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>>>Studies show it just doesn't work. It's not that "eat less and exercise more" doesn't work, it's that nobody does it, because it's really, really hard. Cal

• petesergeant 2y ago
  The best way to stop smoking is to never have another cigarette!
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• logicchains 2y ago
  >It's not that "eat less and exercise more" doesn't work, it's that nobody does it There are plenty of examples of people who've managed to lose weight through diet and exercise, it's not "nobody". Sure it's a small % success rate, but that's because it's not easy. Just like squatting or deadlifting 300 lbs, it's not easy to get there, but the vast majority of humans could if they decided to put the time and effort into it.
  • arcticbull 2y ago
    Would you apply the same analysis to people with depression who cured their depression by smiling more? It's not zero, it's just very hard. Ultimately both are chronic issues of the central nervous system. We know GLP-1s act on the GABAergic central nervous system.
    • spicyusername 2y ago
      I think that as convenient as it would be, depression and the inability to not eat too much are not the same. The fact is that you have much more control over one than the other. I don't disagree that maintaining a healthy weight is a challenge in today's environment, but it's not impossible or inevitable, like so many in this thread are pretending.
      • arcticbull 2y ago
        > I think that as convenient as it would be, depression and the inability to not eat too much are not the same. > The fact is that you have much more control over one than the other. Why do you say that? Studies do not agree. How would you assess the difference? Or are you simply coming at this from the perspective of either someone who has never had a weight problem or was able to get out of a weight problem without issue? If the latter you're in the ~1% and your experience is not that of others in the same way as your experience as someone without depression does not align with that of someone who is depressed. How would you measure your thesis? Certainly it cannot be based on results because, well, I cited them. As someone who isn't addicted to cigarettes, it's pretty easy to not smoke. My experience does not align with those addicted to cigarettes, and I can appreciate that. Why do you not appreciate that the experience of those with obesity might be different than your own? I am not obese for the record, and I have never taken GLP-1s, but I have been obese and this just makes sense to me. Just because you have full control over your diet and I have control over smoking does not mean that there are people out there who cannot control their diets and cannot control their smoking. Maybe depression and obesity are more similar than you are giving credit. Especially since serotonin inhibits appetite and has an integral role in maintaining energy homeostasis. [1] https://academic.oup.com/edrv/article/40/4/1092/5406261 https://academic.oup.com/edrv/article/40/4/1092/5406261 Is there any data I could provide that would change your mind or is this just a "I heard it growing up so it must be true" kind of thing?
  • patmcc 2y ago
    Sure, I don't mean literally nobody, just 'nobody' in the statistical sense - from the comment I replied to, "the likelihood of going from severely obese to normal weight is 1 in 1667."
  • gensym 2y ago
    I'm one of those examples. I've never been obese or really even overweight, but mid-2023, I noticed my clothes were no longer fitting, and I decided to take off some weight. I lost 20 pounds over the course a a few months and have managed to keep it off since. Body scans aren't accurate, but the 1 scan I took after losing the weight put me at 13% body fat. It's one of the hardest things I've done. I'm no stranger to hard physical things - I've run marathons, raced cyclocross, done daily bike commuting through several Chicago winters, and I'd rate the weight loss as up harder than all of those. At the risk sounding too hubristic - if that's the effort it takes to lose weight, doing so is beyond the abilities of large swaths of the population. Not to mention that I have the time and financial resources to weigh my food, buy foods that were optimal for my diet (so much yogurt and chicken!), etc. (As a side note, exercise isn't a very good way to lose weight in my experience. It's valuable to do for all sorts of other reasons, but I actually gained weight when training for my first marathon, while running 60-70 miles/week).
    • Izkata 2y ago
      > As a side note, exercise isn't a very good way to lose weight in my experience. Generally people who don't normally exercise are going to gain muscle faster than they lose fat. This was the origin of HAES before it got corrupted: Health At Every Size, not "Healthy". Encouragement to keep going because with exercise you'll get healthier even if you're not losing weight. Also, by weight, muscle burns more calories than fat just by existing. Personally I think that's where most of the weight loss attributed to exercise comes from, rather than the exercise itself. You have to gain the muscle first to actually burn more calories.
• stevenAthompson 2y ago
  Right. It works, it isn't sustainable because it doesn't just take effort it takes effort multiplied by time (effort x time = permanent weight loss). Obviously, even a small amount of effort becomes impossible when you multiply it by "forever".
  • wilburTheDog 2y ago
    That's not a valid argument, though. Firstly nobody lives forever. Second you don't have to exert all the effort at once, so the totality of effort doesn't matter. At any given time you just have to decide whether to have the snickers bar or the apple. And that's not an impossible effort. We don't live our entire lives all at once. We just have to be present for one moment at a time. Edit: In my opinion it's hard for two reasons. We have cravings for high calorie foods. And no one candy bar will make you fat, so it's easy to think "I'll exercise more tomorrow to make up for this indulgence." But then you don't, because that's hard too.
    • stevenAthompson 2y ago
      > At any given time you just have to decide whether to have the snickers bar or the apple. No, you have to decide to even think about the difference between them instead of thinking about something in your life that feels more important. It's a sort of cognitive opportunity cost. You have to consciously think about food (instead of something useful) forever, because your body's instincts are telling you to do the wrong thing and you need your rational mind to overrule it. So for the rest of your life, every day, until you die you must decide to stop and expend effort making that decision instead of thinking about work, family, politics, or writing a new bit of code that will change the world. Most human beings can do it for a while, but not forever. The only way to do it forever is to get your body chemistry on your side and reduce that cognitive load.
      • jodrellblank 2y ago
        > "The only way to do it forever is to get your body chemistry on your side and reduce that cognitive load." That's how all creatures in the wild do it. That's how humans did it for the past quarter million years. And all creatures did it for the past hundred million years. Wait, no, it isn't. Then there must be another way. A way that doesn't involve manipulative abusive capitalists and advertisers destroying health in the name of profit while selling it as freedom. > "or the rest of your life, every day, until you die you must decide to stop and expend effort making that decision instead of thinking about work, family, politics, or" How much does that lifestyle sound like freedom to you?
• mrweasel 2y ago
  Precisely, the point of Ozempic (or rather Wegovy, Ozempic is for type-1 diabetes) is that it reduces your appetite, making it easier to eat less. One of the studies done with Wegovy showed that people lost 15% of their body mass in a year, but they also eat 500 Calories less and exercised for 2.5 hours a week.
  • jnwatson 2y ago
    Wait, Wegovy makes people exercise more?
    • crooked-v 2y ago
      That's probably counting 'light exercise', aka walking around. That works out to 20 minutes a day, so it could just be the side effect of people being lighter and so walking places being more comfortable.
    • mrweasel 2y ago
      Oh, no sorry, the study I read had people on Wegovy, but it also had them exercise 2.5 hours per week at the same time. The point was that the 15% weight lose in a year is in the high end of what you can expect, especially if you change nothing else.
    • rblatz 2y ago
      It's hard to exercise when you are overweight. It puts more strain on your joints, makes injury more likely, and it's all around harder. Maybe there is a path to using these drugs in a manner to get people healthier so they can exercise more, establish good habits and taper down.
    • odo1242 2y ago
      Weight gain makes it harder to exercise. In any particular day, eating more also makes exercise harder (because it tanks your energy levels). This is especially true if you count light exercise.
      • Scoundreller 2y ago
• s5300 2y ago
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• blargey 2y ago
  People chanting “If everyone just did X, Y wouldn’t be a problem!” without seriously addressing why everyone doesn’t just do X already, or making a serious proposal for how everyone is going to just do X from now on. A phenomenon not limited to dieting.
  • brianmcc 2y ago
    Yep. When 1 or 10 or 100 people do a thing, it's a "them" issue. When 100,000,000+ do a thing - it's a wider issue, and asking those 100,000,000 to do it differently just isn't a useful strategy.
    • mortos 2y ago
      In another vein, if my bank account is $100 short, that's my problem. If my account is $1m short, that's the bank's problem. Considering it's a societal wide problem, society at large ought to care about resolving it. It's incredibly expensive otherwise to treat chronic, lifelong obesity.
  • zahlman 2y ago
    I don't know people who just give the "trite" advice without any actual consideration of the difficulty. I do see a lot of people ITT who were accused of doing so but who aren't actually doing so. And I've known quite a few people who get really annoyed at constantly having to hear about how impossible it is to do things that they've personally actually done.
    • pas 2y ago
      it might be still impossible for others. tell a blind person to just look out for cars. tell a person with paralyzed legs to just get up and walk. tell a type 1 diabetic to just skip insulin. obesity has a large hereditary component. important genes associated with obesity are expressed in the brain. is it impossible to live with constant hunger and its consequences? no, likely not, but it's not really a big mystery why millions of people fail to do so.
• borroka 2y ago
  Given that a few decades ago obesity and overweight rates were nowhere near what they are today, this shows that a large part of the population is weak, fragile, and not very interested in their well-being. I want to emphasize that a few decades ago, people were much thinner in the Western world and did not hate their lives because they could not eat a triple cheeseburger, go hungry constantly, or feel physically deprived. Those were my parents and my grandparents, I know them. But if you show them hyper-caloric food that makes them feel like crap, they can't say no. It's disappointing. And the same can be said for addiction to social media, horrible TV series, and constant music everywhere.
  • jodrellblank 2y ago
    It used to be that the devil on the shoulder was the tempter. It isn't depressing that parents and grandparents can't say no to lizard brain instincts, it's depressing that we allow companies to exploit that in a devilishly evil way - to harm people - for money, as much as they can, in almost every way they can think of. Imagine how much money and time and effort is spent making Doritos 2% more tempting; the crunch, the flavour intensity, the packaging layout, the packaging colours, the mouthfeel, the shelf stability. The same for ice cream and everything else. How far can Kelloggs stretch the gap between the strawberry presented on the packaging and the almost-zero strawberry in the pop tart? Or the honey pictured on the Honey Nut Cheerios box with the "hint of honey" in the description on the back? How To Cook That[1] on YouTube on Kellogg's misleading and potentially misleading claims. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suy3wGzQ08g&list=PLPT0YU_0VLHxJMqHBC2_OMTYWwQ5z_iP4&index=9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suy3wGzQ08g&list=PLPT0YU_0VL...
  • cortesoft 2y ago
    Do you think it is because the people before were mentally stronger? No, it is because they lived in a different environment. If you were to transport those people from decades ago to today, the same portion of them would become obese.
    • borroka 2y ago
      That's what I'm saying. It's not that people were stronger then, it's that, as many times throughout life, traits are revealed by circumstances, there's nothing particularly physiological about feeling the need to eat like hippopotamuses that have been deprived of food for months. The unattractive, low-status man (or woman) has less trouble remaining faithful than the handsome, high-status man (or woman). Not because they are more virtuous, but because they are not as exposed to temptation. But fewer people justify the unfaithful than the “big eater.” And that's something society and culture have decided, for now.