It feels like people want there to be some horrible side effect to these drugs. Idk if it’s some moral objection to weight loss without discipline, or just general mistrust of big pharma.
Edit: also regarding the moral/discipline thing, to many people me included the larger issue is absolutely not this, it’s obviously a good thing if people can improve their health. It’s that we are unhappy that the answer to food designed to be addictive and that is poisoning people is having to research a drug and having the whole population take it to protect themselves. I have a hard time celebrating such a waste of resource and a supposed market "innovation" hiding yet another government failure at regulation. When people were poisoning themselves with lead pipes, the answer was not having the whole population take a drug to manage the effects of lead poisoning. Even if there was absolutely 0 side effect I would be happy for the individuals losing weight, but unhappy with the larger picture.
Ultimately everything is risk calculus. Ozempic, like all drugs, has risks. When you compare ozempic versus not taking ozempic, it’s not like those risks disappear.
Take, for example, vision loss. The risk of vision loss IS NOT “ozempic” versus “no risk”. Because the default of doing nothing is typically diabetes which causes… vision loss. So, it’s entirely possible that the risk of vision loss is much higher from not taking ozempic than taking ozempic.
I had cancer and I had to do multiple types of chemotherapy. It damaged virtually every organ in my body. But it’s not like that risk would disappear if I didn’t do chemo, even though chemo caused the damage. Because the alternative is death. You have to weight these things, and too often people just assume that the default of “do nothing, take no drugs” is safe. It’s not.
Being able to lose weight is, in many minds, associated with self-discipline. A route to the same goal that elides self-discipline is consequently viewed as a cheat, a shortcut.
It's a product if the cultural pervasiveness of the Protestant work ethic and its relation to the health and wellness domains. That fine, in my opinion, if one is Protestant, but why carry the baggage for someone else's religion if you're not one, ya know?
She has a PhD in biotechnology and works in a lab. She is also quite thin (always was).
It's crab mentality disguised as moral position. It's especially obvious when the same people advocate for free access to drugs, alcohol or gambling. You should have freedom you do anything as long as it doesn't improve your life or move you to in social hierarchy.
- Concerned about fatphobia
- Worried Ozempic might create a two tier society
- Believe we should have unrestricted access to gambling and drugs
This sounds like a goomba to me.
Isn't the whole point to read about what others think or experienced to learn about things you personally hasn't?
Of course, all that ignores that people's bodies are different, and some people will be slim no matter what they do, while others are doomed to be heavier regardless what they do on their own (barring extremes like developing eating disorders), but I'm not sure it would matter even should everyone understand that -- a large proportion of people need someone they perceive as lesser whom they can look down upon, and physical appearance is a quick and easy means to categorize others.
While this is true in individual cases, it is obviously not by any means common. Unless the human species has had some extreme mutations in the last 100 years (and only in the West). Yet this is brought up in every thread about obesity, because believing yourself to lack agency is more convenient.
The second is psychological, people whose bodies work normally and they do everything wrong on their own.
The third is structural. Countries in which a huge part of the population is obese while other similar countries don't have that problem, have systemic issues that cause that. In the US it's the fact policies all around favor food that cause obesity and make healthy food be extremely expensive, which is the opposite of what countries where obesity is uncommon do.
Fix this last issue, wait two to three generations, and you'll see obesity fall to normal levels, at which point, yes, bringing up the moral argument for some of the few remaining cases may even become valid.
Physically, that's not possible. If calories consumed is less than calories burned, the body cannot add weight. It doesn't have access to zero-point energy.
There are a plethora of conditions that cause your body and to not use energy. Whether it be physical disability that prevent movement, or diseases that dis-regulate your metabolism.
There are many people who eat sufficient food and are perpetually lethargic. Their body has the energy, and chooses not to use it.
When I did chemo, I actually put on weight, despite eating almost nothing. I had pretty bad nausea despite my 4 anti-emetics, so food was difficult to eat. Even drinking water was hard.
So how could I have possibly put on weight? Well I was sleeping 16+ hours a day, not moving at all, and my hormones plummeted. I lost most of the muscle on my body. I obviously don’t know what my basal metabolic rate was, but it must have been incredibly low. Even my brain, which uses a lot of calories, didn’t work right. I couldn’t think right.
Rather, my point was simple: calories-in and calories-out is correct, but the mistake evangelists of this ideology make is assuming calories-out is fixed or even a simple equation. It's not, and this is what pushes your narrative from "science" to "ideology".
Indeed, you said this instead:
>There are a plethora of conditions that cause your body and to not use energy
Now, grammatically it makes no sense, but I thought "and" was just a typo and then sentence read as: "There are a plethora of conditions that cause your body to not use energy" to witch I responded.
But now? You pay a very heavy price because you can very cheaply get your entire daily supply of calories in a single meal.
And don't forget, a lot of these people are set up for failure by their parents. The number of overweight children I see is staggering. These kids are almost certain to spend their lives being overweight or obese because of what their parents feed them. A drug that helps someone overcome that is a very good thing.
That's part of it. A very motivated 5' 9" person can learn to dunk a basketball, but it's a lot easier for someone who is 6' 4".
Similarly, there are probably built-in biological settings for how strongly someone feels the desire to eat.
the thing is though, at least as far as our society is concerned: thats a fact not a missrepresentation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluttony
and yes, using tools like GLP-1 is a moral failing. a proper christian would just be more disciplined. and be a straight up better human from that too.
but hey, i'm an atheist, and struggled with my weight all my life to varying degrees. The way fat people generally undersell the issue that theyre fat and keep wanting to be victiums / not responsible for their own actions is extremely dystopian however. and its flabbergasting our societies have degraded so far to no longer even be able to tell that.
Yes, there absolutely is a sense of "it was hard for me, but I did it anyway, you should do the hard thing too". But that's not out of nowhere. Willpower is a muscle. If someone never exercises it, it's going to atrophy. It doesn't need to be shameful, but people who promote these things need to seriously consider the reality that most people's hunger is caused by something real, and just not being hungry does not solve any of those underlying problems.
My mother is a little bit overweight, which is a problem of calories OUT being too low. She doesn't exercise enough. She doesn't have energy to exercise. That's a problem of calories IN being too low. She's taking a GLP-1 now to lose weight. It very exactly does not solve either of those issues. She has less energy. Most of the weight being lost is muscle mass. I think it's despicable that these things were rushed through the medical system. I don't think it's the layman's fault for being manipulated into thinking it's medicine.
I lost now 42 kg from my heaviest (5 kg left to reach my ideal weight of 73 kg), the first 20 i absolutely needed eat less and to fight the hunger pangs (which are more painfull than ankle sprain due to my fucking grehlin receptor being whack), some medical help was needed anyway (i fasted for 5 days under medical supervision to reset my leptin levels, and stayed in ketosis for 3 month prior to that to reset my insulin resistance). 20 kg loss over 18 months. I thought exercise would be enough for the last 20, but i took 5 year to loose 5, and only a change in diet finally helped me go under 80.
NGL, all that is very difficult if you have issues at home or in your life. My family might have individual flaws but as a unit we've been doing great since like 2006, and my income in 2019 when i started my weight loss was comfortable enough for me to have a great apartment, private medial help and a good overall social life.
If people need GLP-1 to get back in track, they should absolutely go for it. I do think we should help them, once they are close to their optimal weight, to sever from GLP1 though, i've heard about the "rebound", imho it is way easier on the mind to eat as much as you use to than forcefully reduce your portions (your leptin/grehlin level were unfucked by GLP1, so your old eating habits are now only psychological, not hormonal)
I also don't think you understand how living with kcal deficiency works on the long run. Have a look at the Minnesota starvation experiment. When in deficit for long the mind constantly goes to "what/when are we going to eat?" and it only gets worse from there. It becomes an obsession. It takes over everything. My understanding is that glp-1 reduces that.
It also helps for people who have too much extra weight, or incapable (waiting for hip replacement, or the elderly) of exercising.
I have been on diet and managed to go back to the target weight (lost around ~16% of bodyweight) but the food noise was real and constant. It is not a one off "I am not going to eat anymore" that was a decision to be made every minute until next meal came around. I do cycle 10-12 hour a week and the occasional footbal game but finding the deficit that is not causing the food noise is different for everyone.
GLP-1 is produced by the body to regulate and balance food consumption. People whose bodies produce less than the correct amount eat more because they feel a lot more hunger than people whose bodies are normal. Taking in GLP-1 drugs, if following medical advice, brings their level back to what it should have been all along, in which case most wouldn't have become obese at all.
I'm such a case. Clinical exames never showed up any clear problem associated with weight gain, so for my entire life my obesity was linked by everyone, doctors included, to lack of willpower.
I only discovered what my issue was when I took a genetic test and discovered that my DNA came with these lovely traits:
* I feel more intense hunger than the average people, so I need to eat more than they do to feel satiated. If I eat the same amount a normal person does, I leave the table literally still hungry.
* My body accumulates more fat than the average person, so even if I eat the same amount they do and keep constantly hungry, I accumulate some fat.
* Caloric-reduction diets don't work for me. So the years and years I tried and tried them had little effect, and were mostly wasted effort.
* Fat-reduction diets also don't work for me. Good thing I didn't lose time with those since everyone recommended me the useless caloric-reduction ones.
* The only diet that has some effect for me is the Mediterranean one, which I didn't know about and no one had ever recommended.
* Physical exercise has little effect for me, as I gain less muscle mass from it than the average person. So the years of walking and the many attempts at going to the gym were also mostly wasted effort.
* And physical exercise causes more pain for me than it does for the average person, so all the time I was doing those, I was suffering more than most people while getting worse results then they do from it.
If your genetics is normal on all those fronts, then sure, a bit of willpower fixes that. With that combo though, and fully not knowing you have any of that? Not a chance.
You don't know this.
> These things are useful for a few months
You don't know this.
> For anyone else (most people), it's much healthier to learn how to do difficult things.
You don't know this.
> Willpower is a muscle.
I know you mean this in a figurative sense, but what exactly is "willpower"? There has to be a physical (and physiological) mechanism for "willpower", no?
Do you believe that can be aberrant physiological conditions?
I do. I also believe over-eating is a manifestation of some type of "aberrant" physiology.