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Comment by Kirby64 | Hacker News Reader

For the average overweight person? I disagree. The average obese person does little to no resistance training, eats very little protein, and wants to lose weight fast so they're not paying for expensive GLP1 drugs for a long period of time.

You're asking folks to make three separate changes: start exercising, change their diet to add protein, and use GLP1s to reduce food amount. And reducing food amount already goes against adding protein, so whatever protein they were getting is going to get cut even further.

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Increasing exercise also goes against reducing food amount, because it makes you hungrier.

For me my cravings shifted from cookies/candy/ice cream to craving food that actually does something for my training, like a real meal.

Also for me if I go to crossfit after workday ends I don't get cravings the rest of that day. If anything I want to go to sleep instead of eating candy in front of the TV.

I'm someone that used to be fit and lifted regularly. Got busy, got lazy, got fat. Tried multiple times to get not-fat after getting fat, and found it to be too difficult for me, despite it not being something I struggled with for many years earlier on in adulthood.

Getting on tirzepatide made it trivially easy for me to get back to a better diet, start exercising, etc. I do have to force myself to have an extra protein shake to hit my macros, though.

I think you're trivalizing the ease at monitoring your diet for someone who has never done this before. 'Macros' as a concept is foreign to probably 90%+ of the population I suspect. Unless you go extremely strict on calorie/macro counting, it will just be hard to know exactly how much you're taking in. It basically becomes another hobby for at least a few months until it becomes somewhat natural to do.

I mean when I needed to lose weight (15kg, 85kg -> 70kg) I started with calorie restriction, and as a result of that actually looked at what I was eating and realized I was incredibly low on protein, and then from that added some daily light exercise partly just to avoid getting bored and wanting food.

So this isn't really 3 separate unrelated changes. Also at least in my experience, people tend to regard high protein things as the "energy dense" part of a meal - the problem with a lot of carbohydrates is they're not very filling.

The biggest problem with exercise is it's an awful way to lose weight - you don't burn that many calories, it makes you hungrier, and then your body optimizes to burn even less calories as you do it.

> So this isn't really 3 separate unrelated changes. Also at least in my experience, people tend to regard high protein things as the "energy dense" part of a meal - the problem with a lot of carbohydrates is they're not very filling.

Who are these people? I suspect a lot of people who are overweight/obese and taking GLP1 drugs have very little to no concept of proteins role in their body composition. Essentially all a GLP1 drug does is modulate down your hunger (and you get full faster). That does not give you any of the tools or skills to create a diet or exercise plan. Both of those require intentional planning, research, skills, and time. They're definitely 3 separate things.

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