Weight-loss drug found to shrink muscle in mice, human cells

The problem with appetite suppression drugs is that they simply make you not feel hungry, but do nothing to fix your lack of discipline and self-control, I'm sure most people who lose weight on these drugs, and then come off, will just go back to their bad habits.

So why not just stay on the drugs?

You technically could but the idea here is to cut the excess bodyfat percent and get into the healthy range, rather than to keep losing weight, which itself is also unhealthy, but once you become dependent on the drugs to maintain your weight, without fixing your habits, you will just go between getting off the drug, binge eating, gaining the weight back, and hoping back on the drug and losing weight while barely eating, I can't imagine bouncing between such two extremities being good for your health.

Can’t you just adjust the dosage to stabilize?

K. But getting to a healthy weight by means of discipline and self control has a ~1% success rate[1]. That's dismal.

I wouldn't blame anyone for choosing the drugs over dying early.

[1] https://www.healthline.com/health-news/obese-people-have-sli...

Well, lots of people back off those dosages once they reach their goal weight and have minimal difficulty maintaining. As we know more about the long term effects of staying on the drug, it's totally possible it might make sense just to keep on it.

But as someone who spent a good chunk of their early adulthood having no problem with healthy habits and then slowly slipping into tons of bad ones, getting on tirzepatide has made it as easy for me to make those healthy choices that I made when I was in my 20s. Ones that I struggled with mightily after I got fat.

Hopefully more and more people will use them as a tool to help them get things back and order and then stay there, whether or not they keep taking it.

Most kill you. If I didn't misread articles on ozempic, they can cause digestive problems where food rots in your stomach. Bad depression was another side effect which blows my mind since you'd think looking better would make you feel great. And these were the minor things.

Yes, you can. Or most people can. It’s called a maintenance dose and is usually the minimum dose available for the particular drug you are on.

As these become more common and doctors more aware, the dosing guidelines will become much more nuanced and dialed in.

> digestive problems where food rots in your stomach

I assume you mean gastroparesis - this is an extremely rare side effect

> Bad depression

Again, pretty rare side effect.

If you think these are the minor things I'm confused as to what you think the major side effects are.

I don't think you realize the amount of people have taken Ozempic or similar drug. I'm lucky enough that I haven't had issues with body weight, but if I believe the stats (and my observations in real world confirm it), about 15% of adults are on it.

If it was "killing people", we would be seeing it literally everywhere. We're not talking about a small scale 50K+ observation... we're talking about literal millions.

> Bad depression was another side effect

What? Ozempic has been noted for its mild _anti_ depression activity.

This says 6% are currently on a GLP-1 drug and 15% have ever taken one in their life:

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2024/05/10/health/ozempic-glp-1-surv...

If you find it hard to control your eating when you always feel hungry, taking a drug to reduce your feelings of hunger is self-control. It's exactly looking at your body as a system and controlling it.

Maybe you can titrate off the drug and in a perfect world, the hunger signal doesn't come back on all the time; that'd be great. Maybe, while on the drug, you've developed eating habits that you can continue while off the drug, even though you feel hungry all the time, again. Maybe, it's just too hard to ignore the hunger signal, and you need the drug for a lifetime.

That's not to say these drugs are necessarily wonderful. Previous generations of weight loss drugs came with nasty side effects that weren't immediately apparent. Fen-Phen was a wonder drug until it ruined people's heart valves. Stimulant appetite supressants have issues because they're stimulants. Cigarrettes have appetite supressant properties (not surprising, nicotine is a stimulant), but they're cigarettes.

Personally, I don't have an overactive hunger signal; so when I eat poorly and gain weight, it's on me. But other people I know have a totally different experience with hunger. If your body is telling you all the time that you need to eat, it's hard to say no. Just like it's hard not to scratch when your skin is itchy. I can resist itchyness sometimes, but when it's constant, I'm going to scratch.

both can be true. it can reduce depression in 60% of people and increase it in 10%

Fair, I remembered my stats wrong. But it's still 15M people in US that are actively on it. That's a lot of people.

Yeah, I am sceptical, but we'll have to see how it pans out.

Vanishingly few people succeed in exercising discipline and self-control long term. But obesity is caused by food addiction and the idea is once you've kicked the addiction and got over the withdrawal etc then it's gone and you no longer have to fight it. I don't "exercise discipline" to stay thin. I just don't eat copious amounts of junk food because I'm not addicted to it.

So if the drugs are used to soften the withdrawal symptoms such that people can learn to like real food and kick the addictive crap then that's good. But if they're used as a magic pill with no other lifestyle changes then I'm sure people will just go back to what they were doing before once those pangs come back.

I'd still rather we went after the industry peddling the addictive shit. We went after the cigarette companies. But food companies seem untouchable.

$$$

Gastroparesis is literally the method of action of GLP1 agonists. It slows gastric motility. Gastroparesis is literally slowed motility of the stomach (where 20% of food stays in your stomach after 4 hours). It doesn't matter why, that is the literal diagnostic criteria, ergo it literally causes gastroparesis.