‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers

Citation? This goes against everything I've heard from credentialed experts and against my own experience as well. For one thing, it's unclear how you'd explain the weight gain of the median person in the western world over the last 30 years. For another, it's very strange that people like me (previously) gained 5-10 pounds a year, if our bodies were supposedly trying to keep us at a particular set point.

>I am Petro Dobromylskyj, always known as Peter. I'm a vet, trained at the RVC, London University. I was fortunate enough to intercalate a BSc degree in physiology in to my veterinary degree. I was even more fortunate to study under Patrick Wall at UCH, who set me on course to become a veterinary anaesthetist, mostly working on acute pain control. That led to the Certificate then Diploma in Veterinary Anaesthesia and enough publications to allow me to enter the European College of Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia as a de facto founding member. Anaesthesia teaches you a lot. Basic science is combined with the occasional need to act rapidly. Wrong decisions can reward you with catastrophe in seconds. Thinking is mandatory. I stumbled on to nutrition completely by accident. Once you have been taught to think, it's hard to stop. I think about lots of things. These are some of them.

The evidence is a little slim (no pun), but there's one theory which I find quite compelling. The theory is that eating foods with high flavor-calorie association increases your set point, and eating foods with low flavor-calorie association decreases your set point.

Flavor-calorie association is when your body knows that a particular flavor results in getting lots of calories in the near future. The flavor-calorie association will be higher for foods that are more flavorful or more calorically dense, and flavor-calorie associations can only be developed for foods you eat regularly. This explains why I lose a bit of weight whenever I go somewhere new – I'm trying new foods, so what I'm eating has doesn't have any flavor-calorie association, so my body's set point goes down, so I get full more quickly, causing me to eat fewer calories overall, causing me to lose weight. And since foods have gotten much more flavorful and calorically dense in the past half-century, it would explain why people's set points have gone up.

There's a simple way to test this theory at home. Extra-light olive oil (not extra-virgin) is tasteless and textureless. So, find a 2-hour window of your day when you don't taste anything with flavor, and have two tablespoons of extra-light olive oil right in the middle of that window. Since the oil has no flavor, it should have no flavor-calorie association, and your set point should go down. I've been doing this, and I've been getting full faster and that's been causing me to lose weight. (If you want to google more info, it's called the shangri-la diet.)

(Note that if you try this, your toothpaste probably counts as a flavor.)

Various things have lead to me eating/drinking (alcohol) to excess and becoming more overweight than ever.

My long-winded point is that it seems specifically to be my personal actions that have caused my obesity -- poor food choices and lack of exercise. Others from the same background, others at the same workplace, etc., are not obese.

I would hate anyone to start telling me being fat is OK and that I shouldn't bother to do anything about it.

[0]: https://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2020/can-calorie-restrict...