Maybe we’ve just embraced being fat.
people will do anything to avoid eating a healthy diet and exercising. I lost 120lbs in just over 2 years from walking and eating low carb real food.
If those things reduced people’s weight in a reasonable time frame then they would do that.
Don’t expect slaves to have the time, money, and energy to spend hundreds of hours to be an attractive weight.
Once again, carbs are not the problem. Italian and French people eat tons of carbs and are way healthier than Americans
The easiest way to boil down weight loss is calories in calories out. If you are in a surplus, you will in most cases gain weight (with some deviance based on genetics and other bodily factors). Lots of carbs is fine if you have a lot of calories out. European people usually have walkable cities, and the infrastructure there promotes lots of calories out on a day to day basis. America is a lot more car centric. The average american has less calories out because walking/cycling is uncommon in most of the US. Coupled with the standard caloric dense american food, it’s easy to see how we are struggling with an obesity problem.
Low carb is just one way to cut down on how many calories you intake. Nothing wrong with it, and there are obviously many other ways to go about it.
Plus, personal anecdote – carbs don’t curb my hunger as quickly as protein and fat do. On a heavy protein day, I snack little to nil.
Yes, but there is a difference between grains and refined sugar and high glucose corn syrup.
I agree. I don’t think my homemade bread with 4 ingredients is a problem
Congrats! It’s not easy! I dropped 60 lbs the same way. It’s the only thing that works long term since you have to retrain your body and mind, learn new habits, and build interest in maintaining it.
I lost 40 without making any new habits other than weighing in daily with an app that estimates my caloric balance over the last two weeks. Turns out that I didn’t need big changes to diet and exercise to get into a persistent decline, though I’ve lost another 15 since starting hormone therapy
“Weight Watchers files for bankruptcy as old weight loss scams are supplanted by new weight loss scams”
Fixed the headline for them.
Yeah fuck off.
I’ve been overweight my entire life, over five decades now, and these drugs are nothing short of a miracle.
In addition to changing how my body processes sugar, it kills any desire I have for any particular food as well as hunger.
They like to say that it “silences food noise in your brain” and that works as a description but it doesn’t convey just how truly profound that is.
You can tell that it works, BTW, by how much they charge for it.
I’m down a little more than 30 pounds in 90 days. Given enough time I will be slim/normal for the first time since the 1970s, and I don’t appreciate chucklefucks calling them a scam.
You know what’s a scam? HFCS. Sugar in everything.
These new drugs though - not a scam. At all.
Hey good for you! Keep it up dude.
I used to work in public health, and even among educated people there was a lot of prejudice against the idea that addiction was beyond the individuals control.
I’m not claiming to have evidence backing me up, but I fear the idea that addiction is under your control
may be higher among the educated populacemay not be affected by being more highly educated because they’re bought into meritocracy and the idea of improving oneself. ‘Just do this’ platitudes etc. from the crowd that believes everything works like a controlled lab experiment they did in AP BioSpecifically, I was referring to medical professionals and hospital workers I knew. Detox units and rehab was a part of the system, but people who dealt with alcoholics and addicts of all types every day would still say it was a matter of will power and not an illness.
What was your experience in getting those prescribed? Was it a matter of just being overweight? Did they go over lifestyle changes as well? There was a guy at work that was going to get them prescribed. He was very overweight, but he ate horrible food, a lot of candy, and drank three monsters a day. I’ll admit I got a little judgemental when he mentioned the medication. He was a good guy and I cared about him, but hard to help him see his lifestyle was probably the cause of a lot of his issues. I ultimately didn’t care how he got healthy, if its a pill so be it. But hopefully the lifestyle changes are tried as well. I also think we really need to focus on the mental health aspect of it. He was really hard on himself and I found myself regularly trying to steer him away from that.
You put in more work and he took the easy way and you got the same results. It’s fair to feel like he cheated but he didn’t.
We have better methods of weight loss than starving ourselves and wasting our little free time exercising.
Weight Watchers is basically eating in moderation, its most definitely not a scam.
One could argue that paying a subscription to not over-eat is a scam similar to the way gyms prey on people and get them to sign up while expecting that they’ll only come once or twice.
Wegovy/Saxenda whatever others are (GLP-1) inhibitors aren’t a scam, they work.
They are absurdly expensive for the benefit they bring. Of course, fat lot of good it does if you don’t use it to the full extent so you can actually get off of it.
The pricing is absurd. In Denmark it’s like $80 for four weeks. in USA it starts at $1000. But medicine in USA is a whole other can of worms.
In Germany it starts at $300 (2.5mg/week) and goes up to $540 (15mg/week). But then if you get a 15mg/week prescription and happen to only need 5mg/week (possibly supported by taking it more often than once a week), and also make use of the 1.3 (my guesstimate) extra doses that are in the syringe (but a bit difficult to extract) you pay like $120/month. This is what a proper gym costs in my area. And honestly, you safe on food, too. And on your weight watchers subscription!
The work in the sense that they cause weight loss. They do nothing to keep the weight off once it’s lost. And they have side-effects, some quite nasty.
These new Semaglutide medications work by mucking with one’s appetite and slowing digestion. It’s actually mimicking a natural process that occurs in a species of desert lizard if I remember correctly.
So they work, and in trials they found people. lost at most about 30% of body fat, which is significantly more than any previous weight loss drug, but for folks who need to lose more than 30% they won’t reach their goal body weight. (But it does certainly make the Hollywood approach of taking semiglutides to rapidly lose a fairly small amount of weight make more sense)
Or get caught up in the crossfire where Metformin makes you shit your pants and a new drug for managing your A1C comes out (ozempic) which doesn’t make you shit your pants. Only for a few years later get denied insurance coverage for it because you obviously are using it to lose weight.
I got denied coverage because I don’t have type 2 diabetes. My main doctor confirmed I’m pre-pre-diabetic.
Or I was.
I pay for the medication myself and the diet they have me on is literally called the Insulin Resistance Diet.
Not only have I lost just over 30 pounds in 90 days but I’m also clearly healthier just because of this diet. (At my height and weight 30 pounds isn’t shit, but I’m only just getting started.)
Proud of you random internet stranger! Keep up the good work! It’s going to be super duper worth it!
In theory once you stay at a dosage of metformin for long enough the unfortunate side effects go away. In practice it’s been a year and I still can’t trust a fart.
You guys trust your farts? I always presume each oncoming fart is a world ending disaster.
fat lot of good
Pun intended…??
😂
I dunno anything about these drugs but I remember the diet drug fad in the '90s and the disastrous consequences and side effects that came from it. I’m sure these aren’t going to give heart attacks to a bunch of people, but I have a hard time believing there isn’t some sort of cost to pay for a magic pill that makes you skinny. I’m willing to admit that my view is tainted by the past and will once again state that I know nothing about these pills specifically so I could be completely off base here.
could you be referring to this drug, Fenfluramine/phentermine.
Good ol’ fen-phen.
but I have a hard time believing there isn’t some sort of cost to pay for a magic pill that makes you skinny
There is a cost. It is called money, it is incredibly expensive, and they need to take it for life.
I’ll just say that my wife works in medicine and you have to stop Oz3mpic 24 hours before surgery because of the added risk of aspiration due to the stomach retaining food contents for longer. Seems to possibly put strain on the pancreas (pancreatitis a side effect).
That doesn’t sit well with me. Neither does it fix the core problem of what caused the vast majority of weight gain cases: poor dietary habits. Then again, our society has short-circuited evolutionary dopamine-driven behavior so it may necessitate intervention to re-wire it back.
Ozempic is typically taken once a week. The half-life of Ozempic is about a week. Stopping Ozempic “24 hours before surgery” does not make any sense.
I might have that wrong and it may be a full week. I’ll ask them when I get a chance and update.
They work!*
*aslongasyoudontstop
Same as for working out, controlling your calorie intake etc.
Bingo, those medications are as effective as any other diet or change of habits, if you have a problematic relationship with food you need to fix the reason behind it otherwise the moment you stop you’ll gain your weight back.
When you get to a certain size, food is the same as booze to an alcoholic… these drugs turn off the food noise telling you to eat… they let your bodies ability to decide when full reset to normal and give you a chance to form good habits without an imaginary food devil in your ear telling you to binge junk food… with good habits formed managing your now healthy weight at the end of a program of use is easier.
“a chance to form good habits”
And that’s the issue right there, without professional support the majority of people who have an unhealthy relationship with their food just fall down the same hole whenever they manage to get out of it, may it be through diet or medications or even surgery.
Dietician training now puts a lot of focus on psychology because of that, giving someone a pill to make them lose weight won’t fix the childhood trauma of being abused that causes them to find comfort in food, if they stop the medication that is still there, that’s why the long term failure rate of diets is so high, they don’t address the why, just the what.
Not everyone overeats due to trauma… I stress eat and have eat often out of boredom/habit. I’ve personally tried dieticians and found them to be snake oil salesman( not saying all are but the ones I have tried) who are trying to sell their weight management group programs or are indoctrinated in the ancel keyes food pyramid bullshit. Two things work for me, these drugs and a low carb diet.
If I need services similar to those of a dietician, I’ll use an A.I agent.
The dieticians you talked to aren’t medical dieticians then, they’re people who call themselves dieticians without any university degree. AI will just spew whatever bullshit it was trained on so you’ll probably be reassured that what you’re doing is ok because it was trained on/r/fitness or whatever instead of scientific papers.
Eating out of boredom is an unhealthy relationship to food, I’m not saying all cases are out of trauma (holy shit lemmings have a hard time when things aren’t spelled out for them), I’m saying the underlying issue needs to be fixed to have a permanent solution, you said so yourself, you need the drugs and low carbs diet in order to fix the problem, stop both and the problem comes back.
You didn’t fix your leaking roof, you applied a patch and it will start leaking again if you remove it.
They also banned the knock off versions a little while ago since the name brands were no longer in shortage. WW had HEAVILY pivoted into trying to sell subscriptions to those and lost big.
There are other, cheaper options as well but they require consistent diet/exercise on top of the Rx, so I think they are less popular for that.
The modern them actually has an app that lets you build out recipes and/or scan barcodes to track what you eat, they use a distilled version of nutrition called “points” and you’re allocated Y points a day to try stay in your food budget.
I think their older system was also points based just not software.
The app has training content and some kind of social community (that people say is quite terrible apparently because of the other users).
It isn’t a bad concept, and helps one understand that a slice of pizza is insanely unhealthy if one didn’t already know that.
Where it falls apart is their skeezy subscription model. Best time to sign up is around New Years, if you do bulk pricing you get a discount for the year, if you sign up partly through the year, that discount only lasts 10, 8, 7 months, however many are left. If you want to get a better rate, even their customer service says to just cancel and then sign back up after you’re canceled. If they had honest flat-rate pricing and curated their social space/education material better, they’d likely have had something to offer…Instead, like most health tracking/exercise/apps that cost money, it’s difficult to manage, expensive, and abrasive to cancel.
Like so many businesses that went “app” - they didn’t embrace a usable and sustainable model that fit on a digital platform, and instead basically phoned it in.
I haven’t read into any of it, but I thought weight watchers was just a calorie counting thing? I’m assuming the new drugs just curb your appetite to allow your stomach to shrink and then you have to still learn to be a healthier eater to maintain/lose weight. I have no impulse control when it comes to food sometimes so I’d fuck that up real quick. If I am in the mindset of eat healthy I can do that for a while, but soon as I have that one day I’ll sit down and eat a whole pizza and not give a fuck which I assume would stretch my stomach or tear any stitches and I’d be back to where I was (or in the hospital)
Pretty much. Weight watchers worked great if you adhered to it. Pretty easy to lose weight when you eat fewer calories than you burn. Problem is people’s willpower to feel hungry and not eat more calories.
weight watchers was just a calorie counting thing?
And counseling, according to Wikipedia.
That’s exactly what they help with, they turn off the impulse to eat. You feel full and content… and if you do try force yourself to eat too much you feel sick.
Without the impulse to eat, all you have is the logical part of you deciding an appropriate time to eat and giving you the headspace to make a good decision about making that meal healthy.
It does. It basically slows your entire digestive system way down to the point where you physically can’t eat more than you should. Which also kills your appetite.
Interestingly, I’ve discovered whatever nuerotransmitters are affected by it is completely counteracted by lunesta.
once had the flu(2018 flu) so bad i lost appetite, it was the strangest feeling besides the wierd balance issues, also cause all sorts of other issues.
How is it slowing down the digestive system? Didn’t we learn recently that our digestion system / gut bacteria actually plays a strong role in lifespan of a person? Would modifying such processes not potentially impact the lifespan of a person… Guess we’ll find out in time
It already has. Ozempic, once weekly injection, can reverse the need of insulin in Type 2 diabetics. My dad still has the symptoms he accumulated, but hasn’t had any worsening of symptoms and improvement of a lot.
My blood work is perfect. My heart rate and blood pressure (aside of POTS) is perfect. I can mow the yard without passing out.
My sugar consumption has dropped a lot. And I’m eating way better.
But to me? It’s not about the lifespan. It’s the quality of life. I can chase my kid around again. I feel more attractive. I can do things that normally I hide from. One day I might even try to get laid. If I get cancer in 20 years directly tied to it, so what? Ain’t no “Cats in the Cradle” here.
Chase your kid around, one day might even try to get laid. Are my order of operations wrong or is there some parentsethies missing from this equation? And yes, that was a bad joke, I’m sticking with it
the slowing down doesnt exactly depend on your digestive system. its complex also involves neurological compenent, and certain hormones like ghrelin.
My mom followed their diet plans for years and never lost any weight. But at the same time, she didn’t exercise. Diet alone isn’t enough unless you’re doing one of those extremely calorie restrictive diets and I really don’t think that it’s exactly healthy to starve yourself. You’d be losing muscle as well as fat.
Losing weight is almost entirely about diet. Exercise plays only a minimal role in that. It’s far easier to not eat something than to burn off those same calories through working out. That’s not to say exercise isn’t important - it is - but you do it for reasons other than weight loss.
seems like an excuse
Honestly I thought they went belly-up after it turned out Oprah was full of shit
This is unfortunate. WW is hard because they help you lose in a healthy manner. Drugs will kill ya faster than fat, but at least ya look better faster.
We all wish there was a safe, easy button for life’s challenges. At best, pick one.
I get asked frequently what my secret is to be in such a good shape. I tell them that i don’t drink or smoke, i work out, i eat healthy. They never want to hear any of that shit, what they wan to hear is that i have some magic pill that i take once a day and boom, i’m in shape.
Where do you think the best place to start is? I’ve never been that fat, but I have been out of shape (I’m now one of the very athletic people). For me it was finding active things that I like doing and becoming a member of outdoor communities. But if you’re so out of shape it’s not fun to do active things, what would keep them going until they get to the fun part?
(Tzeench is right btw)
When I was in college I had school health insurance so I was on some meds that helped my mental health but made me really fat. When i graduated I lost my health insurance, went off my meds, and lost 80lbs in less than a year. People asked me all the time “whats your secret” and they really didn’t like when the answer was “I’m off my meds and want to die, but at least I’m cute now”. At school I was on a meal plan and ate three healthy meals a day and used the school gym 4-6 days a week. I was fat but fit. After graduating I didn’t go to a gym again for about 7 years and still now don’t really eat very healthy or regularly. I’m less heavy than I was in school but I’m not strong or muscle-y like I was when I was fat.
The worst part is, imo, I have health insurance again, but I’d rather be depressed than go back to being fat, because society is so cruel to fat people. Especially on the internet where people are like “it really IS just as simple as keeping a caloric deficit”. That’s just not true.
Anyway, it made sense in my head to respond to you when I started this, but now I think I’ve gotten lost in the weeds a little. I’m not trying to argue with you about anything, I’m just sharing my experience.
Hope everyone can find one thing they love about their bodies today xx
Thank you for posting your experience.
Drugs will kill ya faster than fat
This is just plain false. The health benefits of not being overweight far outweigh any potential negative effects of the drug itself. GLP-1 receptor agonists have been used to treat type 2 diabetes for decades - we’re quite familiar with their risks.
alot of people want a quick fix when it comes to weight loss, dr now and 1000sisters, almost every just want a immediate solution while refusing to change thier eating habits. ive heard they also eat around thier weight loss surgery sometimes too.
the extreme people in denial are the people believe fat is being good.
I went to my sister the other day bus she wasn’t home. An older neighbour of hers wanted to visit her too, and i tol her that she wasn’t home. I don’t really like ger that much so we didn’t talk too long. At the end of our smalltalk she said: i just wanted to tell you something, you should eat more, being that thing can’t be healthy. I didn’t even know what to say. I’m 1.85m and weight 80kg. And i have to take health advice from an obese old lady? All her sons are obese too, but they think it’s just being “healthy” yeah no, sorrt, i don’t envy people who get out of breath when they walk up a set of stairs.
Doesn’t ww sell frozen food? That food isn’t healthy.
Frozen processed food isn’t inherently unhealthy. Eating the right amount of calories from nutritious processed food is still probably a net positive over eating too much of any kind of food.
I’m pretty sure it’s not, but I’ll eat that before rushing gastroparesis.
Their food has high sodium. At least it did 15 years ago.
Their food has high sodium. At least it did 15 years ago.
Isn’t high sodium only a problem if your blood pressure is too high? I have asked this a number of times and the only answers I get back about high sodium dangers are related to high blood pressure. Keep in mind, I’m not belittling the dangers of high blood pressure. Those are known and absolutely dangerous to your health.
However, if whatever sodium you intake doesn’t give you high blood pressure, where is the risk in a high(er) sodium diet?
It all increases your risk of cancer.
It’s associated with increased risk of colorectal cancer yes
