For many people, the "underlying issue" is fundamentally just being too hungry for how they live. GLP-1s absolutely treat that.
operative phrase in that sentence "how they live". They need to live more active lives. And that's better than a weight loss drug because inactivity causes systemic disease beyond weight gain.
GLP-1 drugs do to hunger what pain meds do to pain, but if you're overweight and your back is aching because you're sedentary the solution isn't a cocktail of drugs, it's to get off your ass, because that lifestyle is going to cause you biomechanical, metabolic and even cognitive issues down the road.
There's disease you can't do anything about and need to treat with medicine, but if you're experiencing symptoms because your lifestyle is abusing your body change your life. There'll come a moment where there's no wonder pill to fix your issues and in that moment you're better of if you know how to actually get control of yourself. Which most import of all is going to give you the confidence that you can change. You don't want to be 50 years old and your only cope in life is praying that a pharma company mutes whatever symptoms plague you.
When I become more active, I also become more hungry due to the extra energy consumption. The net effect is little weight loss and more often than not weight gain. While being physically active is beneficial to health in many ways, it does little for losing or maintaining weight, at least for me.
Active life = higher TDEE which means you can eat more food while still maintaining same deficit.
For example, a lifting session may burn 200-300kcal and then they'd think they've burned a lot, so they will end up eating 500kcal back.
so as a result there is no deficit there.
Even people who track their calories perfectly often eat when hungry because it is the most basic of human instincts and our brains and bodies are wired to respond accordingly.
>Even people who track their calories perfectly often eat when hungry because it is the most basic of human instincts and our brains and bodies are wired to respond accordingly.
Many people can track calories, hardly any of them are tracking calorie burn and no the ones from your watches or displayed on cardio devices aren't correct.
Many times the eating more issue you are seeing is because average guy may estimate that 1 lifting session burns 800-1000kcal. How do i know? i've asked random people in gym this question.
It is hard to accurately calculate the calories burned in a lifting session but the ability to count calories has little to do with the causes of obesity. Even if a person could count them perfectly that doesn’t mean they are capable of manipulating the numbers to meet their goals.
If you live in a place where waking to get your daily life needs met is possible, good for you!
Personally, I look at GLP-1 agonists akin to wearing glasses. Some people are just born without the ability to regulate their appetite in accordance with our society, but there is a tool / prosthetic to change that. That said, it's not one or the other, it's always great to be more active.
Also that's how my mum got it in the swiss test run. It was never supposed to be long term, just to help change eating habits.
Why would this sentence make any sense?
I stand by my words that just using Ozembic without changing your habits on the way can't be the right way. And as far as I know studies suggest that that is actually the case. Like with any diet really
Yeah, humans should have more free time and do enough work or exercise each day to keep their body in shape.
Why would you eat 2700+800 = 3500kcal? when you can do with 2700kcal?
There are a million reasons like this. You need quite consistent motivation in order to not overeat; overeating is the default for most overweight and obese people.
This is similar to how most people drink alcohol occasionally, maybe sometimes get drunk at a party and even enjoy it, would even be unhappy to have to significantly reduce their alcohol consumption (e.g. when taking some medication) - and yet have nothing similar to alcoholism, might go weeks without drinking without even noticing, and would never even consider having a drink before work.
I've helped many people lose weight, become jacked, and go from underweight to a healthy weight. I regularly hear from overweight and obese people who come to me, “I’m genetically predisposed to being fat.” Yet after a few months, we often make significant progress.
Many of them have also tried “deficit dieting,” and it didn’t work for them. But when I looked more deeply into their methods, I found they had calculated their maintenance calories incorrectly.
They were running huge, unsustainable deficits. They weren’t doing any Zone 2 cardio, which is an easy way to boost maintenance calories, and most of them were largely sedentary.
Many times, their diet consisted mostly of packaged, processed foods, and they weren’t eating enough protein or healthy fats or vegetables.
Simply fixing these issues led to major transformations. I’ve yet to come across someone who is truly resistant to these changes.
I do not doubt existence of people who simply cannot sustain even a small deficit or people who have no control over their diet but i've among 1000s of people i worked on i never found even 1 such person.
I keep an open mind maybe i'll eventually find such person, so far i've not.
Note that I'm not speaking as someone who has just accepted being overweight/obese. I was hovering around 105kg in my early 20s, then I gathered the motivation to go down to ~75kg over the course of a year, then maintained myself around 80-85kg for the next 5 years, then in a bad period went back to overeating and was hovering around 100kg again for a few years, and now I'm in the process of going back down (currently around 86-88kg after 6 months of actually working on losing weight - so about two thirds of the way to where I'd like to be, given I've also been building some muscle mass).
So I'm not someone who just throws up their hands and says "I'll always be fat", or maybe pushes themselves for a fad diet one month and is proud of losing 5kg that come back right away. My experience though is that appetite control and managing food cravings are the most important parts of managing my own weight, and that the nutrient content of food has virtually nothing to do with it. I can eat a whole steak with 400g of steamed peas and some asparagus, with some butter and cheese, and then feel hungry and unsatisfied 4-6h later when the stomach isn't as full. And if I'm not in a good headspace, I may well then grab a McDonald's menu to get rid of the feeling of hunger and get some satisfaction that the steak and vegetables didn't actually address on that day - and the exact opposite can happen on other days.
This is why for me things like One Meal A Day (OMAD) has been mucn more useful than actual careful nutrient tracking. Being able to tell myself "it's OK that I'm feeling hungry right now, I'll eat that X tomorrow and be satisfied" has been the single biggest helper. I've not yet been tempted to try out GLP-1s (afraid of the side effects, the food problem isn't that bad), but I imagine they could be a huge help if they removed the need for such willpower-based mechanisms.
From my experience stuff like Intermittent fasting, OMAD is not really needed.
Something especially useful to many people is being able to visualize, their maintenance calories vs calorie intake, see this: https://macrocodex.app/assets/hero-tdee-line.png
When dieting properly, you should focus on long term weight trends rather than daily fluctuations.
Yeah I know bodybuilders manage to get jacked and many of them are doing nothing but maintain their body and are taking anabolic steroids and thyroid hormone and stimulants and who knows what.
People in pro sports take PEDs.
>can be very physically active and muscular but still pretty fat.
you can retain higher muscle mass at higher bodyfat% like Sumo Wrestler.
being lean limits amount of lean mass you can carry.
>Yeah I know bodybuilders manage to get jacked and many of them are doing nothing
bodybuilders who take PEDs do not easily gain fat because steroids change nutrition partitioning.
also, some bodybuilders take DNP, clen, t3 etc... but many bodybuilders also do hours of zone2 cardio.
Not understanding calorie balance, not understanding calorie density of the food they eat.
How many people know 1kg fat = 7700kcal that if they could create deficit of 7700kcal they could potentially lose 1kg bodyfat? Ofc, i know the relationship isn't that simple but for most people this roughly holds true.
If you are eating granolas in breakfast, it may come across as a shock how many calories they pack, go ahead look it up many people believe that's a low calorie health breakfast option.
Many people don't know
1g of carb or protein = 4kcal
1g of fats = 9kcal.
If what you actually mean to say is "you're wrong, there's no way you could eat like that", the response is "give me nothing but heads of lettuce with salt and pepper, and there are days when I could still continue eating them the entire day whenever my stomach isn't literally full".
People with that low of maintenance calories are usually sedentary and undermuscled.
I think I'm not the ignorant one.
>I've been on a diet since I was 12 years old, and am now approaching 50. I've lost and regained the same 60lbs about 4 times now
You can lose weight by crash dieting, which does not prove much. The first thing that comes to mind for people is simply: "I'll just eat very little and lose weight." It even works, but people quickly get results; it makes them miserable, and they gain it back.
People get stuck between "eating too little" and "binge eating".
>I have logged every bite that goes into my mouth, and lived with a constant hunger for as long as I could take it
This proves you are sincere in calorie tracking, but it doesn't tell us much about what kind of deficit you were in. What were your maintenance calories, and how did you calculate them?
What kind of deficit did you run over what time period?
In my experience, while people know all these things, execution still requires knowing all the "gotchas".
Going from 2700kcal calories to 1000kcal a day diet will make anyone hungry and miserable.
In my experience, people that think they know all the "gotchas" don't really know as much as they think they do.
Knowing fat is calorie dense is great. Without context one would attempt to try to cut it out of your diet almost entirely. Sort of like what literally happened with the food industry in the 80's/90's and 00's.
But then they would wonder why they are so hungry and likely consuming more sugars. Which is even worse for most folks due to glycemic index and how that interacts with hunger.
A little bit of knowledge can be actively harmful. Common sense on this topic actually does far better than most who think they know better. Almost everyone knows what "healthy food" looks like without needing to know anything about much else. Education is not the issue.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tirzepatidecompound/comments/1omfgx...
which is often shared on fitness subreddits, nowhere it asks people to completely stop eating fats.
furthermore i run dieting app with thousands of users so i am not the one who is going to promote zero sugar or fat diet.
My app: https://macrocodex.app/
it's an ad free, subscription free app, i don't make money from this.
I highly doubt this. A lot of people think stuff like juice smoothies, granolas or dates are healthy. Or more generally organic or grassfed or "no added sugar" or "high-protein" high-sugar or "unprocessed" stuff.
People are actively misinformed about what's healthy by a constant bombardment of ads, fads and "common sense".
People tend to not want advice when they're not seeking it, and when someone wants to dissect every detail of what they've done that hasn't worked, when they mentioned it merely as an anecdote, it tends to be perceived as condescending.
About advise part, I am not looking to offer him any advise I am simply defending the method and ideas, so that other people can find success with it similar to what I've done for me and for many others.
How much weight did you lose, and how long have you kept it off?
Giving up the very difficult route of changing lifestyle for the easier alternative of taking drugs for weight loss comes with both biological and social consequences.
The people talking about that shouldn't be bullied to feel ashamed of not taking or recommending taking drugs.
The unbelievably low success rate of diet and exercise programs for long-term weight reduction is widely documented and quite consistent with the earlier poster's experience.
where is your data from? what protocol did they follow?
Curious: how big of a calorie deficit did you run, and what was your macro (protein/fat/carbs) balance.
My personal experience is going low on carbs (especially added sugars) and high on fiber and protein made running a deficit suck much less in terms of feeling satisfied.
Also, a 10% deficit was okay (I was hungry but could mostly ignore it). A 25% deficit was very annoying and about as much as I'd care to do.
For some people, diet and lifestyle changes help control blood pressure. Other people need to take meds for the rest of their lives, anyway. We don't shame them for it.
But this intelectual knowledge doesn't really help if your body is telling you it's hungry all the time and it's hard not to eat something. Better choices can help, because different calories deliver different satiety; but some people don't get much satiety no matter what they eat.
Calories in vs calories out is true, but it's very hard to measure calories out, so it's sometimes helpful and sometimes completely unhelpful.
These drugs seem to help a lot of people in different ways, but if the underlying issue is that they don't get the satiety signals they need to eat healthy amounts without it, of course it's not surprising that when they stop medicating, they stop getting the satiety signals.
There's a lot of variance among humans, but everybody seems to want a one size fits all approach to eating. That doesn't work; you have to find all the things that work for some people, and then try the most promising options until you find something that works for you. Many people crave novelty, and anyway people change over time, so something that works for someone today might not work for them next year, etc.
Maybe try to figure out why you’re feeling hungry. Is it because you’re running a 1000 kcal deficit?
Can your body really tell whether you ate 200–300 kcal less today than you did yesterday?
Most of us can easily notice a 1000 kcal difference, but very few can reliably detect a day-to-day difference of just 200–300 kcal.
What are your maintenance calories? Are they around 1800 kcal, where even a 300 kcal deficit puts you on a 1500 kcal diet? That’s very little food for many people.
In that case, it may be better to focus on increasing your maintenance calories by becoming more active in daily life.
Deficit = TDEE - Intake
either drop intake or boost tdee or do both.
If you managed to boost your tdee to 2500kcal, now a deficit of 300kcal means you eat 2200kcal day to day and 2200kcal isn't very little food making diet easy to follow.
>There's a lot of variance among humans, but everybody seems to want a one size fits all approach to eating.
I think there isn't as much variance as people like to believe, how many people you see walking around you with 3 eyes? and 4 hands?
I know several people who are feeling hungry because they're not dead, regardless of how much calorie surplus or deficit they have.
We can do the same activities and eat the same meals and I'll be satied and they will be hungry. Or I can confuse the hell out of them when we do some big activity and I say "i'm not hungry, we worked too hard"... or when we miss a meal by several hours and I tell them "I'm not hungry anymore, it's been too long... but I should probably eat something"
> I think there isn't as much variance as people like to believe,
Oh sure, I don't think everyone is really a unique snowflake, there are patterns. You can find lots of people in these threads who have a broken hunger sensor. You can find lots of people in these threads that can manage this intellectually. I don't see a lot of people in these threads like me who keep a healthy(ish) weight because IBS punishes them for bad food choices, but I'm sure they're out there. Plenty of people out there where celiac drives their relationship between calories in and calories out.
Diet research would be a lot more interesting if there were ways to classify people by their 'metabolism type' and then see what can work for which type. Maybe there would be more reproducability that way, too.
Are you saying 1000kcal vs 200kcal deficit makes no difference?
>Diet research would be a lot more interesting if there were ways to classify people by their 'metabolism type' and then see what can work for which type. Maybe there would be more reproducability that way, too.
You can easily track your maintenance calories, by tracking your weight vs intake overtime.
For a lot of people, the reason they feel hungry is because the way their brain works is that they feel better when they feel full and their life sucks for some reason, so they want to feel better. Hence overeating. It’s entirely a psychological issue for a person like this. Counting calories is not going to help them. In fact, them even being able to maintain a calorie counting regime is downstream of resolving their anxiety/stress/depression. In other words, diet and exercise are not the beginning in the causal chain required for them to lose weight.
And you’re getting absolutely no traction in this thread because you’re completely oblivious to this. Which is common for someone for whom diet and exercise is easy to control.
i am not trying to gain traction, i already know what i am saying applies to vast majority of people and i've yet to come across people who feel 200-300kcal deficit is impossible to apply for them because of their insane appetite.
In most cases where people say this, they are sedentary so their TDEE is very low, applying deficit makes them end up in very low calorie zone where they feel miserable.
Why all these people who are failing can't actually define their fitness journey by putting some numbers into perspective?
because they calculated nothing, they just winged it. I am not denying that there aren't people who cannot control eatingg, there are but they are rare.
I regularly hear from overweight and obese people who come to me, “I’m genetically predisposed to being fat.” Yet after a few months, we often make significant progress.
Many of them have also tried “deficit dieting,” and it didn’t work for them. But when I looked more deeply into their methods, I found they had calculated their maintenance calories incorrectly.
They were running huge, unsustainable deficits. They weren’t doing any Zone 2 cardio, which is an easy way to boost maintenance calories, and most of them were largely sedentary.
Many times, their diet consisted mostly of packaged, processed foods, and they weren’t eating enough protein or healthy fats or vegetables.
Simply fixing these issues led to major transformations. I’ve yet to come across someone who is truly resistant to these changes.
I do not doubt existence of people who simply cannot sustain even a small deficit or people who have no control over their diet but i've among 1000s of people i worked on i never found even 1 such person.
I keep an open mind maybe i'll eventually find such person, so far i've not.
For me I always feel hungry. Always ready to eat more. Always.
It doesn't seem to matter what I eat or how much, I have no "off switch" apart from maybe being asleep. I sit at big family meals like Christmas or thanks giving and people around me are all "man I am going to pop if I have another bite" and yet I am still reaching for more while simultaneously thinking about what is for dessert. Once I start eating for the day, that's it game over I am going to be thinking about when I can eat next the entire waking time. I have done calorie counting for years (with deficits of usually around 400-800, tracking macros etc making sure I get enough protein) and am fairly active (running 20-25km a week, strength sessions 1-2 times a week) but even when I am not counting calories or especially active that doesn't stop me wanting to eat the whole damn time.
Dieting or not, exercising or not, it makes no difference I am always ready and willing to eat more. I am in a constant mental state of food binge.
I usually stop eating when the food physically runs out on my plate, so portion control when making meals etc needs to be airtight. I work at a BigCo where there is unlimited free food at every turn, so just going to get a coffee is a nightmare as you can imagine as I am surrounded by things to eat. Like e.g. on a bad day I might end up having 6 or 7 bananas a day just to avoid picking up a chocolate bar or donut instead. It's nuts (..and yes there are nuts too and also too easy to just grab a handful...)
I think of it like an alcoholic. But an alcoholic can "go sober" and just cut it out and not get that first taste that leads to the spiralling binge. I've got to eat to stay alive though so every day I "fall off the wagon"
I am seriously considering the pill form now that is a thing. The refrigerated injections just seemed like they were incompatible with a normal busy life with travel etc
It's totally overwhelming and often hard to concentrate with this constant overriding urge to think about eating all the time. It's like gravity, inescapably pulling me in.
People say "Oh I forgot to have lunch!" and it simply does not compute for me. How can someone forget?! Having lunch is my overriding constant nagging thought since having that last mouthful of breakfast. It only stops when I get to start thinking about eating dinner as soon as I have stopped eating lunch. Repeat. Every moment of every day. Eat. Eat. Eat.
It's a like a stuck record or whatever. Over and over. I want to turn it off.
I'd get it if I was solely existing on a diet of junk food that is designed to do this, but I am not. Since I've been tracking every last gramme of food I've been eating on and off for well over a decade I can tell you that it is very much "healthy" and low in processed and/or junk foods. I just never feel full and want to eat more.
Everyone knows what they need do to loose weight.
The problem is we have an environment that in every way promotes over eating and eating hyperpalatable food is pleasurable in the moment.