The Biochemical Beauty of Retatrutide: How GLP-1s Work

I saw this was a feature, not a bug.

When you are on a GLP medication, commonly your digestion slows and will make you really prone to constipation and acid reflux. I've learned to eat just 3-6 ozs when I do steak, and generally opt for the veggies instead of the potatoes now. Feel much better in the morning.

People, on average, eat until they're no longer hungry. Problem is, there's only a loose relationship between your caloric needs and your hunger response. That's how you end up with underweight people who are trying to put on muscle saying they can't possibly eat any more and still can't put on weight, while having overweight people who eat twice as much as that guy and have to actively choose not eat more. Both people can make a conscious choice to disobey their signals, just like how you can choose to hold your hand to a hot stove. But it takes a lot of energy to keep up that willpower. Effective weightloss drugs solve that problem, by treating the actual problem: the hunger.

This would be true if not knowing what an appropriate portion size is was the one thing keeping most people from losing weight. If that was the case, traditional dieting would have a far better track record with long term weight loss.

Australia's health organization did a meta study on people who had bariatric surgery. They found that every single one regained 70% of their original weight after five years, even though they were physically incapable of eating the way they did before.

This happened to my grandmother, she had a bypass in the 2000s, lost over a hundred pounds, and then regained it again and was back to her original weight when she passed in 2022. The woman couldn't eat more than 4 ounces per meal without throwing up.

I lost 40 pounds in 2017 from gastritis. I kept it off for three years, and then regained 50 pounds despite starting ozempic.

The issue with these things isn't that they don't work. It's that people attempt them and do not go all the way. They go on a little diet in some ways but fail to account for all their daily calories from stuff like beverages or snacks, maybe they aren't weighing their food either and just assuming a lot with what they are eating. They try and work out but it looks like walking on a treadmill or moving some 5lb weights around, far from running until lactic acid stops you or lifting to failure.

I think there is a lot of misjudgement of how intense a workout really is or how a diet should look like. And that feeds into this idea that it will not work.

But, you can't argue against thermodynamics. We don't make energy from nowhere. We are bound by the same laws of physics as anything else. If you can't lose weight with how you are eating, then the answer is obvious why that is the case: you are still eating too much given your activity level.