Discontinuation and reinitiation of dual-labeled GLP-1 receptor agonists

That's not willpower. That's looking things up in the USDA database and tweaking my existing recipes. Why force nasty carrots onto the plate when I can eat spinach, cantaloupe, pumpkin, sweet potato, etc.?

I guess I also didn't emphasize enough that I took things super slowly? Taking 5 years to do what I did is a really modest goal. I just wanted to manage risk with minimal change. This is the pareto principle in action.

If we're really going to argue over stats, the effects of GLP-1 is meaningless noise in comparison and probably way harder to commit to. I just wanted to eat good and not feel like shit all the time. Isn't that what everyone wants? What if instead of there being "one weird trick" or a "miracle drug", we consider that basic nutrition is simply misunderstood and full of hundreds of weird tricks that are proportionally much easier to implement and they're damn tasty too?

But everything you did, plenty of people try to do and fail at it. You are making it sound like this is all it takes and that it's easy. It might have been for you! But it might not be for other people.

The fact of the matter is the overwhelming majority of people that are obese and go on GLP-1s have tried other interventions before and failed at them. ~70% of all obese people have tried to lose weight in general, ~50% have recurring attempts, and while I don't have stats to back it up I am confident that the sort of people who are willing to go and inject themselves every week are the sort of people that have tried to lose weight in other ways.

> probably way harder to commit to.

A subcutaneous injection once a week is nothing. Dealing with constant food noise? I could maintain that if the rest of my life was stress free, and that's how I would drop 30lb. Once stress came back? So did the weight. Because for me, rearranging food doesn't matter if I still can't stop thinking about it even if I'm not actually hungry.

I'm on reta. It does barely anything to suppress my appetite - physical hunger has never been my issue. And I can easily eat however much I want - most days I am below 2k calories, but Saturday was an annual event with friends and I'm sure between food and alcohol I was probably at 5k calories for the day. But what reta does, is absolutely murders my food noise. I don't think about food constantly. I don't go eat because I got bored. The only thing I have to commit to for it is, once a week, put a needle on my injector pen, twist the dial to the right dosage, poke it into a spot where I still have subcutaneous fat, depress the twist top. Once a month I reconstitute a new vial.

I am fully aware - I have spent several years of my life following a ketogenic diet. None of that is relevant for "starvation mode" and insulin within that context. I was replying to your specific points - not providing an explanation on how ketosis works from end to end.

Unless you are claiming that your body just doesn't produce glucose/glycogen and insulin when in ketosis? Which would also be incorrect.

> Muscles obviously need glucose for their best performance which is why strength training is not recommended during ketosis;

Strength training should 100% still be done in ketosis/while following a ketogenic diet. It will be suboptimal compared to a regular training, but being in ketosis doesn't magically make resistance training optional if you want to be healthy.

> OTOH ketosis is naturally muscle-sparing.

It is not and the study links in my post show consistent data here. There might be an exception if you are an endurance athlete but that is based on far more limited data than the rest of the research. So... if you're a high level endurance athlete that is also somehow fat, keto might be a better option when it comes to sparing muscle, but for the rest of us, not the case.

What you need to understand is there are a lot of people where all they have is being skinny and appearing to be healthy. Without that, there's nothing left for them.

For a long time, there has been a moat that they can use as a justification for why they're better. They can say "well I work hard, I eat right, I put in effort!" The idea that others can achieve that without any of that means... well, they did it all for nothing. In their heads.

The dirty little secret? Many of them don't do any of that, it's just a delusion. Always has been. I'm skinny, you think I go to the gym? Fuck no! I should, but I don't. And I eat whatever I want.

But if a lot of people have to face the reality that their most redeeming quality is nothing of their doing, that would ruin them. Ruin them. They could just, like, get achievements or something but that's hard. Continuing the delusion is easy.

The issue is shameless "science" reporting like this which packages up the results for non experts, without explaining the nuance because they know the sensational headlines will get more attention, and they know non-expert readers will get scared and share the article on places like HN or Facebook.

It's such an obvious play: find one doctor who'll make a loaded statement with the word "whiplash", write on this one study as if it's gospel truth, get everyone reading it as scared as possible. Throw in links to other emotional articles like "Can you die of a broken heart?" throughout the text to trigger secondary emotional reactions that will get confused with the main ones. Boom, social media sharing heaven, who cares if the science was valid or not?

And to be clear, the science underneath might be valid, probably even is, but it would need the expertise of someone who understands statistics and medicine to decide whether you should take action based on this or not.