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Comment by BoingBoomTschak | Hacker News Reader

Well, the negative consequence on the value of willpower is pretty obvious. "In what measure" is the real question.

You have the completely wrong take on this. Dieting destroys your relationship with food. Basically every adult woman exhibits some level of disordered eating because of it— "girl dinner" is both funny because it's true and sad.

Being able to lose weight while continuing to eat is a wonderful thing. There is no virtue in spending your willpower making your body do something it desperately doesn't want to do. That's some puritan shit.

Normally dieting shouldn't be necessary to maintain healthy weight though? One could eat a whole lot of salad (with some serious dressing) and a piece of meat and even a little starchy side (some potatoes or similar) 3 times a day and not gain weight. Throw in some regular moderate exercise and you're golden.

Granted, once you go past middle age, it can become a bit more complicated.

Someone brought up doughnuts as an example, but that's a ridiculous source of calories: I could probably down half a dozen doughnuts (a daily calorie budget) and then go for a normal meal afterwards.

Eating only becomes disordered if one can't be bothered to eat healthy food as a rule and then freaks out about weight gain as a result.

>Basically every adult woman exhibits some level of disordered eating because of it— "girl dinner" is both funny because it's true and sad

This is sexist and absolutely not true, there are plenty of women capable of pre-planning what they're going to eat and sticking with it. It's not "dieting", it's living a healthy lifestyle and not regularly eating junk.

My dude, I'm a woman talking about my experience with myself and other women. Disordered eating is rampant. It's ingrained to the very core of how women are taught to approach food. Denying food and starving yourself is the default behavior.

We are human animals. Our bodies need healthy food and regular exercise. There’s a case that diet and exercise are worth willpower capacity, possibly more so than anything else. That’s just the reality we exist in?

Capitalism disagrees. I need you to work two extra hours today. Also watch this advertisement for Tasty Snack! We've spend a billion dollars of research to ensure you eat this nibblet filled with 350% your daily sugar requirement, 200% of your daily fat intake, and 3000% of your recommended salt. Remember all the beautiful people in the world are eating Tasty Snack! Sold in the impulse buy isle near you.

It doesn't make you magically lose weight, it just gets you closer to "girl dinnering" with less cognitive load. The weight loss comes from eating less.

The difference is that it puts you in control of your hunger and what/how much you eat. You don't build negative associations with food while you're running a deficit. You don't build the association "hunger/misery means you're doing good and losing weight."

Yeah, it's funny, Ozempic sounds utterly useless for me. I know how to lose weight, it's dealing with the side effects of weight loss that is tricky. And the side effects of weight loss sound a lot like the side effects of Ozempic.

There is absolutely virtue in spending willpower to make your body do something it doesn’t want to do - maintaining and developing self control and autonomy. Imagine if there was no way to develop self-discipline, you’d be at the whims of your environment and the world would be nothing but chaos.

Right, and the associated cultural impact of increasing hedonism

I am confused as to how a drug that makes you want to consume less would increase hedonism? It is basically an anti-hedonism drug?

Hedonism is a philosophy that posits that pleasure is the sole objective good and thus pain something bad.

This whole thing is about trying to find shortcuts to get to the pleasure of having a nice body while circumventing the pain and effort.

Pain and efforts are important, they forge character like nothing else. If you want to live in a world where adult-children simply take their soma to get what they want, you're just not thinking about the consequences.

Do you feel this way about everything? Like you shouldn't take an aspirin because you should feel the pain of your headache? You shouldn't wear shoes because you need to feel the pain of the rocks under your feet?

Why is this particular thing the bad thing?

Important != superlative need. I mean, I know this is just rhetoric drivel, but I'm bored enough to reply. My post was clearly about a certain type of pain that the mind knows is a necessary path to achieving a stronger mind.

Also, about headaches and more generally physical pain that you know is only temporary and not a sign of radical bodily malfunction, I say yes: enduring a reasonable amount is important to develop a tolerance to it and willpower.

What I'm saying isn't new anyway, everybody knows some amount of struggle is needed to temper character and not fall to the most insidious poison of our times: constant comfort.

You know the way that software bloat expands to consume increased computational speed?

We're about to see the nutritional equivalent.

I don't understand how that analogy is supposed to work, given that the basic mechanism of these drugs is to reduce appetite (and possibly just desire in general).

We're about to see a dramatic fall in the production and consumption of unhealthy food because people who used to want them in large quantities will no longer want them when they're on GLP-1 drugs.

If this is the case and we believe that markets are efficient we should surely soon be seeing a decline in the stock price of McDonald's, etc.

If you are right then there should be money to be made by shorting the stock.

>In October 2023, Walmart became one of the first retailers to correlate Ozempic, food sales, and changing habits. Using internal pharmacy and grocery data, the study found that Ozempic is negatively affecting Walmart’s food sales. Measuring per-unit sales and calories, the retail giant confirmed a long-held belief that patients on GLP-1 drugs buy less food, particularly within the sweets and snack food categories.

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