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New research shows weight loss is possible without GLP-1 (www.news-medical.net)
submitted 4 months ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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[–] 27 points 4 months ago (5 children)

people have been losing weight by a variety of methods

Surprisingly, they have not.

Before GLP1s, weightloss was a myth. 99. something % of people (edit 99.2% of women) who meet the medical definition of obese will always be obese despite a lifetime of effort.

We know for certain from decades of research that weightloss from willpower alone, even with diet plans or excersize plans is functionally impossible. The best they do is yoyo effects - no diet has ever produced perminant weight loss on a real scale.

Very rarely a statistically insignificant sample size enjoy permenant weight loss and these individuals are held up to show it's possible and you can do it too! But that's just not true, and we know it's not true because decades of stats show again and again that perminant weight loss just does not happen.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Horseshit. I literally know multiple people who have lost weight and kept it off.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    If you know several people who met the medical definition of obese and have perminantly left that category then you know several outliers, which is entirely possible.

    But that is just not representative. Over 99% of obese people do not lose weight. Those few outliers are heavily visible and celebrated so it feels like there must be more.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Fun fact: glp1 weight loss isn’t permanent either.

    You have to keep taking it.

    So now all you’ve done is added some pills.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    And?

    Beats the shit out of having to weigh and track every calorie for the rest of your life.

    People act like willpower is an infinite resource.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    Sounds like a miracle, doesn’t it?

    Miracles don’t exist.

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  • [–] 0 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    What is so different about this than a doctor telling you that this statin will help to lower cholesterol, but if you stop taking it, the cholesterol will come back?

    Or a doctor saying that this PDE5 will make your dick hard, but if you stop taking it, you'll go back to having a limp dick?

    I kinda get what you're saying...but what doctor in their right mind would use that as a reasoning against statins and boner pills?

    I think a couple of important things need to be realized...one being that there are a ton of factors that play into obesity.

    If you want to cure obesity, it needs to be done at a societal level. You have to be Socratic about it. Nobody ever gets past the first easy "but why" to "what causes obesity."

    Doctors realize this about statins, and they prescribe diet and lifestyle in tandem with statins. Why they can't apply the same methods to obesity baffles me.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    Whataboutisms are wild.

    Then original comment said that traditional weight loss isn’t a permanent cure.

    Neither are gpl-1s.

    And bringing other medications into it is irrelevant.

    If you want to cure obesity, it needs to be done at a societal level. You have to be Socratic about it. Nobody ever gets past the first easy "but why" to "what causes obesity."

    And of those who do, no one ever gets past the easy pill, that makes corporations rich.

    The reason the US in particular doesn’t have the political will to press for the societal change we know will solve things is because it hurts profits of corporations like nestle or General Mills (and many of these mega corps are also profiting off the medical issues the fist creates.)

    If GPL1 is the only way it works for you, that’s between you and your doctor, but long term, it’s not a solution. It’s just another subscription making life more expensive than it needs to be

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    I don't disagree.

    But.

    People like you make it sound like sustained weight loss is easy.

    It is not. And acting like it is exacerbates the problem.

    It is a lifetime of awareness and shutting out signals. It's maintaining willpower for as long as you can eat solid food. And possibly longer.

    Getting weight loss advice from somebody who has never been fat is like taking tax advice from a toddler. Or if MLK were white. You don't know. You do not understand. That's fine.

    If you're one of the lucky < 1% who manage to lose weight permanently, great, good for you. You are an exception, not the norm. But you don't know that yet. Give it a few years. A seemingly small lifestyle change can start setting you back on old habits.

    And that's the next problem, because when it does, it's a personal failure. And that puts fuel on the fire.

    Very, very few people successfully break out of that cycle forever. And they never will without everyone else understanding that obesity is a symptom of a larger issue.

    Science is finally starting to look at that, and GLP-1s are a great place to look...because your body also creates GLP-1s to control appetite and regulate digestion. However, the synthetic form tends to stick around longer.

    Perhaps, then, one cause of the overeating that leads to obesity is either a deficiency, or a malabsorption of the natural GLP-1s.

    In which case, trying to fight that without medication sounds like a losing battle, without first understanding what is causing that. And in which case, saying that people should avoid GLP-1s sounds an awful lot like telling diabetics that they need to stop taking insulin.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Who exactly is “people like me”?

    Stop making assumptions. Particularly when my comments directly contradict them.

    You’re reading things in my comments that aren’t there.

    And by the way, GPL-1s aren’t some sudden fix. Yes it helps with the appetite and hunger.

    But that comes with other baggage, like needing to monitor for side effects, finding the proper dosage (and keeping on it.)

    It’s certainly not a viable solution at the scale that’s currently necessary. Even so, I’m not seeing anyone here saying traditional weight loss isn’t hard- and I’m certainly not.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    Yep!

    The altered hormone balance is what allows weight loss and if that reverts than so does weight loss.

    I know this "you have to keep taking them" argument is big in anti-glp1 circles, but I don't think it's very good - the same is true of vitamin supplements. You have to keep taking them or the deficiency comes back. They still help.

    I don't care for glp1s myself but i've heard how happy they make some, so i don't judge others' choices.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    “I know this ‘if you go off the diet plan you gain weight’ argument is big in anti diet plans, but…’”

    I get that gol1s help people regulate their caloric intake. Don’t get me wrong.

    But acting like they’re some miracle when they’re not is counter productive, particularly given that the core issue is ultimately behavioral in the first place.

    People who’ve gotten to obesity have done so are more likely to revert to the same habits that led to it in the first place. Unless there’s something fairly radical about their lifestyle.

    For me that change was finding a few gymbro friends who both cared enough to keep me going and genuinely celebrated my losses (and gains, weightlifting was part of the exercise thing.)

    I’m not a gymbro, and I never will be, but being around them is sort of like a smoker finding new friends who don’t smoke. It makes it easier.

    The other more important change was therapy. Lifelong habits don’t change easily, and therapy makes that much easier.

    The point being here that GPL1 is not the only way to get there; and in terms of society’s health, almost certainly not the best solution. (That solution would require prevention, and corporations don’t like that.)

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    GPL1 is not the only way to get there

    Except that for the overwhelming majority, functionally everyone, they are.

    I'm not a propent of the drug. I'm slightly wary, I don't want it and i don't bring it up to others. But I don't judge people who do.

    It sounds like you're part of the incredibly small minority who have been able to lose weight. Congratulations! It sounds like you worked long and hard to find a regimen that works for you.

    Literally 99% of obese people will never find what you found. For them, these drugs are the ONLY realistic option to perminantly lose weight. Nothing else has been shown to work in more than 1% of cases.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    How is that different from like antidepressants or thyroid medication, etc? You'll have symptoms again if you stop the pills.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago*

    The difference is the social understanding.

    Nobody gets thyroid-shamed. People understand hyper-/hypo-thyroidism as an objective symptom of a physiological problem.

    Obesity is not viewed the same, though it really should be.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    Did I say anything about other medication?

    No?

    Why bring it up?

    “These other things aren’t a permanent cure either!” Is a lazy response.

    The original comment was acting like gold-1s are a cure where traditional weight loss isn’t. The reality is if you go off them, the same thing happens as going off your diet.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    They're a cure for having an uncontrollable appetite, which makes dieting difficult to impossible.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    So if you stop taking them, you retain your controlled appetite?

    Spoiler: nope.

    They’re not a cure for anything.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    That's so pedantic, but yes, they're a treatment for an uncontrollable appetite. Do you mean to suggest that you're against medical treatments which are not cures?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    It’s not pedantic when the original commenter I was responding to was saying that traditional weight loss wasn’t a permanent cure, for the same reason that gol1s aren’t a cure… but then framing them as a cure.

    They’re not permanent and they do have risks associated with them (pancreatitis and GI tract issues iirc,)

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    Do you read studies produced by pharma to arrive at those facts? I call bullshit.

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (3 children)

    Do you know any chronically obese people?

    Like, seriously. I'm not joking. What your parent described is something that is entirely true to a lot of people.

    Losing weight is "easy", in the sense that how to do it is pretty obvious and well known.

    The hard part is keeping it off.

    Think of alcoholism. It's easy to just stop being an alcoholic right? I mean, conceptually...just stop drinking alcohol. Simple.

    Now stop drinking alcohol for the rest of your life. You can never touch it again.

    Not so easy.

    Now imagine you need a small amount of alcohol every day or else you will die, but if you ever start to think "oh well I worked hard today I can have a second beer", then before you know it you're a full blown alcoholic again.

    That's chronic obesity.

    My weight has dropped and rebounded countless times over my life. I know what to do, I know how to do it, I've done it countless times. I'm fucking tired. The idea of having to weigh my food and track my calories for the rest of my life honestly makes me anxious, because I know that as soon as I stop, I'm going to lose all that I've worked for. Because it's happened so many times before.

    GLP-1s are different. It's honestly like a light switch. Like "oh, this is how I'm supposed to feel". There is no more thinking about food. Even when starting to feel hungry, it's not "I have to eat right now", it's "I'll get to it when I get to it". It's not all-consuming.

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  • [+] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)
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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    How do you feel about "abstinence only" sex education? You know, people can just choose not to have sex right? And how well does that work?

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    You do not understand what happens to hunger regulation.

    The human body fundamentally don't have a concept of too much fat. It only really has a concept of "close to the highest fat mass we've had" or "below highest". It keeps recalibrating for your new highest and will make you want to eat more until you get back there. That's it's mechanism to drive you to avoid starvation, because it doesn't know what "overweight" is.

    Any long term treatment needs to focus on that regulation mechanism and recalibrate it down. We don't know how to do that yet, all we can do is silence the hunger or change absorption.

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  • [+] -1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (3 children)
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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago

    You're being purposely obtuse. If you believe addiction is a disease, then overeating is also a disease. We have drugs and research guided methods to help deal with both. If its cruel to force addicts to quit cold turkey, then its also true of forcing clinically overweight patients to entirely change their lifestyle. (All the while being vocally judged and mocked)

    Most of these people have tried losing weight through diet and exercise and want to get better, but as the other commenter has mentioned, their mind and body works against them. That's also ignoring the societal conditions pushing us all to calorically dense, quick-n-easy meals and a working schedule that doesn't allow us much free time to exercise.

    As a disclosure, I am 6'0" and 200lbs. Down 30lbs from 3-4 years ago using strictly diet and exercise. BUT I'm also an athletic trainer and my office is in a gym I can use for free.

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  • [–] 6 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    You have absolutely no idea how difficult it is to eat correctly when your body screams at you that it's wrong. Starvation is used as a torture method, and deliberate unassisted weight loss triggers the exact same regulatory reaction in the body even if you're not actually starving, because the body only sees "loss of fat levels".

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  • [+] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 child)
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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    That's an exceptionally ironic response to scientific studies pointing mapping out the chemical processes behind the above. You're just desperately trying to justify feeling better than others.

    Some people can drop severe drug addictions on their own. Most can't. Do you treat ex addicts that way too? Tell them it's agency and responsibility when their fucked up chemical response messes with their head?

    If you actually wanted to help others, you'd spend less time condemning people you don't know and spend more time figuring out why they have problems

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago

    Well if you've looked into this at all you'd see people CANNOT. Hypothetically people can, but in reality, people can only lose weight short term and then they gain it back.

    You're arguing a point that has no evidence beyond "well I personally think it SHOULD work like this!"

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago (6 children)

    This attitude is the problem, yep.

    There's no other medical condition which only 0.8% of people ever recover from where we tell people to just keep trying treatments that we know don't work.

    An individual's behaviour is a contributing factor in most diseases. But the hormones, social factors, etc. which determine that behaviour are beyond the control of willpower. GLP1s work because they treat the hormonal imbalances which cause the behaviour that causes weight loss.

    We don't tell people they're pathetic for catching a cold, though our social organization put them in a place where their biological weakness to that disease was triggered.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago

    I am not downplaying the psychological effects of obesity but....Willpower is quite literally the ability to overcome your hormones/emotion and resist social pressure. It IS all you need, it's just really hard to learn. Especially nowadays with the societal pressure to be hot and how depressing the world is in general.

    Comparing obesity to a cold is a false dichotomy as you most people can't simply avoid asymptomatic carriers. But if you insist on the comparison, we were absolutely vicious to people who got COVID because they chose to not wear masks (and rightfully so). I'm not suggesting we SHOULD be similarly mean to fat people, though.

    I want to reiterate I'm not looking down on anyone for having weak willpower, mine is shit when there's a sweet treat in front of me. But I lost 5kg last year just by practicing at the grocery store. If there's junk food in my house, I know I'll pick it over real food every time. So I choose not to buy it.

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