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Comment by cj | Hacker News Reader

I was a daily drinker for many years. A "1 or 2 cocktails in the evening" type of person. (And of course, 1 cocktail often meant 2 shots, so 2 cocktails = 4 shots a night.. looking back... yikes)

I started a GLP-1 in February of 2025. Lost a bunch of weight, etc.

What I wasn't expecting was that I'd have such an easy time dropping the daily drinking habit. I'm not convinced GLP's will help if you're truly addicted to alcohol to the point where you need AA and structured programs to break free. But I do think GLP's have the potential to give you the initial "kick" you need to drop the habit if you're otherwise motivated to.

In the first few months of starting the GLP-1, I remember losing enjoyment for eating (and drinking) a lot of things, especially unhealthy stuff (unhealthy foods/drinks tend to not combine well with GLP's). The taste of a cocktail wasn't as appetizing or appealing as it used to be, hard to explain.

I'd love to see more research around this.

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> I'd love to see more research around this.

Looks like we posted around the same time, but see:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46945756

This was also my experience. I was a daily drinker, but once I started on tirzepatide I lost all interest. Even after I stopped taking the medicine, I still wasn't interested. I'll occasionally have a cocktail or glass of wine, but it's now a once-a-month sort of thing.

It removes my craving for alcohol, but I can definitely time my dosage effectiveness based on when I start craving beer again.

I had a very similar experience.

There is a point you made here "losing enjoyment for eating (and drinking)" that I think is The Key, but also not what people think when they hear it without experiencing it. Someone hearing that line might think it makes food "unenjoyable," as in "bad." That is not the case. It is "unenjoyable" as in "lacking in a joyful experience."

After talking with friends of mine who are similarly aged to me but have not had the major weight struggles I've had, I realized one of the biggest differences between us is not our drive or discipline (they envy me in many of these areas), it's in the sheer level of enjoyment that I get out of food and drink that they do not.

There are certain foods that, if I have them, they make me more hungry. I can't physically fit enough spaghetti or chocolate pudding into my mouth to satisfy my craving for it. My favorite beer feels glorious all the way down my throat and into my stomach; I can go from depressed to happy in 10 seconds just from that first gulp. And it's just those specific things. I'm not going to scarf down hard on lasagna or chocolate ice cream. While I enjoy whiskey, wine, cocktails, and other beers, I can have one in a night and be done.

There are also foods that are the opposite. I physically cannot stomach muscles or cuccumber. Putting cauliflower--in any form--on my plate is likely to start an argument. All leafy greens feel like a punishment; I can choke them down, unlike muscles, but I'm not going to like the person who made me do it.

But my friends without weight issues have never had these experiences with any foods. Food is just a way to avoid hunger. Booze is just a way to get drunk. There's no strong emotional connection to any of it.

And GLP-1 agonists completely remove that. I've heard it called "The Food Noise." It's basically a re-baselining of my relationship to food back to what should be "normal." Nothing has a feedback loop of pushing me to consume more anymore. Nothing gives me such strong revulsion that I can't eat it anymore. It's just food, on my plate. I don't even feel hungry, the only reason I'm eating it is because I understand at an intellectual level that I have to in order to not pass out in the middle of the day.

It just makes me eat less. I enjoy food every bit as much as I did before, just less often and in lower amounts. I still get hungry eventually and still want to eat and food tastes the same and if anything has a stronger emotional appeal than it did before because I eat so little.

I still enjoy drinking an IPA just as much, and really I enjoy it much more since I have one every few months instead of 5 every night. I could enjoy one every night, but I don't really need to have it, even though it would be delicious and the buzz is enjoyable, I just don't feel compelled to get it and I know it's not good for me. I knew before it wasn't good for me, believe me as the child of an alcoholic I knew it wasn't good to drink every night, but I did anyway because I had something inside pushing me to do it.

So maybe that is what you are describing, that thing that pushes you to do things you know are bad for you, and which you will regret immediately, but yet you feel like you have to do anyway. It's not enjoying something more, it's more like feeding withdrawal.

Overall I feel like there is someone in control now. I can just decide that drinking a beer every night is bad for me and not aligned with my goals and then I don't do it, and when I rarely think about it I'm just not a person who drinks alone anymore and my thoughts quickly move on to figuring out how to make croissant dough or looking for a scene to post to instagram or some work problem that has been bugging me.

> It just makes me eat less. I enjoy food every bit as much as I did before

Why are you eating less, if you enjoy eating just as much as before?

Is it that you feel physically full (would be uncomfortable to eat more)? Or is it that you aren't hungry (but you're also not particularly "full")?

Why don't you eat 5 entire pizzas instead of 5 slices? It's like that. One pizza seems like a LOT of food now. Three slices seems like too much. Before I could eat a whole pizza without even thinking twice. I look forward to it just as much, if not more. The first bite is just as good, but honestly seems better since I didn't just have a snack an hour ago. I ate like 5 Takis for a snack the other day and they were delicious and I really enjoyed it, but before I would have eaten the entire bag and not really even taken the time to taste them.

I would say it takes longer to get hungry even though I eat maybe 1/3 to 1/2 as many calories as I did before (that is to say 2/3 less than before). If I ate this little before GLP-1 I would have felt like I was dying and would have been thinking about food and hunger all day and night.

Yes you do fill up faster, and your stomach empties slower, so there is actually a physical 'being full' that happens with less food than previously.

Similar experience. Went through a phase of drinking once or twice a week. Started GLP-1, completely dropped the drinking habit to the point where there is zero desire of drinking.

Now, I wish it could do this for late night sugary snacks as well since that's my crux.

I have heard a few very different experiences with GLP-1s, for some an almost magical relief from addictive behaviors, for others they didn't notice much on that front at all.

Which is common with any medication and why medicine is so hard. Two people can react wildly different to the same drug.

Without getting into individual physical differences that occur, expectation is a huge part of addiction and overcoming addiction. Rituals are very often a part of substance abuse for similar reasons. It sounds silly, but consciously placebo-ing yourself can be very effective for people trying to quit. "This medicine will cure my addiction" can be a very powerful mantra for people with a strong imagination.

ah, nope. not everything is just a placebo.

I've heard very addictive personalities describe it as a light switch being turned off, people who have been on a whole host of different things across time.

Individual differences in medication response isn't just placebo.

Why make medicine at all if essentially you think you just have to convince people of fairy stories well enough for literally anything to work?

So much is about what is causing the behavior I would expect. GLP-1s don't change the way you think so much as breaking some of the trigger mechanisms.

Are you doing the action because you want to do it, or because your body is responding to that mild trigger that occurs, but your pavlonian response is so strong you can't differentiate.

The thing is, those trigger mechanisms break after weeks without doing them, whereas it is very hard to break them normally without some more extreme measure.

this is baseless speculation.

there are GLP-1 receptors on neurons, the drugs cross the blood-brain barrier, they are active in reward centers.

these drugs directly affect the behavior of neurons, it's not some chain of effects that result in behavior change

I'm in the latter group. I've had little to no weight loss from Ozempic because my issue is having a sweet tooth, not eating too much regular food. Yeah I fill up faster, but by the time I would fill up on cookies or something that's still a crazy amount of calories. So it hasn't really helped me to curb my weight. It has helped my A1c though, which is the main thing.

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