I have never struggled with weight. Or not in the direction of overweight anyway. When I am full I don't want food. When emotionally upset, I REALLY don't want food. I don't need willpower or a big bowl of kale before every meal.

If someone can live the life I get to have, with a drug, that is awesome. The GLPs have some good side effects, they have been used long enough now that there's increasing evidence they reduce the risk of dementia, heart attack, and stroke (even in diabetics of normal weight, not using it to lose weight) - not all the side effects are bad, and if it is well tolerated it's a reasonable drug to just stay on.

I do agree that lifestyle comes first. And think most people do enjoy a healthy lifestyle if they try it. But I don't think someone should have to do more than I do, just to get to the same place.

This whole conversation reminds me of getting migraine treatment - the doctors would say oh try avoiding food triggers. What food triggers? Every single food, oh and also fasting. Heat, cold, sex, no sex, stress, relaxation , caffeine , no caffeine. The list of migraine triggers was "life".

I got them with my period though, not something I could avoid, and even though I'm sure the doctor was trying to make me feel empowered to do something about it, it always felt like they were blaming me for getting the migraines.

I have had them managed with emergency med imitrex by injection for 30 years, once a month and now less often with menopause plus estrogen and progesterone daily. Would I rather have had to take extreme lifestyle measures just to avoid crippling headaches? No. The drugs worked so much better.

There is no inherent virtue in avoiding drugs. They are tools, in the same toolkit that holds a good diet and physical activity and meditation.

Are you healthy? I am thin but not as much as I'd like (mental issue) and always have to remind myself that the result of a healthy lifestyle is a healthy body. Not one that necessarily looks like your ideal form. I can walk & dance, stand on my hands & cartwheel, eat healthy, exercise and work on athletic goals not size goals.

If you are happy with your lifestyle and feel like you are nourishing your body and exercising it, weight lands in different places for different people (or as I found, different for same person at different ages.) But you feel good? That seems like a good result.

If you don't feel good, that is when I would push the doctor for more tests to figure out what the heck is going on.

4 miles between pedestrian crossings should be illegal. Here, though it's for sure a car city, the small roads that go under the stupid highway that bisects the city are about 1/2 mile apart. And where there is no sidewalk, on smaller roads, legal to walk in road, off to the side, facing traffic.

Not everyone even has a car. Or license.

And blood pressure medicine, and plenty of other drugs. If benefits > risks & costs, who cares?

One criticism of this analysis (which I think is mostly spot on) those GLP drugs help people change their lifestyle by turning off the 'food noise'. They don't, by themselves, make anyone lose weight. They help people who overeat be not hungry all the time so that they can eat better and work out more - it's the eating better and working out more that is causing the weight loss.

Yes, also walking to the store, walking to work. I don't use my car much - arranged my life so that I can get everywhere I need to, mostly, without driving but that is unusual as fuck where I live, everyone else in my office arrives by car. I am not usually the only bike in the rack at the grocery but maybe 3, 4 bikes and a hundred cars in the lot. No bike rack at my doctors' offices, nor dentist, nor aesthetician. None at restaurants.

Walking a lot or even biking on e-bike everywhere like I do, makes a difference in what you can eat without getting fat. But also I cook at home, from ingredients, do make sweet stuff for the kids & husband but don't like it much myself. Grow some of our food, and lunch biggest meal.

I don't think it's impossible here, to have a reasonable lifestyle, I do it and am not an unusual person, not super rich or super ambitious or determined. I do think it's more difficult and you have to be intentional AND either be lucky (city grew up around me) or flush with money, to create a life that is the "fifteen minute bubble" with everything nearby.

I agree so much with this. We can use math to describe what you are doing when you throw a ball, that doesn't mean you are doing the math calculations when you throw it.

We can use math to calculate all sorts of things, doesn't mean those things themselves are doing math to decide how to do them. Waves, the moon's orbit, all kinds of natural systems we can use math to describe, but they aren't doing math.

To fall asleep?

Think Sa on inhale and Ha on exhale can work, or I count backwards from 100 in Spanish, starting over when I forget where I am. Yin yoga is good too, forward folds calm the nervous system.

To do something else, when it seems sleep is not possible or desirable? Emotional stress? Get out of bed & go for a night walk, or even a run. Exercise. Get physically exhausted if possible.

https://thetinklers.bandcamp.com/track/mom-cooks-inside-dad-cooks-outside

What the heck? I cook because I'm better at it (like, much better) and my husband cleans; but my mom & dad cooked about equally when I was growing up (and they were literally from the 1950s) my ex-brother outlaw was a chef, actually taught his wife to cook well, now they are about equal; my ex went from below zero to good cook while we were together (and back again according to my kids) I can't even begin to imagine thinking it unmanly to know how to feed yourself. It is to me unmanly to be like a kid and expect your lady partner to take care of everything at home, yuck.

Voivod were such a delightful live act when I saw them tour that album. They made the sound effects vocally, like just stepped up to the mike and said woooooooo or whoooosh or beep or whatever. And had almost no English because they were from some little town in the French part of Canada. We saw them open for Soundgarden, but liked them better, they were amazing performers and really nice people.

No. When I was growing up the crime rate was high, schools were much worse, downtown here was abandoned on weekends, gay people were targeted with more violence, there was more racial violence, more domestic violence, it was really rough.

My kids grew up in a better time, but now it is sliding again, the last one did not get education as good as the older ones.

I am not even a little bit nostalgic, you could not pay me to go back to the time I grew up.