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Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

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Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#931
post #762

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Alcohol is no joke. I never got this, other than seeing it's hard for others. So in that sense I agree. I've seen the effects on others and how hard it is to quit. That's no joke indeed. I just don't get why I find it quite easy to stop drinking for a year (or longer). While I haven't been able to stop for life, doing those yearly challenges is relatively easy, for me. If I'd be a normal person then that's whatever…

I’m a recovering alcoholic. I’m almost positive that the effects of alcohol are wildly different between the two of us. When I drink my brain spits out more reward chemicals than I know what to do with. It makes me feel extremely energetic and creative. It inflates my sense of self-worth and gives me confidence. It’s genuinely more enjoyable than sex. And that’s how it dug its claws in, because almost all of those go…

Thanks for commenting on it.

> I’m a recovering alcoholic. I’m almost positive that the effects of alcohol are wildly different between the two of us. When I drink my brain spits out more reward chemicals than I know what to do with. It makes me feel extremely energetic and creative. It inflates my sense of self-worth and gives me confidence. It’s genuinely more enjoyable than sex.

Yea, me too. Holy shit. I have this too on certain things but not on alcohol.

> And getting sober means having to learn to want whatever is left of your life.

That's a good/harsh lesson for any addiction I think. Thanks for formulating that so clearly.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#932
post #929

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say there is a new discovery tomorrow - there is a virus that lives in your mitochondria, and makes them unable to produce energy. We can make a vaccine against it, and nobody will ever get fat. Would you be against the vaccine?

Why would I be against that? I'm not against ozempic either. I'm just against people who throw their hands in the air, say "my fatness is a disease" and continue eating 4000 calories a day while hardly moving at all. And just to be clear I'm not against the fatness - if you want to be fat that's fine, I don't care. It's your life. And if you want to say it's a mental disorder that's fine too, addiction is real and I…

All right. I guess you're right then, and the entire world is lying and everybody wants nothing else than to eat more.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#933
post #929

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would I be against that? I'm not against ozempic either. I'm just against people who throw their hands in the air, say "my fatness is a disease" and continue eating 4000 calories a day while hardly moving at all. And just to be clear I'm not against the fatness - if you want to be fat that's fine, I don't care. It's your life. And if you want to say it's a mental disorder that's fine too, addiction is real and I…

All right. I guess you're right then, and the entire world is lying and everybody wants nothing else than to eat more.

Entire world? Everybody? No, I think most people are completely aware of the link between overeating and overweight. If everyone around you agree that food intake and weight are entirely unrelated things then maybe you're just in some kind of echo chamber. Or maybe people just don't care enough to challenge your ideas. I don't know, but I do know for a fact that what I said earlier is true and that it is the overwhelming scientific consensus.

That's why common remedies for obesity are things like dieting, stomach reducing surgery to reduce capacity for food, and ozempic and similar drugs that reduce appetite. See how the common denominator here is less food? Diet for those who can do it that way, more drastic measures for those who struggle with self control. And of course all of these solutions work better when coupled with regular physical activity. Simply taking a daily walk for half an hour is a great way to burn some extra calories and get the heart pumping at least a little, this has many benefits beyond burning calories.

Trust me I know it's hard. I'm not in the shape I wish I was. It's a lot easier to order a pizza than go to the store, figure out what to make, buy ingredients and cook a heathy meal. And it's so nice just crushing half or more of a large pizza in one sitting. The amount of junk food i can eat before I feel full is way more than I should have. It's a lot easier to spend all day in front of the computer or on the couch than getting out and doing some exercise. It's hard to do the things I know I should do, when what I should do and what I want to do are so different. I know from experience that when you get going it's easier to keep it going but I've also fallen off the wagon a lot. And it's not like you just do it for a little while and you're good, it's a permanent lifestyle change. It takes months or years of dieting to get down to a normal weight, it's a huge task.

But if you don't even believe that this is the solution, which it unequivocally is by the way, then you're either going to waste your time and probably money on things that don't work or more likely just keep eating yourself into an early grave while telling yourself you're just unlucky.

And I think it's worth some negative social points for saying things that might upset some people on social media, if I can maybe influence someone to get their shit together and work towards a better life.

This isn't opinion, I am 100% sure about these things and I'm not paid to say them. I just want to help. Trust me, you can lose weight and eating less and moving more is the way to do it. Ozempic and similar drugs can help with that and there's no shame in using them. The only thing that matters is getting healthy.

Obesity is a deadly condition and it's miserable. Trust me I've been in great shape I know exactly what I'm missing. And I'm not even very overweight, I'm about 100kg and it's already miserable. I can't imagine what it must be like for someone to weigh 150+. Struggling to breathe, getting winded just from getting off the couch. It's no way to spend your limited time in this world.

Oh and I forgot to mention a cool fact in my previous comment: that CO2 you're breathing out - that is your fat. That's where your fat goes when you burn it, you literally breathe it out. And the carbs of course. Your body turns the food you eat into energy and CO2. Unless you eat too much, then it turns it into fat to store it for later.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#934

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After discontinuation of Ozempic, people start to gain the weight again (and buy again more food), that’s why the spending changes again.

People must be getting prescribed this medication in a vacuum without any corresponding nutritional guidance. I can't see any way of going back to my previous eating habits, mainly because I've really had my eyes opened to how mindless some of my eating was before.

You're in the faux enlightenment that everybody gets during weight loss. Everybody I've ever known losing weight starts discovering the wonders of healthy eating and nutrition as they lose weight, vowing never again to go back to their old habits. Then they slip further down the line and 1-2 years they're back to their original weight, plus some.

Weight loss isn't the challenge. Maintaining it for the rest of your life is.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#935

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is no surprise to anybody with common sense, the data for discontinuing GLP-1s show exactly the intuitive outcome. Zero diet change, zero habit change for the vast majority of users. Weight loss is accomplished via biochemical tricks to eat less volume of calorie dense junk food, rather than diet substitution. When the artificial appetite suppression ends, volume of the same food increases again leading to weig…

> they don’t have the discipline and motivation to maintain the weight loss That argument has been tried for years and yet it fails nearly 100% of the time. Should we be trying something different than claiming it's a moral issue? Or is that too scientific?

It's entirely discipline and motivation. Just because only a select few people carry it through and maintain it doesn't change that. Just very few people in this world are truly disciplined and self-motivated.

You can see it all around you in one form or another:- overweight/obesity, alcohol consumption, smoking/vaping, people spending 5+ hours staring at glowing rectangles.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#936
post #913

Been following a whole food diet for a few years now, with one simple rule: avoid anything pre-made that has preservative or additives. Everything is made as much as possible from scratch with fresh, frozen or dried ingredients. The only downside is most fresh ingredients need to be used within a few days (lack of preservatives/additives) - which means often making a stew using anything left-over that needs to be eat…

This is the most sensible attitude I've seen people express that has led to meaningful weight loss, maintenance and as far as we can see across large timespans, lifestyle change.

It's incredibly hard to gain weight by eating whole or minimally processed foods. The destruction and recombination of foods (and their food matrix) into ultra processed foods is one of the driving causes behind people eating more because the artificial textures and softness is one of the main drivers of over-eating, especially of high calorie foods.

I'd wager that people could replicate the same satiety induced weight loss (to a slower, but safer extent) through minimising ultra processed foods than GLP drugs.

It reduces your supermarket shop to about 10% of the store. Almost anything packed and transported is out of the question, as are entire rows of capitalism-driven junk food.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#937

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the point. Supermarket food is cheaper than restaurant food, virtually without exception. But the 'routine of supermarket shopping' creates 'noise' that makes you want to eat more / more often? How does that work. I tend to go to the supermarket once a week and make this buying decision on a full stomach. I've not bought snacks or soda during this type of shopping since I was a teenager, I simply r…

> Supermarket food is cheaper than restaurant food, virtually without exception. Supermarket food is cheaper than sitting at a restaurant. For take-out, I don't see why it couldn't be cheaper considering whatever you buy and do at home, the restaurant does at scale.

Sure if you put a cash value on opportunity cost.

In that way hiring a cleaner to come clean your house is cheaper than cleaning yourself, because they're professionals and take less time than you would yourself.

But if you don't pay yourself an hourly wage to cook and clean (which is true for most people), then paying someone else to do it will require you to spend more cash.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#938

We’re seeing similar in the UK, fast food restaurants are having to adapt and dieting companies have outright collapsed. Sounds conspiratorial, but when you look at the revenue impact this is having, the deluge of baseless articles about it making your eyes fall out or “users who stop taking it gain the weight back” or whatever malady they can make a tenuous link to, it all make a lot more sense. The biggest food com…

“users who stop taking it gain the weight back” is not a baseless claim.

Most of the people on GLP will come off the drugs and regain the weight back to their original weight, if not heavier, just like people who temporarily restrict eating in any other way (discipline). You need real lifestyle change. Even the people shilling the drugs tell people that.

Personally, I hope all of these business fail. Screw the fast food industry, dieting companies (they don't want customers to actually succeed), and the pharma companies that are restricting access to people who actually need GLP drugs.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#939

Anyone else notice the lack of crowds at their gym post new years?

I don't think this is based around GLP drugs. I've noticed the gym, swimming pools, running and cycling routes I usually frequent have been lower every year for the past 5 years or so (the spike in January is smaller every year).

I think new years resolutions are dying out, or people are doing non-fitness based resolutions (eg. Dry January) more often now.

Re: Ozempic is changing the foods Americans buy

#940
post #899
post #877

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Share to share any of it?

Always a fair request. I don't know it well enough or have time at the moment, but afaik it's the medical consensus: Obesity is a disease, (mostly) not a result of behavior. Eating less and/or more activity doesn't cure people; iirc bodies adjust to retain the same amount of fat, etc. under the new conditions.

It is a disease as in “your metabolism is slow” so you need to cut food even more. It is a disease as “you have problem with controlling your impulses and therefore crave food”

Psychological diseases are not better or worse from psychical/metabolic ones. They are real, and for some of them we have or we develop medicine.

Nobody is claiming that obesity can’t be a result of a disease, but under the hood it always ends up as: calories surplus is stored as fat.

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