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‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers

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Re: ‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers

#831
post #607

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> there's a difference between being full and feeling full. Implying that something is off if you "feel" but are "not" full? How do you define full? Having a "healthy" amount of food in your stomach? However you define it, with asserting that, you have to acknowledge the closely related idea that there's something off if you are "full" (as you've defined it) but still not feeling full - or satiated. It's that broken…

> Implying that something is off if you "feel" but are "not" full? How do you define full? Having a "healthy" amount of food in your stomach? However you define it, with asserting that, you have to acknowledge the closely related idea that there's something off if you are "full" (as you've defined it) but still not feeling full - or satiated. It's that broken state that so many of us are desperate to solve. I call it…

Having felt both “brain hunger/body hunger” And “obesity hunger/glp1 hunger” they are very different. The glp1 drugs remove a compulsion to eat that many thin people just don’t have. It’s like being a smoker, and then nearly instantly no longer craving cigarettes and finding the smell of ciagrettes unappealing. It’s not a remotely subtle change at all.

Re: ‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers

#832
post #712

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> high protien, high fat, and zero carb Basically a keto diet, of course it works due to ketosis.

A carnivore diet is not necessarily a ketogenic diet, although it is a zero-carb diet. If you eat enough protein then your body will make glucose from it and keep you out of ketosis. But I agree that a diet of only red meat is absolutely ideal no matter which angle you look at it from.

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Re: ‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers

#833
post #206

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> ... there's zero reason to believe that they're substantially unhealthy unless consumed to the point of sustained caloric surplus. We know this ... Disagree. > who consume 50% of their diets in sugar (e.g. the Hadza) "Their diet is made up almost exclusively of food that they forage on the forest and includes fiber rich and highly nutritious berries, bananas and honey while any meat they eat is hunted and caught wi…

> The food is the problem Quality of food is certainly declining, but we are also seeing weight increases in lab rats with extremely controlled diets, so food probably isn't the entire story. There's no accepted explanation for this, but good candidates that might apply to humans are: subtle toxicity by microplastics, and changes in gut microbiomes.

I don’t think anyone claims that obesity is only achievable with modern processed food. At the end of the day it’s calories in, calories out.

That said, there’s more to the story. For instance, type 2 diabetes in children did NOT EXIST before ~1980, even though there was plenty of abundance and environmental contaminants. This suggest that there is a major issue with the food itself. If you look at where there is the most obesity, within the US or in the world, you also find a strong correlation with processed food. For instance, the Pacific Islanders who suffered obesity epidemics which coincided with processed food replacing their traditional diets.

Re: ‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers

#834

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Erm, the intented permanent physical change for the user is establishing normal weight, at which point you would assume, that you can establish healthy routines and ideally move on without the drug. But the drug is designed (intentionally or not) in a way, that makes this very hard, keeping the user dependant on it. So I would call this a bug, but I can see people still choosing it over the alternative.

How so? Why can't people simply stop taking it once they reach their goal weight?

My source was another comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34251674

"cause the body to create lots of new adipocyte (fat cells). Increasing the number of adipocytes is very unusual after puberty. As long as you are taking the GLP-1 inhibitor drugs you will lose or maintain weight, but as soon as you stop you will gain a lot of weight back."

But the source seems to be a bit tainted, so I am not sure if any of this is really true.

Re: ‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers

#835

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Please try eating only liver, eggs, and ribeye steaks and drinking only water. You can absolutely stuff yourself on this diet and you will nevertheless get in shape. It breaks my heart that people have such an upside down idea about what healthy food is -- people think they should avoid red meat and eat fruits and vegetables and "heart healthy grains" when in fact the only thing they should eat is red meat. It is a t…

I did this and lost 18% of my body weight (BMI 36 to 29) after reading Gary Taubes. It works. The resulting blood chemistry worried my doctor. Worse, it’s excruciatingly boring. The 60th serving of fatty steak is no longer delicious. I lusted for a crouton. Even onions are a cheat in a glycemic load regime. When I was single, strategies like having no sugar, alcohol, or refined carbs in the house were practical, but…

> There’s a big difference between maintaining constant vigilance against desire and having none.

This is exactly the case I make for fasting to those who ask why I like it. Nothing to count. It's super effective, much easier than people assume, and very quick. Also gives you a ton of energy and focus.

Glad you found something that works!

Re: ‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers

#836

I’m currently taking one of these drugs and it has been no less than a miracle in my life. I became obese when I was around 5, topping out around a 34 BMI. When I was 20 I lost a substantial amount of weight the old fashioned way (diet and exercise), and within 8 months I was BMI 23. Losing weight was extremely challenging and socially isolating. 7 years later, I had a bad ankle injury and regained weight to about 29…

I'm also on one of these drugs (Tirzepatide) and have been for a few months. The first time I remember knowing I was fat was when a babysitter made fun of me for it at age 6. I've been fat ever since and I'm in my late 30s now. I've lost significant amounts of weight (60+ pounds) three times in my adult life, through simple calorie restriction (intermittent fasting, including before I'd ever heard the term). Every ti…

> I've heard people say that the solution is to eat (healthy food) when you're hungry, and stop when you're full. The thing is, I'm never full.

I’ve had a weirdly similar experience due to wildly different histories.

When I was a kid I was on medication that f’ed with my appetite so I literally never learned what hunger was as a kid. As an adult and long off the medication, I just eat and don’t understand the signals my body produces.

When I was younger, I had a healthy and active body and didn’t notice my diet was bad until first I graduated and took a desk job then it accelerated with Covid when I became sedentary and snacks were constantly available. I put on weight very quickly.

Re: ‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers

#837

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> It’s so hard to eat healthy, I honestly cannot fathom how people do it. It's honestly just what you're used to. If you eat tonnes of sugar and fat then that's what you crave. If you cut sugar out of your diet, after a while the amount of sugar you used to eat will taste wayyy too sweet. Same with fat - eating chips for example will leave a gross fatty taste in your mouth. 99% of food bought out will have a whole lo…

This would be more persuasive if it wasn't more or less the opposite of what current nutrition research suggests about fat and satiety.

I think that many people discover a particular diet that works for them psychologically and expect that to be the case for everyone.

I do wish that more people understood the basic research on satiety, though. I suspect more diets would be successful if people were eating ~2g of lean protein per kg of goal weight along with a lot (I'm not sure if people have studied amounts here) of dietary fiber.

Re: ‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers

#838

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Why? Plenty of young and healthy people died of COVID. Only some vaccines are mRNA types, and, in the USA anyway, all vaccines went through the same testing process as any other medication, they simply sped the process up by layering some of the steps - all that means is that rather than wait to see if one study passes before doing the next one (save money or whatever), they just overlapped them. Even for MRNA vaccin…

>all vaccines went through the same testing process as any other medication, they simply sped the process up by layering some of the steps - all that means is that rather than wait to see if one study passes before doing the next one (save money or whatever), they just overlapped them This is misinformation. The normal process involves at least 4-5 years of observation to identify long-term side effects; you can't sp…

> The normal process involves at least 4-5 years of observation to identify long-term side effects.

If you have for instance an Ebola vaccine, how can you show it works when there's only a few hundred cases a year? You can't just infect people. You have to vaccinate a bunch of test candidates and wait. Sometimes years until you can show a statistical advantage.

With COVID literally everyone had it so they could show it worked by the end of the weekend.

> ... it's not going to make long-term side effects manifest sooner.

They're looking for short-term side effects, they're testing efficacy and they're looking for 'long-term side-effects.' A long-term side-effect here doesn't mean one that's latent for years before presenting, it's one that presents quickly (days, weeks) but causes lasting harm. So yeah they're looking for them but they're not primarily vaccinating people and then following them for 4-5 years to see if something miraculously goes wrong 3 years later. That's what VAERS is for.

> And while the technology has been around for 20 years, it certainly hasn't been trialed on humans until very recently, due to difficulty finding a safe delivery mechanism.

mRNA vaccines and adenoviral vector vaccines have been in development since the 1970s. Vaccines have been around since 1721. We know what kinds of effects to expect, and they're (a) overwhelmingly short term and (b) we know of no mechanism where latent effects might randomly appear 4-5 years later since we know these platforms don't alter DNA.

We know from having extensively characterized the platform over fifty years that if nothing happens within the first few months, nothing's going to happen.

So really the parent post is right. Development went fast because we (a) leveraged a platform we'd extensively characterized and knew a ton about (b) were able to show efficacy very quickly due to prevalence of the disease within the population (c) layered a bunch of steps.

[edit] They didn't exactly YOLO this and I think that's born out by the fact we have like 5 different vaccines developed over comparable timeframes, administered billions of times all with the absolute bare minimum of adverse effects and incredible efficacy. Frankly it beggars belief that lightning struck so many times and we just got lucky a few billion times over. Maybe we were careful, and maybe the system worked.

Re: ‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers

#840

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[flagged]

Counting calories correctly is really hard. I've lost 90 lbs, achieved a healthy body weight, and kept it off for years, but I keep trying to lose just 10 more pounds. I only make progress when I'm religious about calorie counting, including weighing every meal or needing to do precise food prep beforehand. That's such a pain in the ass that I inevitably fail and keep returning to my body's new average weight. I thin…

i don't know... we don't deviate much from what we eat so it's really about that initial tracking and seeing the results. after that you can kind of "eye-ball" what you are eating. the hard part is just being brutally honest with what you are actually eating and tracking at the beginning.

tbf it's like any learned skill, it sucks at the beginning but over time it gets easier. when i started getting serious about my fitness i was tracking it meticulously but now i rarely do.

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