It was incredibly hard and took me a long time to lose 15 pounds as a always had been skinny person whose weight slowly crept up.
I've never been obese and I'm sure it's super challenging to change, considering how hard loosing 15 lbs was for me. But if I were, I do think I'd try a GLP-1 agonist to get my weight down.
That second part makes it harder. Losing weight was pretty simple for me, but maintaining that low weight was much harder. Someone said that it takes about half a year to form a habit. I maintained lower weight for about a year, then it came back.
The key insight is that your sensation of hunger is primarily driven by the weight of your stomach (not the caloric contents or volumetric fullness of it).
So the question is how do you increase the weight of your stomach (decrease sensation of hunger) without increasing caloric consumption. You just eat a lot of low caloric density foods!
Divide calories by grams on the nutrition label. Lower is better. Replace as many items as you can in your diet with the nearest alternative that is of lower caloric density.
Nonfat greek yogurt and seitan are the two biggest hacks ever. Adopting this mindset will also probably astound you how many calories modern engineering can fit into a gram. Would be a pretty great achievement if we had to trek long distances, but here we are munching on this stuff while sitting all day.
Yeah I instinctively did the same thing once I finally was able to bring myself to counting calories. Once you have a budget, you want to game the budget to feel full, so it makes veggies start looking a lot more attractive, and things like chocolate easier to avoid.
For me one of the big byproducts of this thinking is that my feeling of fullness was mis-calibrated a little bit. As a result, when I’m full according to my calorie counter, I think about how what I’m feeling is not hunger but the correct level of full. I’m recalibrating what full means to me, and believe it or not it actually helps me to not feel like I’m trying to overcome hunger.
Don't they only prescribe these for the morbidly obese? As someone "merely" overweight (BMI ~27) I'd like to try but I don't think I'm fat enough to get a prescription.
Reassess progress towards your renewal (we did 3 months). It’s literally cheating, in the best way.
Many experts including cardiologists maintain that the current mainstream protocols for statin drugs do more harm than good.
It's not that statins are good for you, it's that heart disease is the number 1 killer in the US and surgery is very risky. If we're able to better control cholesterol and hypertension without invasive methods that's very good.
Also GLP-1s lower cholesterol too. So it's possibly statins will be going out a bit out of fashion in the future.
The reality, I think, is that that is just not a very effective treatment plan for a lot of people.
On a side note, I keep exercising at least 2-3 hours per week and honestly I feel physically much better than I used to feel in my 30s.
'Just eat less and exercise more' never worked because I needed to learn how to do these smaller skills myself first. Once I learned what it actually takes to eat less and actually exercise more, that simple advice started becoming possible. It's still a work in progress.