Discontinuation and reinitiation of dual-labeled GLP-1 receptor agonists
nautil.us
nautil.us
We probably don't know the numbers yet, but one can easily envision a scenario like: risk of CE without GLP-1 weight loss: 20%. Risk after taking GLP-1s for 2 years: 10%. Risk after stopping GLP-1s: 12%. "Your heart attack chance goes up 20% after stopping GLP-1s!!!"
https://bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/5/1/e002150
The data on the results section shows almost parity between the control group and participants who discontinued for 2 years.
Note that while it is a well conducted study at the US VA with 300,000+ patients, it is not a randomized study so fully eliminating confounding variables and reverse causality is hard.
It’s like stopping a blood pressure medicine and then being surprised that people have more heart attacks afterwards.
> In this cohort study of adults with overweight or obesity who initiated treatment with injectable semaglutide or tirzepatide and discontinued the index medication between 3 and 12 months after initiation, 19.6% restarted the index medication and 35.2% received an alternative treatment in the year after initial treatment discontinuation. The average weight change 1 year after index medication discontinuation was relatively small; however, there was considerable individual-level variability.
https://dom-pubs.pericles-prod.literatumonline.com/doi/10.11...
I don't know why a study that focuses on discontinuation didn't split the groups that restarted or transitioned against the group that actually just stopped.
Which makes sense since we have strong evidence for the GLP-1s providing significant protective benefit even without weight loss.
GLP-1 masks the problem and people don't realize their actions aren't ideal once the mask is removed.
The issue is shameless "science" reporting like this which packages up the results for non experts, without explaining the nuance because they know the sensational headlines will get more attention, and they know non-expert readers will get scared and share the article on places like HN or Facebook.
It's such an obvious play: find one doctor who'll make a loaded statement with the word "whiplash", write on this one study as if it's gospel truth, get everyone reading it as scared as possible. Throw in links to other emotional articles like "Can you die of a broken heart?" throughout the text to trigger secondary emotional reactions that will get confused with the main ones. Boom, social media sharing heaven, who cares if the science was valid or not?
And to be clear, the science underneath might be valid, probably even is, but it would need the expertise of someone who understands statistics and medicine to decide whether you should take action based on this or not.
You could characterize these same facts in the opposite way. GLP-1s don’t permanently change your body. They provide benefits while taking them but quickly clear out of your system when you stop taking them. Arguably, that’s a good thing in a drug.
That does appear to be the case, according to the study.
> Participants Veterans Affairs users with type 2 diabetes who started treatment with GLP-1RAs (n=132 551) or sulfonylureas (n=201 136), followed up for three years. Veterans Affairs users were defined as having at least two visits to Veterans Affairs and having used the Veterans Affairs outpatient pharmacy within a year before receiving treatment with GLP-1RAs or sulfonylureas.
So, why not? Seems very obvious to everyone here on HN that it's "kind of useless" unless they did have that, yet they didn't. What reason would there be for ignoring that?
Assembling a control group of people who have never taken Ozempic could be difficult. How do you control for the fact that people not on Ozempic are less likely to need Ozempic? You'd need to figure out some criteria by which to include and exclude patients before sorting by whether they take Ozempic or not, so you'd have a smaller sample size of people who are taking Ozempic.
Best not to allow scope creep.
> This study showed that discontinuing and interrupting GLP-1RA treatment could erode and might reverse the cardiovascular benefits of the drug in a duration dependent manner, increasing the risk of cardiovascular events.
emphasis mine
It took a while going through the data in the results section to see this.
Decided to try Ozempic and was on it for about 6 months. Didn’t do a single thing for my appetite unfortunately, even on the max dose.
Sample size of one here, but if you’ve got mental health struggles that feed into your eating patterns, GLP-1s might not help with your weight problems.
(though as a general note for anyone reading, just getting enough protein isn't enough - you need muscle stimulus too. Getting enough protein will help reduce the amount lost but if you really want to stop it, you gotta do resistance training)
The first year was the most dramatic loss of 100lbs. I was miserable and didn't know what I was doing other than counting calories. The rest of it was more considerate of total nutrition, and that's what made my good eating habits stick.
I say this because while I'm not a doctor I think GLP-1 is probably unnecessary for the vast majority of patients. Better food and information is more available than ever before.
I would strongly advise to watch your A1C and get out of the diabetes danger zone if you are. Most people can drop a few percent in as little as 6 months and it makes a massive difference in mental health. Blood glucose has a direct impact on the brain and overall cardiovascular health. If you drink alcohol, you might want to take a break also to let your liver/kidneys/pancreas do their jobs properly and restore insulin sensitivity and other hormones. Look into the "fruit paradox", and more generally get a good salad in for lunch to address nutrient deficiencies. Not crappy salads either. You're not a rabbit. Treat them like the amazing sandwiches without bread that they are.
Sounds like old advice, because it is, but I find people aren't listening because they want to more deeply understand why to do it and what the effects are. Convenience and unintuitive pricing are false bargains that get in the way of healthier habits. Focus on nutrition and not quantity. Change your groceries, change your life.
We have mountains of evidence that willpower fails for something like 99% of everyone, which is far from a vast majority. I applaud anyone's efforts to become healthier, however (though 240 at 6'1" is still obese, I would still explore medicine if I could not get any lower "naturally").
I didn't need any willpower to do this and I'm not even humblebragging nor think of myself as a tough guy. I'm saying that healthy habits are simply a matter of understanding. If someone wants to take GLP-1 on top of that, it's their call. Many seem to be under the impression it's so vital for their specific situation to lose weight or avoid a heart attack and I think that's plainly false. We shouldn't be feeding fear, and humans aren't that unique.
I did not change my diet. If anything I just added more variety with a specific intent and it worked. Even just changing the order in which one eats things (fiber before sugary foods) can make a big difference. Once I got the blood glucose under control all the strong cravings and eating mistakes basically went away on their own without my conscious effort. The body is all connected and driven by hormones.
Plenty of people have heard everything there is to hear on this, understand it, and still fail to implement it.
> I did not change my diet.
You plainly did. You do not lose weight without your diet changing.
> If anything I just added more variety with a specific intent and it worked.
This is changing your diet.
> Even just changing the order in which one eats things (fiber before sugary foods) can make a big difference
Changing your diet to eat more filling foods is a very frequently recommended thing, yes.
> Once I got the blood glucose under control all the strong cravings and eating mistakes basically went away on their own without my conscious effort.
My blood glucose has always been excellent. It did not stop me from having food noise and cravings.
That's not willpower. That's looking things up in the USDA database and tweaking my existing recipes. Why force nasty carrots onto the plate when I can eat spinach, cantaloupe, pumpkin, sweet potato, etc.?
I guess I also didn't emphasize enough that I took things super slowly? Taking 5 years to do what I did is a really modest goal. I just wanted to manage risk with minimal change. This is the pareto principle in action.
If we're really going to argue over stats, the effects of GLP-1 is meaningless noise in comparison and probably way harder to commit to. I just wanted to eat good and not feel like shit all the time. Isn't that what everyone wants? What if instead of there being "one weird trick" or a "miracle drug", we consider that basic nutrition is simply misunderstood and full of hundreds of weird tricks that are proportionally much easier to implement and they're damn tasty too?
But everything you did, plenty of people try to do and fail at it. You are making it sound like this is all it takes and that it's easy. It might have been for you! But it might not be for other people.
The fact of the matter is the overwhelming majority of people that are obese and go on GLP-1s have tried other interventions before and failed at them. ~70% of all obese people have tried to lose weight in general, ~50% have recurring attempts, and while I don't have stats to back it up I am confident that the sort of people who are willing to go and inject themselves every week are the sort of people that have tried to lose weight in other ways.
> probably way harder to commit to.
A subcutaneous injection once a week is nothing. Dealing with constant food noise? I could maintain that if the rest of my life was stress free, and that's how I would drop 30lb. Once stress came back? So did the weight. Because for me, rearranging food doesn't matter if I still can't stop thinking about it even if I'm not actually hungry.
I'm on reta. It does barely anything to suppress my appetite - physical hunger has never been my issue. And I can easily eat however much I want - most days I am below 2k calories, but Saturday was an annual event with friends and I'm sure between food and alcohol I was probably at 5k calories for the day. But what reta does, is absolutely murders my food noise. I don't think about food constantly. I don't go eat because I got bored. The only thing I have to commit to for it is, once a week, put a needle on my injector pen, twist the dial to the right dosage, poke it into a spot where I still have subcutaneous fat, depress the twist top. Once a month I reconstitute a new vial.
I do at least one a day, sometimes up to four if things happen to line up exactly right.
Even four subq injections amounting to around 2ml of stuff is nothing, doing all four of them after a shower takes about as long as brushing my teeth.
If you use correct technique and good quality needles, you will feel essentially nothing. If your needles are not sharp enough, there might be very slight discomfort when initially piercing the skin.
From the starting population of overweight people, only 3% of people dropped down to, and stayed, a healthy weight.
I am in a totally different setup than you though - 225 weight, goal to get down to 180 (my Army weight was 170.) I exercise a lot, and lost 30 pounds through diet two years ago. But it was the hardest thing I've done since Ranger school! So paintful to not eat enough. Gained it all back. I'm in month one of tirz and it is as easy as pie.
It really opened my eyes to just how food centric society is.
But I feel you on sugar. Took me a long time to cut sugar cravings. A decade ago I cut regular soda out of my diet, which a few years later led to me cutting out pretty much anything sweetened. Realistically it wasn’t the sweetness for me, it was the “mouthfeel” or doing something with your mouth. Just straight sparkling water satisfied the entire craving for me.
The hardest thing for me to give up / heavily cut back on was fried things. Maybe that’s the result of my parents using french fries as the reward food when I was a kid…
I think the only very confident thing I can say after watching and helping dozens of folks get started on these drugs is that everyone’s biology is vastly different.
I have friends who have lost close to a hundred pounds on the starting doses of their chosen GLP-1. I have other friends who barely lost anything after a year at max dose. Some of these people in both groups are highly motivated to lose weight and some are simply taking the drug as a magic fix and expending zero other effort into changing their lives. Some have very difficult mental issues and relationships with food, some have very few hangups on the subject.
I have never been able to predict with high confidence how any particular person is going to react to taking them. By and large the results are close to magical for the majority of folks, and there may be some correlation with folks who combine the drug with other lifestyle changes - but those are just general averages I see and certainly not scientific.
There are some difference, too, between the various drugs. I never tried ozempic, I went directly to tirzepatide (zepbound). And then to retatrutide. I will say that reta is in some ways the most interesting, because it has less appetite suppressing activity than tirzepatide (this is common, not just me), but it still cuts my stomach capacity quite a lot, and ramps up my metabolism. I had stalled at about 90 pounds down with tirzepatide, and reta immediately knocked off another 15. I track calories, and I had changed nothing. Felt more hungry, still lost more weight. Wild.
From one rando to another, I recommend trying tirzepatide. Or try semaglutide again but stacked with cagrilintide -- some people get pretty great results with that, similar to tirz.
I am a big guy (6’4, 330 lbs), but I was amazed that Ozempic just seemed to do nothing. I was having the gastric side effects, but I could still eat 3000 calories a day if I cheated without feeling anything.
If it works for you, look into getting one of the 15mg pens and counting clicks in order to get more doses per vial. I've been on the one pen for 3 months now and it's still got plenty of juice left.
You can also take apart the pens and do the same thing, but it’s a lot more involved and you’ll need to source some sterile reusable vials for it.
However:
> But allulose isn’t approved for use in Canada or Europe. There, it’s considered a “novel food,” which means it hasn’t been available long enough for sufficient testing, according to those governments’ standards.
> And it’s important to know that the FDA’s GRAS status doesn’t mean that allulose has been rigorously tested.
> “We don’t have studies regarding the safety of allulose at this time,” Dr. Hazen shares. “But if it follows similar trends to what we see in some other sugar substitutes that are sugar alcohols like erythritol, I would suggest there’s reason to be cautious about how much of it you consume.”
So yeah, when you stop taking something that protects your heart and kidneys, it stops protecting... your heart and kidneys.
There's an increasing body of work that indicates that long-term GLP use (initially higher doses for weight loss, then tapering down) retains the cardiac and kidney benefits and can actually lead to additional weight loss.
This is not at all obvious and still requires further study. Do the drugs themselves have heart- and kidney- protective effects, or are the heart and kidneys protected by maintaining a lower weight, or lower resting blood glucose, or lower inflammation, all of which are effects of the drug?
Weight loss can reduce heart attack and stroke, but GLP-1 does not.
You could also reduce heart attack and stroke risks by not eating crap and going for a walk every so often.
Edit: In fact, from the study -
BMI went from 35.86 (Continued) to 34.57 (Discontinued) to 35.48 (Interrupted),
Heart failure percentage was 11.57% for continued use, 12.73% for discontinued, 11.92% for interrupted
NICM went 3.10% for continued, 3.36% for discontinued, 3.31% for interrupted
BMI was higher for the continuing users and they still had lower heart failure and NICM rates than the discontinued and interrupted groups. (Also a bunch of other things including stroke and heart attack but I didn't want to write all of these out)
> BMI went from 35.86 (Continued) to 34.57 (Discontinued) to 35.48 (Interrupted),
So, what, was 35.86 the BMI at the start, 34.57 the BMI when they stopped taking the drug, and 35.48 after some interval?
For someone of a fairly average height, say 1.86 metres (that's a little under how tall I am) a BMI of 35.86 would be 124kg which is ridiculously fat and 34.57 would be around 119.6kg so you're looking at a loss of around 4.5kg or so.
That's a good shit and a haircut, in the grand scheme of things. It's fairly normal for someone's weight to fluctuate by a kilo up or down (a range of 2kg over normal) and not utterly off the map for a range of four kilos on a day-to-day basis, especially in obese people. That's why you're not supposed to keep weighing yourself and obsessing over the weight.
There's not a single qualified doctor out there that would promote drugs before preventative measures.
Saying they should try this first at this point in the game is like having your support case escalated 5 times already and them saying "have you tried turning it off and on again"
If it's not working for you, it may be because you haven't sorted the "diet" bit.
Are you eating "low fat" or "low calorie" things? Because those are not food and they will make you fat.
Eat food, just a bit less of it than you do now.
That's not the point.
The point is the vast majority of overweight and obese people try to diet and do not succeed in it.
What you need to understand is there are a lot of people where all they have is being skinny and appearing to be healthy. Without that, there's nothing left for them.
For a long time, there has been a moat that they can use as a justification for why they're better. They can say "well I work hard, I eat right, I put in effort!" The idea that others can achieve that without any of that means... well, they did it all for nothing. In their heads.
The dirty little secret? Many of them don't do any of that, it's just a delusion. Always has been. I'm skinny, you think I go to the gym? Fuck no! I should, but I don't. And I eat whatever I want.
But if a lot of people have to face the reality that their most redeeming quality is nothing of their doing, that would ruin them. Ruin them. They could just, like, get achievements or something but that's hard. Continuing the delusion is easy.
A) it does have cardio protective effects.
It does reduce your appetite, and for most people have very few side effects. If you get nausea you're titrating up too fast. Most people, because it slows gastric emptying, it doesn't make them shit themselves "inside and out". GLP1s are a decent option for treating ibs-d or bile acid issues and is better tolerated than your bile acid sequesterants.
> You could also reduce heart attack and stroke risks by not eating crap and going for a walk every so often.
This victim blaming advice has been given for decades and obesity rates have been climbing for decades. Only glp-1s have reduced that.
Oh wow it's so simple! why has nobody thought of this before??
You still think mass-marketed "low fat" foods are good for you.
You still think you can pop a pill to make your problems go away.
> To find out what happens when people stop taking GLP-1s, Al-Aly’s team of researchers tracked the health of more than 333,000 United States veterans with type 2 diabetes for three years.
"Ozempic face" is almost certainly an artifact of people who spent their life significantly overweight having somewhat looser skin than they would if they had maintained a low weight throughout their life.
Also, not everyone gets the face effect, not by a long shot.
There are two modes the human body operates normally - insulin-driven, active when carbs are in the food, and ketone-driven, active when there is a lot of fat storage and no food intake, or food has no carbs. Insulin-driven operation switches to starvation when food intake has caloric deficit but still enough carbs for insulin to be triggered; ketones on the other hand lead to zero insulin activity and pure fat burning; starvation is only activated when humans reach around 4% body fat while in ketosis.
"Starvation mode" as people talk about it is generally nonsense - the exceedingly low bodyfat you mention for keto is the same place you would see it in a non-keto diet when we talk about actual starvation mode and not whatever you're talking about with a non-ketogenic diet.
The only real difference when it comes to the biology here is that fat mobilization into glucose is significantly slower and less efficient, which keeps your blood sugar levels more constant, which results in fewer post-meal food cravings. Which isn't nothing, but it's not muscle sparing in and of itself.
We have plenty of studies here. Keto diets are not better for sparing lbm.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38934469/
In fact, if you already have significant muscle mass, it might be worse. Glycogen is hugely important when doing resistance training, and keto significantly impacts your glycogen stores. People perform worse with their resistance training on keto than regular diets.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9244428/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8469041/
I am fully aware - I have spent several years of my life following a ketogenic diet. None of that is relevant for "starvation mode" and insulin within that context. I was replying to your specific points - not providing an explanation on how ketosis works from end to end.
Unless you are claiming that your body just doesn't produce glucose/glycogen and insulin when in ketosis? Which would also be incorrect.
> Muscles obviously need glucose for their best performance which is why strength training is not recommended during ketosis;
Strength training should 100% still be done in ketosis/while following a ketogenic diet. It will be suboptimal compared to a regular training, but being in ketosis doesn't magically make resistance training optional if you want to be healthy.
> OTOH ketosis is naturally muscle-sparing.
It is not and the study links in my post show consistent data here. There might be an exception if you are an endurance athlete but that is based on far more limited data than the rest of the research. So... if you're a high level endurance athlete that is also somehow fat, keto might be a better option when it comes to sparing muscle, but for the rest of us, not the case.
As for ketosis sparing muscles that comes from a wide range of effects like low insulin, preserved/increased GH/IGF-1, BHB-inhibited muscle proteolysis and low leucine oxidation.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41035089/
Your super confident attitude is likely going to lead nowhere for any people following your advice and when they confront you about not reaching any fat loss goals, your response will be likely "it's you", instead of understanding the gaps in your own knowledge.
I linked 3 reviews/analysis of a large group of studies.
Your study also doesn't argue what you think it argues.
> A total of 33 studies were analyzed, revealing no significant differences between the KD and other diets in muscle mass
But fundamentally it is not a meta-analysis of people on weight-loss diets, it is a meta-analysis of people on keto. Look at the included studies - nearly half of them were on athletes. They weren't tried to lose weight - they were just eating keto. No one is saying that maintaining on keto is going to cause muscle loss.
Your confidence is the problem here - you're throwing around a bunch of words you don't understand and linking studies you didn't read.
It might result in more loss of buccal fat than otherwise but even that is not definitive. Activating the receptors is not the same as burning fat - there are GLP-1 receptors all over your body in all sorts of organs. If you activate them in your brain you're not burning your brain for energy.
I can still do my routines easily with no issues. My muscles look slightly smaller I think, but maybe that's the fat around them that's been diminished.
I'm just surprised the food industry or whoever is willing to fund FUD content that ostensibly has such an indirect effect on their bottom line.
Although I guess they spend a ton on ads which are also of dubious value, so maybe it's to be expected.
> They found that the risk of heart attack and stroke jumped in those that paused GLP-1 treatments for as little as six months, compared to those who continued taking the medication.
(Emphasis mine) The 'jumped' would more correctly say 'tended to revert to baseline' if you just had a basic LLM summarize this study for you...but then that wouldn't drive clicks and shares on your article.
I’m most curious about someone like me vs someone who lost the same amount on glp1 with respect to these stats
A decade or so ago, when I was still in uni, I managed to get similar results naturally too - ~100kg down to ~65kg in around 18-24 months just by eating healthy and exercising more.
I put back all of that weight and then some during the COVID pandemic (I'm in Melbourne, Australia - we had the worst lockdowns on planet Earth) and this time struggled for years to lose it until trying GLP-1 drugs a few months back.
For me, what made it harder the second time around wasn't so much of a difference in discipline skills (if anything, they've improved) but the fact that there was so much more going on in my life - young family constantly getting sick, small business that started struggling, relationship/social issues, health issues (sleep apnoea) etc. etc.
I'd get on the weight loss train, lose a couple of kilos, then the whole family would get sick with the flu and I'd put it all back on again while recovering. Or maybe I'd be forced to shift my focus to the business so that we could keep the lights on. Or any number of things.
I guess my point is that it's not difficult to lose weight naturally (or any self-improvement, really) in and on itself, but it's completely different ballgame when you're fighting a war on 6 different fronts. Having one of those problems simply just disappear through GLP-1 drugs genuinely feels like a miracle.
In fact, everything is discipline. If you were disciplined enough to always put the basketball in the net from anywhere on the court you’d be Steph Curry. The thing is most people don’t have that kind of discipline. Someone runs up to them and puts their hand up in the air? They shoot wide or balk. Curry shoots true. Discipline.
Just always do the right thing and never do the wrong thing and you’ll be fine at literally everything.
Metabolisms fluctuate, although granted not by much. But what really varies is your response to food. And it's not just genetics. It's food scarcity, early childhood, your environment.
The (maybe) sad reality is that there will be people skinnier than you will ever be who have put in zero effort. Nada. That's life. Just like there's people who can sing better than me off the rip and I took vocal lessons for 10 years. Life's not fair.
But the bright side is, I can drink and not be an alcoholic. Maybe they're just lazy or something. Or, maybe this mentality is one people feed themselves (ha) to feel better about the circumstances of their life.
Wouldn't we all like to believe we're the way we are because we're strong, brave, and hard-working?
Or do you think that somehow genetics don't play one of the largest roles in your ability to be disciplined when it comes to food?
Also look at obesity rates across time within the same country. It’s clearly not an issue of discipline, it’s an issue of what’s being eaten.
> How do you explain correlations in obesity across cultures? Genetic superiority?
Every developed nation in the world except Japan has been seeing obesity and overweight rates rising at significant rates, including countries that have fairly similar cultures, such as Korea. You also see people move to America and stay in relatively isolated pockets of their culture and still gain weight.
So no. It's a matter of access to hyper palatable calorie dense food. The more of it around, the more likely people are to get fat. The fatter you get, the more of a feedback loop you end up in for a wide variety of known and relatively well understood mechanisms. GLP-1s help short circuit that feedback loop.
Now there’s something we agree on. If only we could agree that no one is stuffing cheeseburgers down people’s throat other than themselves. So close.
Once the shame around disgusting fattening food has reached a critical mass the problem will solve it self.
Ironically the excuses you make for them only worsen the issue. If fat people and the food they ate were appropriate shamed they both would cease.
FYI in Japan fat people are ruthlessly bullied. Fat people are rare. Food for thought, pun intended.
Stop tolerated junk.
No one is saying that it is forced. What I am saying is that your sense of moral superiority for the fact you aren't is misplaced.
Let's give you an anecdote: Up until 18 or so, I was a stick. I went from being a stick to getting into powerlifting. I spent the first chunk of my 20s with a pretty great physique. Then as I had more and more responsibilities in life, I had less and less bandwidth to apply to things like cooking, exercise, etc. I slowly lost muscle mass. I slowly gained fat. I had never had food noise when I was skinny - I had never compulsively felt the need to eat, regardless of hunger. I had never had food just constantly occupy my brain. After my slow descent into obesity, something fundamental about my relationship with food had changed. When my stress was lower and I was skinny or later fit, staying that way was easy. It didn't require great mental fortitude, massive discipline, any of that. And when I got fat, it wasn't because I was craving food - it was because I had shit to do and couldn't take the time to cook. Or because I was going outwith friends or my SO and eating out was a huge part of my social life.
When I looked at myself and decided I had to change, I though I just needed to stop doing those things. Stop going out, force myself to take the time to cook and let other things fall on the backburner, etc. Except now I thought about and craved food in a way I never had before. I went from thinking exactly the same as you to realizing 'Oh shit. This wasn't as simple as I thought it was.'
I lost weight plenty of times. Significant weight - not just a few lb, but 30+. Multiple times. And then I'd get busy at work, I'd have family members going through problems and need help, I'd have a rough patch with an SO - as soon as my mental bandwidth got divided, the weight loss stopped and regain started.
Even if an individual is just always able to resist, it's almost entirely based on their genetics. If you want to feel superior because of something you had no control over, I guess that's your perogative.
> Once the shame around disgusting fattening food has reached a critical mass the problem will solve it self.
I think shame is a useful human emotion. We evolved it for a reason. But we also know that it has limits and that once those are reached more shame on top, it becomes counter productive.
> Ironically the excuses you make for them only worsen the issue. If fat people and the food they ate were appropriate shamed they both would cease.
No. Fat people experience plenty of shame, and for a huge amount of them, it only worsens the problem. Once you shame a person too much - once you make it about them and not about the action - they start to feel that they are unable to make a change because they have less worth than those people that can, and often end up losing even more control in their relationship with food or whatever else they are being shamed about.
> FYI in Japan fat people are ruthlessly bullied. Fat people are rare. Food for thought, pun intended.
This is not universally true - it is highly regional, though the most populated portion of Japan is definitely an area where this is largely the case. But even in areas where this is not the case, they still have significantly lower obesity rates. Osaka and Hokkaido are significantly more laid back about it than the Tokyo area, for example, but they still have relatively flat obesity rates.
Basically every fat person in the developed world receives more than the maximum effective dose of shame over their body and it hasn't made them stop being fat.
Probably the biggest difference, though, is that an average "you" will be back at original weight, plus a little, in about a year, while the average GLP1 user will (assuming they keep taking it) be the same weight, or even a bit lighter.
HN felt like one of the last places on the internet I could have good-faith conversations with intelligent people who would form thoughtful, on-topic replies.
And now it feels like the user base here has shifted enough that the voting system no longer consistently elevates the interesting comments, but the comments that reinforce people's worldviews.
Any time a user gives me a flash of annoyance with a nonsensical comment that’s the last time I see them. This isn’t a native feature but Claude will implement it for you in a really short amount of time. If you want a feature set to copy or a list of users to seed, you can just copy mine (in profile).
I started to write a comment about having some (additional) ideas for a Chrome extension, clicked your profile, watched the YouTube video. Fantastic. I think it already does everything I wanted.
Thank you for making and open sourcing this!
It is also a Friday afternoon, and HN's weekend (and to some extent overnight) 'personality' is noticeably different than during typical business hours. I enjoy coming here on weekends but it gets a bit more wacky.
These are life changing drugs, but like plastic we'll see their effects in force within this generation:
> The longer time spent off GLP-1s, the greater the risk of major cardiovascular events—up to 22 percent for those who abstained for two years.
To use a dense analogy: if I stopped brushing my teeth I would not expect to die of gum disease.
They do not see an increase against their pre-GLP1 baseline risk - they see a reversal of the cardioprotective benefits the drug provided while they were on it.