Ozempic Melted Away Weight–and the Idea of 'Body Positivity'
wsj.com
wsj.com
No one should be harassed or made to feel bad by the way they look, but at the same time, it's not wrong to want others to be healthy.
GLP-1 drugs have basically thrown out the idiotic idea that people were fat because they were sloths or gluttons. Our genetic and epigenetic predispositions very obviously played a huge role in whether on not people became obese. Body positivity was a reasonable coping mechanism for folks who drew the short straw at birth or in youth, and would never be able to have the beauty our society holds above almost everything.
Not we have a drug that fixes these predispositions. Yay! It’s basically the equivalent of “teeth positivity” going away after the advent of braces. The point was about helping people cope in an uncaring world… and then there not needing a coping mechanism after the problem people were coping with gets solved.
Sure we would. James Bond movies? Frat parties?
To some extent American culture does glorify binge drinking, but I don't think the same is true of alcoholism. People brag about how much they drank at the party last night, but they feel shame about starting the morning with a few drinks.
I’d consider calling it “odd” to be an understatement. I always thought such extreme positions were a bizarre denial of the negative impacts that obesity can have on personal well-being and quality of life. Having said that, I only ever encountered such views on the Internet; never in real life.
And now the pendulum swings to the other extreme with very popular female celebrities being openly anorexic, normalizing the terminal cancer patient look. Just pay a few thousand per year and you can effortlessly look almost dead, too.
What I have a problem with, is the "healthy at any size" bullshit. Especially those who use extreme outliers as their rationale - like if you see someone who says that they are healthy at 350 pounds because there's a lineman in the NFL who is their same height and weight. It's like, that person is deliberately carrying extra weight due to their job, and they can likely put up absurd numbers in the weight room, like a 600+ pound squat or a 400+ pound bench press.
I am sure at some point a drug will be perfected, but the promotion of this drugs goes way beyond spreading the awareness that excess weight is a health risk, it feels political, and used as an excuse to attack leftist ideas
balance is everything, your body, your choice, move, eat healthy .. and only use proven drugs, and preferably use drugs as a last resort
So last word talk to your doctor about ozempic, if you are considering using it
Or the notion that being morbidly obese is healthy.
If you as an adult want to eat to excess (or drink, or smoke), feel free (within reason - don't encroach on my economy airline seat) and happily accepts that they might shorten their life by doing so, then have at it. Just don't pretend it's a healthy lifestyle choice.
The obesity epidemic is yet another instance of “What changed in America in 1971?” that can’t be attributed to body positivity, a movement that didn’t really get nationwide traction until the 90s.
In fairness, there are plenty of conditions and imbalances that can cause weight gain besides "eating in excess"
>don't encroach on my economy airline seat
The things are so damn small that's going to happen regardless. They're not designed for big people (even healthy weighted ones)
https://biologyinsights.com/how-much-carbon-dioxide-do-we-ex...
Ok, that is way more than the dozen grams per day I thought it was.
Similar to the "trees are mostly made from air" thing.
There are no fat children in those places in Africa where they go hungry. And I guarantee you a lot of people have conditions and imbalances there.
"Just abstain" approaches have failed repeatedly and conclusively in public health. Hell, it's hard enough to get people to wash their hands after pooping and get vaccinated.
That's not the only advice. But, without that piece, you are unlikely to make progress. Hence all other advice is secondary to it.
It's more in the realm of "just be happy" to a depressed person. Sure, that'd help a lot. It's the how that's tough. So we move the levers that aren't rusted solid first.
Oh except the heroin is available literally everywhere and you need to do just a little bit every day to stay alive
> The mouth. That magical orifice where the cake enters and the excuses exit.
I don’t think you’re a font of nuanced advice on fitness.
Completely in accordance with thermodynamics, and yet, "just eat less" doesn't work.
That organism has been outcompeted (darwinized-out) long ago by other organisms that are able to.
Being more specific, humans are not that organism.
I eventually got a better doctor and a dietitian and lost 50 lbs by changing my macros to focus on getting enough protein, fat, and fiber, which finally curbed my hunger, and wouldn't you know it, my feet feel better.
How about "Plant Based!" Let's get some more grain into soup and milk!
I'm honestly surprised that sawdust is so far only in shredded cheese. No "tree milk" yet for my coffee?
* ADM Bunge Cargill Dreyfus
Up until around age 60, your body adjusts your muscle mass based on usage. Somewhere around 60, you start losing muscle mass. If you have just enough muscle for day to day activities in a sedentary life at that point, then over time daily tasks like carrying groceries or standing up out of a chair are going to become prohibitively difficult. You need to do something that encourages your body to grow more muscle than you need for day to day life so that you can afford to lose some of it.
Most people did manual labor. Even if they didn't, everyone walked more, or rode horses, chopped wood, drew water from wells, and did a hundred other things that required using their muscles in a way that's just not necessary today.
> my strength training is rock climbing
That's weight lifting too. Bodyweight is still weight.
The weight training craze is far, far more recent than our shift to a sedentary lifestyle.
The comment you responded to about not "min maxing" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46499625 only advocated resistance and strength training, not "weight training" specifically. It's hard to dispute that having a stronger body is better for living a healthy life.
None of that will bulk you like weight lifting nor is similar to weight lifting. Those guys were smaller. By our standards, they would do a lot of low resistance repetition, basically.
> That's weight lifting too. Bodyweight is still weight.
I mean, you are stretching the definition of weight lifting to unrecognizable. Climbing is not weight lifting anymore then walking is running.
Even weight lifting won't bulk you unless you actively try to bulk. Seriously, appearing muscular or bulky when you're fully dressed is actually quite hard to accomplish for most people (practically all females and maybe half the males). It takes years and years of gym work and diet that most people won't ever put in.
That being said, you will look pretty good for your size if you moderately lift heavier weights and eat your protein + calories.
Most people are not like this. They can lift weights and benefit from a stronger body without looking any different.
The effects of moderate weight lifting - defined loosely by me as squatting at most your body weight on a barbell - are barely visible. But you will feel much better on a day-to-day basis and all your health numbers will improve massively.
If the alternative to using Ozempic is eating a healthy diet and exercising regularly, then sure, the latter is better, but the target population for it is people who have spent many years not eating healthy or exercising and who are unlikely to start in the near future.
Im not sure why theres such a diataste for just letting fat people take a pill/injection to lose weight. The current advice of telling them "lose weight fatty" is clearly not working on a societal level. When GLPs and naltrexone therapies become ubiquitous we are looking at vastly reduced healthcare costs.
There is also a good possibility that GLPs will kill the fast food industry, which means less fat kids, which means less fat adults.
But why trouble yourself to distinguish anyway? 30% of the Irish are obese, 28% of the UK, nearly a quarter of Belgians and Germans. If over a fifth of your population is sick, does it really bolster your national ego so much that some other place is sicker?
Does it really bolster your national ego so much that some other place is as sick as you?
Italy is 21%
(Common mistake when making generalization about "the developed world".)
But a world where literally millions of people are on a “lifetime drug” to reduce their bodyweight seems to be exactly what the big pharmaceutical companies are hoping for. They will make tens of billions of dollars every year if this is the case. Hell, there are endless commercials where middlemen (e.g., Ro) are hyping these drugs, telling you they can get you prescriptions, etc. If there wasn’t HUGE money in it, this wouldn’t be the case.
Yes, there are some people who have medical conditions that make weight loss very difficult. And these drugs can be a literal lifesaver for them. But for every one of them, there are dozens and dozens (or more) who simply make bad choices about food and exercise. Things that, if changed, would lead to a lifetime of improved health without any of the concerns or side effects of taking a drug forever. Our culture seems to be evolving to where it’s perfectly acceptable to translate “this is not easy” to “I can’t possibly be expected to do this, no matter how good it would be for me."
I’ve been accused of “hating fat people” for this take, but it’s the furthest thing from the truth. I encourage people to actually change their lives in a sustainable, healthy way, because I care about them. It’s not about shaming them.
Can you be “healthi-ER” taking these drugs than if you don’t exercise and eat too much and too many awful foods? Sure. But I’d prefer to see them EVEN healthier by treating their bodies better in every single case where that’s possible.
They (and other elements of our healthcare industry) already make a lot more than that on treating the side effects of widespread obesity.
This raises a thought I hadn't considered before: given how much money gets made off of obese people, it wouldn't be surprising if there would be significant commercial interests that would want to try to actively hamper anything that'd systematically reduce the overall population percentage of obesity. We've seen plenty of examples in the past (and ongoing) of perverse incentives. In turn, I wonder if it's actually a small silver lining that the drugs are so wildly profitable for the short term, in that the producers are incentivized to lobby against any efforts to legally hobble them. And then in the longer term it will all go off patent.
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...
Just because someone is making a boatload on a problem existing doesn't mean someone else doesn't want to make a truckload undercutting that business, even if the first business might try to stop it, well, sometimes a different set of bad guys wins.
The amount of mental and physical effort required to lose and maintain weighloss is absolutely not commensurate with what the average non-obese person needs to feel and do. Anyone that has lost considerable amount of weight will tell you this. In addition to that, the long term efficacy of lifestyle adjustments w.r.t weight loss hovers around 20%. Once you have had the fat in your body, your hormonal profile is forever changed. Those fat cells sit and make "FEED ME" hormones until they are lysed, which can take between 2 and 10 years.
But if people stopped killing themselves in their 60s and 70s, we'd have gobs of people living until their 80s and the cost for dementia and Cancer Care would be ginormous.
I know several people who lift weights three times a week, run for at least thirty minutes three times a week, and were still consistently 20-40 pounds overweight before Ozempic and similar drugs.
Exercise all you want, but for most people, if you eat garbage food in large quantities, you will be overweight.
I am exactly the same, btw. Most of my family was overweight when I was growing up. I was a fat kid, all the way through high school. Since then, I have been exercising consistently for 40+ years. Lifting weights, bicycling, walking every day, etc. But I still need to not just eat everything I want or I will gain weight. I try to avoid junk food, fast food, eating out, MOST days. Personally, I do one “cheat day” per week (see Tim Ferris’ Slow Carb diet for roughly the idea, although I’m not militant about the foods he says are ok, etc.).
I’m around 20% bodyfat at 5’10” in my early 60s, so I could use to drop 5-10 pounds of fat. What boggles my mind is that everyone says I’m crazy to think I need to lose ANY weight. I’ve got clearly visible fat around my middle and other areas, even if I’m not “technically obese”. I don’t look great in most clothes. But compared to the typical person (my age or not), people think I’m in great shape.
I wouldn’t say what I do is incredibly hard. But it’s also not just “do whatever you want all the time”.
I completely agree.
> I wouldn’t say what I do is incredibly hard. But it’s also not just “do whatever you want all the time”.
I think the difficulty varies from person to person a lot more than people realize. We all end up making decisions between what we want to eat and what we think we should eat, but the level of deprivation people feel when they forego the tasty option for the healthy option seems to vary.
I think we eat similarly, and it's not incredibly hard for me, but I think it's much harder for some people.
e.g. being aerobically trained and overweight may be more or less equivalent to being at a healthy weight but not training. obviously the best case scenario is to be at a healthy weight and trained. additionally, aerobic training is much more achievable and sustainable for most people long term than weight loss.