Individually, there's (previously) been nothing better to suggest than "try harder (and, maybe, smarter)".
Statistically it was almost useless, but it's the best we had. It's not bad advice exactly, it's just extremely unlikely to work for long-term, sustained weight loss.
It also very much appears to be the case that weight gain and loss are heavily influenced by environmental factors. Skinnier countries aren't skinnier because the people there have more willpower, it seems, but because they live in a skinnier country and are surrounded by the culture, laws, physical layouts of the created world, et c., that come with that. It'd be kinda weird if we expected "just try harder" to work very well when that's evidently not the mechanism by which skinny countries are skinny. Alternatively, if it is willpower doing it, we're just adding a step, because then it appears that environment strongly influences willpower, instead, since the same observations hold.
Sure, sometimes it works for individuals. In fact, it often works temporarily, causing a yo-yo effect. It can work for long periods (many years without a slip) but that's rare.
If your solution to the obesity crisis is "people need to try harder" your solution is demonstrably not helpful. Can it work for one person? Yes. Over a population, will it? No, it won't, it's amazingly ineffective, even very expensive high-touch interventions involving multiple experts aimed at weight loss and lifestyle change and such are wildly less effective than "inject GLP-1 agonists" or "move somewhere skinnier".
> In the 1970s, Jens Juul Holst and Joel Habener began research on the GLP-1 hormone [...] Research continued, and in 1993, Michael Nauck managed to infuse GLP-1 into people with type 2 diabetes, stimulating insulin while inhibiting glucagon and bringing blood glucose to normal levels. However, treating diabetes patients with GLP-1 hormones resulted in significant side effects, leading researchers financed by Novo Nordisk to start looking to develop a suitable compound for therapeutic use. In 1998, a team of researchers at Novo Nordisk led by the scientist Lotte Bjerre Knudsen developed liraglutide, a glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist that could be used to treat diabetes.
GLP-1 is a hormone that naturally occurs in the human body. Novo Nordisk was responsible for turning it into a diabetes medication. They were responsible for turning it into a weight loss medication.
Where are you getting your facts from?
Other "newcomers" in the GLP-1 space are also showing more promise than what Novo has in the pipeline. Boehringer Ingelheim has Survodutide in the pipeline as well, along with plenty of others.
They're the least interesting game in town when it comes to the incretin mimetics at this point.
> If your solution to the obesity crisis is "people need to try harder" your solution is demonstrably not helpful. Can it work for one person? Yes. Over a population, will it? No
Are you an individual or a population though? Take off the telescopes (and data, and science), and look at the world through your own eyes.
No one needs (or can) to address the obesity crisis in the population. The only crises that can be solved are the ones individuals find in themselves.
Lots of people successfully make changes and lose weight, but exceedingly few manage to keep it low over time.
My assertion is that the success of long term weight changes is not independent from that variable.
There's no evidence to suggest that reading comprehension or scientific aptitude has any link whatsoever to ability to maintain the willpower to stick to a diet. It seems distinctly non-obvious to think it would matter.
And all the evidence is that diets works soo poorly that the effect would need to be astronomical for it to counter-act just how unlikely they are to effect lasting change.
People in the US eat absolute shit. Even the bread is full with sugar.
Good for capitalism if you can feed that to the people and then give them an injection to be healthy again I guess.
Do we have data on that?
I guess you could look at natural experiments, like people who lost and won H1B lotteries, and see if only the ones actually making it to the US get fat?
It appears that your major issue is that you are simply angry people are taking a short cut. Which seems odd, why would it bother you how someone lost weight, why not just be happy for them?
I got on GLP1s in January. I went from 6'1 240lb to 209lbs with defined abs benching 405lbs at 46 years old. I've worked out my entire life but never been lean like this. I like eating bread (steak, eggs, toast, ketchup and hot sauce is perhaps the single greatest breakfast in the history of the world. The toast is very important!) and potatoes are freaking incredible (mashed with Worcestershire sauce... bruv).
The bulk of my calories are protein but I generally eat what I want if I desire it. I just desire less of it. I had a roast beef sub from Jersey Mike's today with my kid, it was delicious. Their honey mustard is the bee's knees. I had a medium sub though and not a large.
The only change is now I essentially don't eat after 6pm. I just set that goal and the GLP-1 helped me keep it. The only side effects I have had is lower cholesterol and lower BP and that is while running 700mg of test. I'm going to hop on metformin next month after this cycle and target eliminating the fatty liver markers I have had for the last 20 years.
They work friend, they are good for you and they make people live happier healthier lives.
Embrace better living through chemistry.
And he is extremely happy with his new sugar and bread free life of increased mobility, less pain, and much lower blood pressure. At 64, he's learning how to ride a dirtbike and doing pretty well at it.
You're clearly an advocate for your father making healthy choices. So why would you advocate against the use of a drug that makes that easier?
Unless we talk about eating disorders.
Telling your mind to do a thing is only ever easy in retrospect and when you find a "trick" that works for you. For some people that trick is getting clear feedback about glucose levels in your bloodstream. But any trick that works for one person might not work for the next. So it is good that there are many approaches.
People make such a moral crusade of this - the drug works, people will take it. Behavior modification works in theory and fails for most in practice. Even for those that can make it work usually don’t hold out indefinitely.
We likely agree that doing it without drugs is probably better, but it’s definitely harder and it’s not clear yet how much better it will even be.
I’ve successfully lost 70lbs (250->180) three times and gotten fit, but it’s a constant effort and psychic drain to maintain the lower weight. If the drug (which I haven’t taken yet) made it easy that’d be a relief. It’s much easier to just manage exercise.
I suspect people that don’t have as much difficulty just get a different amount of joy from eating. For me I felt I could relate to the way an alcoholic described trying to quit drinking, except it’s harder in a way because you have to eat.
If changing your habits was much easier then we wouldn't need these medications and the world wouldn't keep getting fatter. People have known how to not be fat for a long time, yet the obesity rate has been rising worldwide, even in countries that have traditionally been skinny.
It's not like fat people on the whole are ignorant of how to become not-fat and never attempt to do so.
And it’s exactly the same situation with financial education, debt, university degrees, or in general any long term endeavors that requires the sacrifice of the immediate pleasure.
Of course, we still have a non trivial percentage of people that suffer from eating disorders, and use food as a way to emotionally regulate themselves because that’s what they learned as children (child is unhappy, give him a candy…).
I don't understand what drives people to write such intentionally asinine comments. Do you get off on hurting others or something?
There were quite a few foods I let go of when I decided to drop weight. Can't say I miss them much, certainly not to the extent to say something like "wow, i can't enjoy food anymore" or "now i'm fighting cravings all the time!!". And I legitimately have no interest in reintegrating them into my diet.
Turns out, some kinds of food are just dumb to consume, and my enjoyment of them is legitimately secondary. To the extent that discovering how harmful they were, they became inherently less enjoyable, and it was well possible for the habits and the cravings to subside over time. You don't try to go hit a balance with crack addiction, why would you try to hit a balance consuming 5 bazillion calorie rubbish?
Cutting out certain classes of foods from one's diet is absolutely possible and there's nothing necessarily wrong with it.
Your story has been told over and over and over. We get it. Congratulations. You win. You don't need GLP1s to sustain your weight loss. You don't experience food noise. You made all the right choices. Your brain and genetics are superior to the 30% of American adults who have been told to eat less and move more and still haven't managed to improve their health through weight loss.
Now that you've been properly congratulated for your superiority, are you interested at all in understanding the complex systems that prevent 100 million Americans from achieving the success you have? Like, any intellectual curiosity at all about a problem that causes untold suffering for almost one third of Americans? That costs literally billions in healthcare costs? About stress, anxiety, access to healthy foods, or the novel mechanisms by which a drug which was discovered through studying the venom of a Gila monster operates on the human gut and brain? Or are you only interested in re-telling the world how you don't have the problem that we're trying to solve?
While I do miss it sometimes, I'm perfectly fine with sparkling water. Sure I'll have soda once in a while, but it's now officially a "treat", and not all that sad about it.
If I ever struggle with weight gain in the future, I see no reason to skip a tool that makes that much easier.
What’s weird about it? Is insulin some weird injection? What about epinephrine?
It seems like a lot of people need something other than "don't eat bread" though.
My dad has finally understood that grains are for people that need help maintain weight or gaining weight.
No fat person should ever be eating them.
It's strange to make the culprit of a modern epidemic foods that have been with us for millenia.
I said in my other posts.. if someone needs help maintaining or gaining weight, eat those things.
If you are overweight, you should be eating ZERO of them.
"Basically killing them" means whatever the current obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemic means.
I know it's hard to believe in the US as today it even gets harder in Germany to find it.
The problem is eating shitty cheap mass produced food.
Same goes for "vegetable oil". Check out how it is made and you will probably respect olive oil more or some good ol butter.
Also it is possible to drink water. You don't need soda from dawn till dusk .
> No fat person should ever be eating them.
This is absolutism and controlling. Carbs have their place in a balanced diet, but key emphasis on diet. Too much (like the US diet) isn't good, none at all isn't good either. Everything in moderation. I don't understand why dieting / weight loss conversations are always going into extremes and absolutes.
What matters is, are the negative side effects and long term consequences better for you than the alternatives. One of them is "remaining fat". The other is "doing what other people have proven works.. cut all carbs".
Is ozempic worse than being fat?