What If Ozempic Is Just a Good Thing?

Pharmacies can only give out what people are prescribed, the only things they can push are OTC products. They can't get and sell scheduled drugs without being explicitly tracked.

But you're right about health care in the US. We need a single-payer system to get prices lower, but that means fairness and cutting out unnecessary costs. The whole health insurance industry would cease to exist, and all the people abusing it don't want that to happen.

I have a kidney disorder that causes me to waste potassium. Without a supplement, I can't get enough in my natural diet without eating like 10-20 avocados a day, or 6 cups of spinach.

A fun side effect of hypokalemia is that your muscles get really sore, like you just did a full body workout. So, you can literally feel when your potassium is low.

The low salt coincides with some of the most intense food cravings I've ever experienced. I don't crave foods high in potassium, however; just foods with a lot of regular NaCl. So, my body does its best to tell me I need to eat something, triggering a psychological compulsion to get it, but the compulsion is to eat the wrong thing.

I'm just one data point, but I think this might extrapolate out to more people than just me. If you're compelled to overeat, you might be missing some key nutrient that just isn't present in abundance in your current diet. The trick is finding out what it is.

Random related thought - awhile back there was a series of blog posts that got pretty popular (I can't remember the blog's name) trying to investigate the root cause of obesity. They settled on some odd conclusions, but one of the things they noted in their meta-analysis of extant obesity research is that places with lower obesity have more of a particular dissolved mineral (they asserted lithium was the root cause, but I didn't find their conclusions convincing) in their drinking water.

It could be that there are trace elements that, if you don't have mineral-rich drinking water, are otherwise hard to get from a standard diet that drive this craving behavior that I've experienced.

When people fail at health, (as when they fail at finance or addiction), a lot of propaganda tells us to blame individuals, with no sympathy or awareness of our failing systems.

SMH at the cruelty....

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-lab-rats-are-...

My last purchase was a 4.75 can of Gatorade flavor (not uh, low cal, alas), makes 9 gallons, far cheaper than energy drink. But you can buy low/no cal flavoring too. I think this might be the future (til they jack prices to reach parity with canned/premixed drinks cuz the market says they can).

I like monkfruit, Swerve, allulose, and various others.

The root cause of obesity is a propensity to eat too much. The root cause of alcoholism is a propensity to drink.

It follows some people are lucky and simply don't have this propensity. For those not as lucky, we can get rid of it.

The root cause of obesity IS NOT "eating too much". That's a symptom! Why do some people want to eat more than others? Are they weak? Are they stupid? Fat chance. What's wrong with their hormones and brains that this is the case? This is what Ozempic addresses. You have it backwards here: people claiming that diet and exercise are the answer are actually not looking at the root cause, people developing drugs like Ozempic are looking at the root cause.

It reveals that for some trim people, their underlying feelings all along have been a sense of personal value and positivity around the fact that they are trim and others fat.

They feel unhappy that other might be admitted to the trim club.

Do you know that they were _always_ slim?

> Crabs in a bucket

My attitude has nothing to do with your consumption. I have a negative opinion of the drug. I don't have a negative opinion of people who feel desperate enough to use it.

I mean, turn your thinking around, why is being thin so important to them that they would take a very powerful class of drug just to achieve it? Why then would they waste a minute of their time afterwards being worried about external opinions of how they achieved it?

What's actually important here? Their health and appearance or the opinions of their peers? Are they altering their appearance solely for the opinion of their peers?

> and "if you were a better person, you wouldn't need this".

I think you've accidentally encoded that precise understanding here.

>Please reserve your moral judgments.

This thread seems needlessly heated. How is it a moral judgement to say that some folks don't put in the effort to control calorie input? Losing weight sucks. It's worse the bigger you are. But they're not gaining weight by magic. They're consuming more calories than they burn. It is as simple as that (yes, yes, yes -- gut flora, metabolism disruption, vernal equinox, micro-plastics, etc. etc. There are plenty of variables that change the efficiency of the mechanism, but none that override the core mechanism.)

fwiw, Ozympic sounds great to me if people want to take it. Also great if they don't.

No scientific basis in this whatsoever.

> It is the rare person who has been obese for most or all of their lives and prefers it that way or has never thought about or done anything to try and fix it. That is not how people show up at doctor's offices to ask about Ozempic. They show up in tears, at the end of their rope, or having completely given up.

If this was the case, there would have been no drug shortage. Instead, everyone is showing up asking for it because it's the easiest way out. No diet, no effort, nothing. Just take the pill or do the shot, boom. I wonder if you are being serious or just so much deluded. There is no drugging out of thermodynamics.

Please, point them all out.

> Who cares if it no longer requires effort to be skinny? Why should it require effort to be skinny? And why do you care either way?

I don't, why do you care if people say weight loss drug users take the easy way out?

The distance runner or cyclist is not obese in your example.

There is simply no way to exercise enough if obese to create the caloric deficit needed.

This is all really part of the problem. Telling obese people to exercise more and don't restrict calories too much just doesn't work. What works if obese is a massive calorie deficit over time because an obese person has a massive amount of calories stored by definition.

It is just a much different situation compared to a distance runner that is already very learn. That person does have to worry about not consuming enough calories exactly because they don't have the stored calories the obese person does.

If you're very obese, you're probably also sedentary, and running for any amount of time at all is probably aerobically impossible.

I stand by my original point - you cannot outrun your fork.

It works in a few ways, but the vast majority of the benefit is just from delayed gastric emptying (food sticks around in you longer) which makes you feel fuller, and it helps remove hunger in general. If you're not careful, you'll find yourself simply not eating, so you have to be careful - that's a lot of why it leads to nausea. People don't eat, don't hydrate, and they get sick. Turns out that happens with or without the drug; not eating and not drinking will make you nauseous.

If you have a bag of french fries, you will find yourself sick because you overdid it. It doesn't make them taste any less good. You just learn about portion control somewhat through force, because when you screw it up you feel ill.

The other thing it does is remove the "food noise" so many of us simply exist with. I didn't know this was a thing, but it is - I grew up very impoverished, and we didn't always have food. I am also genetically predisposed to retaining more weight than necessary. Looking back now, I was constantly seeking a next snack or a next meal, almost before I finished my previous one, subconsciously. My days were split, in my head, into mealtimes and the times between mealtimes, which were usually snacking time. But between the habit, the ADHD, and the predisposition to always be thinking about it, it was an impossible habit to break.

I didn't realize this until talking to my wife, who doesn't have this problem. She also didn't used to think every food tasted incredible. Just some. Meanwhile, there was almost nothing I ate that didn't taste fantastic, in my brain. That has also adjusted to be more "normal," but historically whenever my mom has stopped, that adjustment didn't revert. It would appear to have been stable, as it helps your brain and body simply figure out it isn't starving all the time.

It's kind of hard to explain, so I hope that made sense.

So should we not help people curb their obesity and/or T2D because some folks misuse it? Of course not.

People misuse Sudafed and use it to make meth, or drink Robitussin to get high. I would be very upset if I lost access to those medications when I was sick, simply because we decided to make rules about the exception. :)

Exercise is an important adjunct to weight loss. Just for the purposes of feeling good, you need your body's emergency response to the loss of caloric reserves to not include cutting muscle to lower your basal metabolic rate. The only way to do that is consistent exercise. It is critical to healthy loss of significant amounts of weight. But it isn't the cause.

So if you wanted to show off how superior you are to everyone with lives that require them to spend time on stuff other than losing weight, if you knew what you were talking about you'd say something like "imagine taking drugs instead of eating less." In addition to being cruel and mocking, your comment indicated a clear lack of understanding how the body even works.

Summary of the linked article: (1) We should reevaluate the benefits/harms of fluoridated water as a public health intervention. (2) The studies used to justify it in the past were flawed, especially by not accounting for a huge improvement in other dental health habits across the world. (3) Fluoride provides no additional benefits when consumed (it's just meant to affect tooth enamel), which means consuming it is inefficient and increases the risk of harm (bone weakening, nerve and brain cell damage).

Someone on a nicotine patch can still smoke while they have it on. Does a nicotine patch encourage smoking?

The way the medication is supposed to be prescribed is with lifestyle changes, including diet and exercise. People don't have to follow that, but it certainly doesn't encourage them to eat worse.

> That flows the dysmorphia stuff. I meant that it indirectly encourages body dysmorphia because it side-steps the shame and compulsive behavior that lead to the person's original obesity. So long after the weight-loss, you remain freighted with the toxic "weight-based" mental model of your body, rather than a holistic one of nutrition and well-being.

I can see how you would logic that out, but it isn't true in my experience, on average. The shame and compulsive behavior that led to the person's original obesity usually compounds on itself, and people come to these medications when they want help. No doctor is forcing these down an obese patient's throat, or injecting them directly. It is still up to the patient to decide they want help.

Most don't simply want to be thin. Most want to play with their kids, be able talk a walk around the block, be able to breathe better, and so on. Obese people don't want to be thin - they want to be healthy. In fact, most assume they will never be thin, because it seems so unattainable. They just want to get to a place where they aren't dying faster than everyone else each day.

So no, I don't think anyone on this medication "develops" body dysmorphia in the sense you're thinking, though I could see why having not gone through it you might thing it does.