‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers

First off, no, not everyone should be on these drugs, there are side effects as well as known drug interactions that can be dangerous and not everyone needs them.

Second, please, please, please stop listing your BMI as if it were a definitive measure of health. To begin with it doesn't correlate well with actual percentage body fat because it doesn't differentiate between fat and muscle. Second, the study which created the BMI was based on a population sample from a single town and all participants were within 4 inches of each other in height, and nearly all were effectively average height with similar lean body masses. If your lean body mass does not conform to the expected range from that study, BMI cannot accurately determine if you are obese, skinny, a body builder or just tall/short.

Finally, rapid weightloss is dangerous, and if you're eating fewer than 1k calories in a day while experiencing extreme fatigue and brain fog, you are more likely to be losing significant muscle mass than fat. This is may be extremely because your heart could be weakened, which could kill you. It's great that your cholesterol and overall weight is down, it's terrifying that you're eating so few calories while being unable to maintain enough physical activity to keep your body from canabilizing vital muscle tissues.

If you're content with where you are then that's fine. I won't claim it's going to be easy to change things. But I do think there are few things you could change that will nearly guarantee success:

- There's no good or bad food. The number is the only thing that matters. Don't feel bad about eating chips and candy everyday. That's pretty much what I do. All you need is to hit the number.

- Always keep track of how much you've eaten. A big binge is not an excuse to stop counting. After a year or so, counting will become second nature and can be done purely with mental math. But initially, you want to write all the numbers down. Date | calories in | morning weight.

- Don't tie the counting efforts to any other effort. You mention walking 5 hours a day. That's some other unrelated thing. Don't ever mentally link this to your weight loss effort. If you want to do it, do it, but it should have nothing to do with losing weight. Counting and keeping records is your primary job.

- Your family should know what you're up to. They're there to help you achieve your goals. If you've already eaten, they shouldn't let you have a family meal with them. If they just let you get away with this, let them know you don't appreciate it. When you mess up, they should care and think it's a bad thing.

- Get this idea of a "cycle" out of your head. There is no cycle, every day is a new day. Your behavior only looks like some cycle caused by external forces post facto. Everybody trying to form a habit has a similar experience. There is nothing weight loss specific going on here. When you break a good streak everything can go out of the window. This is why it's important to keep the required actions as simple as possible. The more you couple different efforts the harder it's going to be. When you mess up you have to take the loss and move on. A good streak helps but don't dwell on breaking it.

- You have to have a sense of urgency and importance. Those around you should too. "I guess that means I'll get some obesity disease at some point" - just think how ridiculous that sounds. You know you can potentially prevent a serious disease (most people never have that opportunity) but you're just gonna sit there and let some cycle run its course. I mean, come on! How can you wake up everyday and not want to stop it today? What about your children? Perhaps they will inherit your eating habits (stats do show high heritablity), perhaps it would be nice to show them how to keep it under control? You owe it to them. Why doesn't your spouse think that's a huge deal?

It's one of the few things in life where you are literally guaranteed to get a good result if you do what you're supposed to do. There's a lot of advice on how to do this or that, get rich or whatever. But you can never prove these things are guaranteed to work so I can understand if people have a hard time motivating themselves. With weight loss you have a 100% guarantee of success. Personally, I don't see it as some random little problem. Pretty much any effort in life looks like this. You want an outcome, you think of the necessary actions and then the entire ballgame is about actually implementing these actions.

Do you often cook with ingredients like canned beans or canned diced tomatoes or premade stock? Do you buy any kind of grocery store bread, including the "fresh" stuff from the bakery section? All of these things usually contain added sugar in the US, sometimes in shockingly huge amounts. I think people from other countries don't know to look out for sugar in these kinds of processed but not ultra-processed food items because such things don't usually contain sugar (because it's totally unnecessary). So even if you're mostly cooking with raw ingredients you could be getting way more sugar in your diet than you did wherever you lived before.

How much did you lose, how long did you take it, and how long have you been off of it?

Nope. I never buy anything without reading ingredients and yes the US is really bad about adding sugar to stuff. Even some meat which is absurd.

But when I say I cook from scratch I mean it. If I want beans I buy a bag of dried beans. I will sometimes buy canned Marzano tomatoes from Italy, ingredients: tomatoes.