. If the French can be said to add butter, well Americans add sugar.
E) walking. Is slow, takes time, costs money. Better to drive. Which means everything is optimised for driving. Which makes it hard to walk anywhere.
None of this is easy to change at a cultural level. It's literally baked into every part of society and the environment.
[1] chocolate is an interesting example. In Europe 75% cocoa chocolate is common, 95% sells enough that its easy to get. The really cheap "dark" chocolate is around 45%. Whereas in the US its "candy" - pretty much all sugar, coloured brown occasionally. Same with coffee - of course lots of people drink coffee with sugar here, but small, strong, no sugar is also very much a "thing". Those who take sugar seem to take "less".
The incentives are so fucked. Now we have basically the entire healthcare industry and the entire pharmaceutical industry relying on the food industry to keep us loaded with addictive garbage that wrecks our health. There is to much money to be made in the US by keeping people unhealthy which is probably the main reason we're not getting universal healthcare any time soon.
Countries with better healthcare actually have an incentive to keep their population healthy. In the US, it's the exact opposite.
IMO food companies should be allowed to sell addictive garbage to people who want it, but they should also be on the hook for paying for treatments. Then maybe we'll start seeing treatments that actually cure rather than address symptoms short term. The same should really be true for every industry that sells addictive crap.
I think the whole “high sugar/calorie food is prevalent and cheap” is a symptom of relatively wealthy counties that have leisure time.
I feel like if bad food wasn’t so cheap and we worked 7 days a week, that would “fix” our culture.
But since the cat’s out of the bag, I don’t see us going back to constant work. We seem to like leisure time and sugar is really cheap. Even in “poor” countries, diabetes is creeping up because we’re getting the processed foods from Europe and the US.
In addition you have to eat a lot of unprocessed food to get fat, where here I define unprocessed food is something you killed or foraged for (or mass produced equivalent), and not refined in any way.
A strawberry for instance.
Eat 1000 calories of rump vs. a small Pizza for example, which would make you want to eat more?
People need to eat less junk and eat more natural whole foods.