It's not that "eat less and exercise more" doesn't work, it's that nobody does it, because it's really, really hard.
Calories in/Calories out is both completely true and completely useless for actual humans.
edit: that's unfair, mostly useless
A phenomenon not limited to dieting.
Considering it's a societal wide problem, society at large ought to care about resolving it. It's incredibly expensive otherwise to treat chronic, lifelong obesity.
I do see a lot of people ITT who were accused of doing so but who aren't actually doing so.
And I've known quite a few people who get really annoyed at constantly having to hear about how impossible it is to do things that they've personally actually done.
obesity has a large hereditary component. important genes associated with obesity are expressed in the brain.
is it impossible to live with constant hunger and its consequences? no, likely not, but it's not really a big mystery why millions of people fail to do so.
One of the studies done with Wegovy showed that people lost 15% of their body mass in a year, but they also eat 500 Calories less and exercised for 2.5 hours a week.
The point was that the 15% weight lose in a year is in the high end of what you can expect, especially if you change nothing else.
This is especially true if you count light exercise.
Maybe there is a path to using these drugs in a manner to get people healthier so they can exercise more, establish good habits and taper down.
Misinformation is also going to be much overused and meaningless if used for situations like a simple mistake. The commenter just misread something - branding it as misinformation seems to imply intent, otherwise why wouldn't you just call it a mistake?
At the present time, Ozempic is not approved for Type 1 diabetes:
>...Ozempic® is not for use in people with type 1 diabetes.
Compared with Type 2, with Type 1 diabetes there are other risks that could occur:
>...While medications such as GLP-1 receptor agonists (Ozempic, Wegovy) and SGLT-2 inhibitors (Jardiance, Farxiga) demonstrated powerful benefits, they quickly were determined to pose too much of a liability for pharmaceutical companies or regulators due to concerns about safety. Specifically, GLP-1s can increase the risk of hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) and SGLT-2s can raise the risk of a serious, life-threatening complication called diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA).
https://diatribe.org/diabetes-medications/why-diabetes-mirac...
Obviously, even a small amount of effort becomes impossible when you multiply it by "forever".
Edit: In my opinion it's hard for two reasons. We have cravings for high calorie foods. And no one candy bar will make you fat, so it's easy to think "I'll exercise more tomorrow to make up for this indulgence." But then you don't, because that's hard too.
No, you have to decide to even think about the difference between them instead of thinking about something in your life that feels more important. It's a sort of cognitive opportunity cost. You have to consciously think about food (instead of something useful) forever, because your body's instincts are telling you to do the wrong thing and you need your rational mind to overrule it.
So for the rest of your life, every day, until you die you must decide to stop and expend effort making that decision instead of thinking about work, family, politics, or writing a new bit of code that will change the world. Most human beings can do it for a while, but not forever. The only way to do it forever is to get your body chemistry on your side and reduce that cognitive load.
That's how all creatures in the wild do it. That's how humans did it for the past quarter million years. And all creatures did it for the past hundred million years. Wait, no, it isn't. Then there must be another way. A way that doesn't involve manipulative abusive capitalists and advertisers destroying health in the name of profit while selling it as freedom.
> "or the rest of your life, every day, until you die you must decide to stop and expend effort making that decision instead of thinking about work, family, politics, or"
How much does that lifestyle sound like freedom to you?
Neither creatures in the wild, or primitive man, have access to unlimited quantities of calorie dense foods. We could go back to that lifestyle, but billions would have to die and the overall human lifespan would decrease rather than increasing.
I think I'd rather take a perfectly safe drug than go back to wiping with leaves and hunting for worm riddled meat.
> How much does that lifestyle sound like freedom to you?
I'm not even sure I understand which lifestyle you're asking about here, but if you mean the modern lifestyle then it's certainly more free than the lives primitive man had. "Might makes right" was the rule of the land back then, and contrary to your imagination, you probably wouldn't have been the mightiest. Certainly not forever.
Hell, it's more free now than the lives most of our grandparents had. 50 years ago about half of all white people surveyed said they'd move away if a black person bought a house in their neighborhood, and gay people were routinely murdered for existing.
There were no "good old days", and Stardew Valley is just a game.
And just like that, you've come up with another way.
> "I think I'd rather take a perfectly safe drug than go back to wiping with leaves and hunting for worm riddled meat."
That is some ridiculously hyperbolic panicked scaremongering at the idea of banning Coca Cola. I have literally no idea how restricting the unlimited calorie dense foods available would lead to hating black people and murdering gay people, but it's some more hyperbolic commentary.
> "I'm not even sure I understand which lifestyle you're asking about here"
The one I mentioned. Comparing the "free" lifestyle where you have adverts for Coca-Cola shoved into your face 24/7 along with adverts selling you a drug to help you ignore the Coca-Cola adverts. Vs. "non-free" where Coca-Cola isn't available for sale and you just don't think about it because you've never had it and don't miss it, and you go about your life doing the things you care about instead.
I wonder if you confused this thread with another? Or maybe your sarcasm was misinterpreted?
I do see how it looks like a return to caveman times, and was unnecessarily sarcastic. Practically, the times when I don't have junk food in the cupboards, I don't have to think constantly about resisting junk food because there isn't any to eat and that makes a difference. Extending that out to national levels, schools shouldn't have vending machines full of junk food, hospitals shouldn't have coffee chains, coffee chains should have restrictions on how much sugar can be in coffee, soda shouldn't be a thing, breakfast cereals shouldn't be a thing, and keep going as far as necessary. In the argument between Nanny state and Laissez-faire it's very clear that the food industry will kill millions of people and ruin the quality of life of billions millions, hiding behind smiley friendly packaging, exploiting human biases in ways we have no defenses against, and it's not nanny-stating to regulate killers harshly.
You literally did not say those words in the comment I replied to. You didn't even seem to imply it. Either that or there's some kind of shadow ban thing happening and I can't see the same thing you are.
Lose weight permanently through cremation?
I want to emphasize that a few decades ago, people were much thinner in the Western world and did not hate their lives because they could not eat a triple cheeseburger, go hungry constantly, or feel physically deprived. Those were my parents and my grandparents, I know them.
But if you show them hyper-caloric food that makes them feel like crap, they can't say no. It's disappointing. And the same can be said for addiction to social media, horrible TV series, and constant music everywhere.
The unattractive, low-status man (or woman) has less trouble remaining faithful than the handsome, high-status man (or woman). Not because they are more virtuous, but because they are not as exposed to temptation. But fewer people justify the unfaithful than the “big eater.” And that's something society and culture have decided, for now.
There are many people who don't feel that need. They don't actively resist cramming cake into their mouths, they just glance at the cake disinterestedly and move on. Or eat a bit, and feel that's enough, and don't want more.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27936016 has discussions about the dramatic rise in obesity after ~1970; refined sugar, chocolate, butter, doughnuts, McDonalds, cars, TV, have been around longer than that. Could there be involvement from Glyphosate pesticide, from reduction in smoking appetite-suppressing cigarettes, Lithium contaminated water supplies, increased Vitamin A added to milk and grain supplies, rise in antibiotics used on farm animals, which causes some people to gain and retain weight more easily?
Service jobs are not conducive to good health.
The main problems have been the easy availability of cheap and tasty calories, combined with a surprisingly low resistance to the ingestion of those calories.
You're looking for "hyperpalatable foods", not hyper-caloric. They're related but distinct.
It shows what it shows.
What the explanation is, that actually requires research. Anything from new food additives, changed lifestyle habits forced by the pandemic, increased chronic stress, screen addiction compromising other opportunities to be active, less walkable neighborhoods, more elevators, higher calorie diet, cost increase in healthy diet to just name a fraction of possible factors.
No, I'm angry in the way that you punching me in the face with my own hand, saying "stop hitting yourself" then offering to sell me a painkiller subscription might make me. The sheer ridiculousness of Big Food vs Big Pharma with humans trapped in the middle. Humans presented by geeks as perfectly spherical rational decision makers, but actually lizard hind-brains wrapped in frontal lobes and language centers, with very exploitable biases, feelings, fears, and base drives and very few defenses against it, and those defenses being undermined at every turn by political lobbying and profit seeking.
Imagine how much money and time and effort is spent making Doritos 2% more tempting; the crunch, the flavour intensity, the packaging layout, the packaging colours, the mouthfeel, the shelf stability. The same for ice cream and everything else. How far can Kelloggs stretch the gap between the strawberry presented on the packaging and the almost-zero strawberry in the pop tart? Or the honey pictured on the Honey Nut Cheerios box with the "hint of honey" in the description on the back? How To Cook That[1] on YouTube on Kellogg's misleading and potentially misleading claims.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suy3wGzQ08g&list=PLPT0YU_0VL...
There are plenty of examples of people who've managed to lose weight through diet and exercise, it's not "nobody". Sure it's a small % success rate, but that's because it's not easy. Just like squatting or deadlifting 300 lbs, it's not easy to get there, but the vast majority of humans could if they decided to put the time and effort into it.
The fact is that you have much more control over one than the other.
I don't disagree that maintaining a healthy weight is a challenge in today's environment, but it's not impossible or inevitable, like so many in this thread are pretending.
> The fact is that you have much more control over one than the other.
Why do you say that? Studies do not agree. How would you assess the difference? Or are you simply coming at this from the perspective of either someone who has never had a weight problem or was able to get out of a weight problem without issue? If the latter you're in the ~1% and your experience is not that of others in the same way as your experience as someone without depression does not align with that of someone who is depressed.
How would you measure your thesis? Certainly it cannot be based on results because, well, I cited them.
As someone who isn't addicted to cigarettes, it's pretty easy to not smoke. My experience does not align with those addicted to cigarettes, and I can appreciate that. Why do you not appreciate that the experience of those with obesity might be different than your own? I am not obese for the record, and I have never taken GLP-1s, but I have been obese and this just makes sense to me.
Just because you have full control over your diet and I have control over smoking does not mean that there are people out there who cannot control their diets and cannot control their smoking.
Maybe depression and obesity are more similar than you are giving credit. Especially since serotonin inhibits appetite and has an integral role in maintaining energy homeostasis.
[1] https://academic.oup.com/edrv/article/40/4/1092/5406261
Is there any data I could provide that would change your mind or is this just a "I heard it growing up so it must be true" kind of thing?
It's one of the hardest things I've done. I'm no stranger to hard physical things - I've run marathons, raced cyclocross, done daily bike commuting through several Chicago winters, and I'd rate the weight loss as up harder than all of those. At the risk sounding too hubristic - if that's the effort it takes to lose weight, doing so is beyond the abilities of large swaths of the population. Not to mention that I have the time and financial resources to weigh my food, buy foods that were optimal for my diet (so much yogurt and chicken!), etc.
(As a side note, exercise isn't a very good way to lose weight in my experience. It's valuable to do for all sorts of other reasons, but I actually gained weight when training for my first marathon, while running 60-70 miles/week).
Generally people who don't normally exercise are going to gain muscle faster than they lose fat. This was the origin of HAES before it got corrupted: Health At Every Size, not "Healthy". Encouragement to keep going because with exercise you'll get healthier even if you're not losing weight.
Also, by weight, muscle burns more calories than fat just by existing. Personally I think that's where most of the weight loss attributed to exercise comes from, rather than the exercise itself. You have to gain the muscle first to actually burn more calories.