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

> like its something against those facts above

I’ve seen multiple friends go from eating like shit, including chugging sodas, to not compulsively ordering dessert and no sodas in the house. I think all of them have since quit Ozempic, each seeing some rebound but nothing comprehensive and, most notably to your argument, not in the behaviour modifications.

The only way to lose weight without damaging oneself is to combine more exercise with less eating, which means becoming comfortable being hungry. Yes, it's difficult -- especially after developing bad eating habits over a long time -- but moderation is required in all things. It takes a long time to become overweight, so the ramp down to a leaner existence must necessarily take a significant amount of time, or there's going to be added risk.

Just like in programming, there is no silver bullet; there's only hard work.

That's true for an individual, but if you're looking at a population then you're seeing a situation where we have zero other solutions that are actually effective at curbing obesity. The only "natural" way to solve it is probably to overhaul our entire culture, redesign our cities and neighborhoods, et c., and that's not happening.

Skinny people move to the US and get fat. They're not skinnier back in their home country because they've got greater willpower or are harder workers, but because they aren't in the US. If harder work isn't why skinnier countries are skinnier, we shouldn't expect it to help us out of our problem, and indeed, we have nothing else we've studied that is terribly effective over time, and certainly nothing cheap enough to deploy on a large scale.

Again, yes, for an individual your perspective is the only thing one has (well... until these drugs) but looking from a policy level, it's useless.

A person's body mass is nothing more than the combination of what a person eats and what a person does in their life.

The only really effective policy is to inform people that that is the simple, honest truth of every single person, and that the quality of food we eat is important in that equation.

Eat better food, be more active. Yes, it is difficult, especially for us peasants.

But that is science. I hope a miracle drug helps folks preyed upon by the food industry, but side effects of that industry's drugs leave me skeptical of their being lastingly beneficial.

> The only really effective policy is to inform people that that is the simple, honest truth of every single person, and that the quality of food we eat is important in that equation.

It's literally not effective. As in, well-studied, isn't effective.

Again, it's the only guidance one has to go on, personally, so it's fine to hold onto that as an individual navigating the world, but it is emphatically not effective policy.

I wrestled in high school and college, my friend. If you don't eat and work out a lot, you will lose weight, guaranteed. It's the nature of the human body; it's thermodynamics and biochemistry and hard as hell as we get older, especially when poor.

But sure, it's not effective but only because people have a hard time fending off our cravings. It requires breaking our cycles and learning how to eat better and eat less and do something other than lay around watching tv.

As to policy: if we curbed the corps' ability to profit off our ill-health, then we'd surely be doing something positive for society. It would also be very helpful to have cleaner air and more and larger parks that are safe for one and all. What can I say, I dream big.

Personally, I recommend everyone avoid any and all refined sugar and alcohol, as they mess with our hormones and gut biome. And that's very difficult for 2024 America, evidently.

>I wrestled in high school and college, my friend. If you don't eat and work out a lot, you will lose weight, guaranteed. It's the nature of the human body

That is like dismissing a bug report because "it works fine on my machine", though.

Yes, it works if you do it. No, relying on it to get a population to lose weight doesn't work, even if that population has self-selected for wanting to lose weight and you educate the hell out of them.

> I wrestled in high school and college, my friend. If you don't eat and work out a lot, you will lose weight, guaranteed. It's the nature of the human body; it's thermodynamics and biochemistry and hard as hell as we get older, especially when poor.

No one is questioning CICO.

The part being questioned is why it's more difficult for others. For example, my wife and I share an almost identical diet and activity level, yet i struggle to keep weight on and she struggles to keep weight off and with similar lifestyles. CICO works of course, but not only do our bodies innately do different things with the calories that they process but we simply experience that world differently.

I could drop down to unhealthily thin levels without even trying. She would be in misery even trying to maintain my weight.

This isn't an excuse necessarily. Rather just saying there's a lot of information beyond simple CICO that we're missing. Complexity in biome, addictive behaviors, and a full on assault from the food industry.

The ease i have in weight loss is not due to my own efforts. Thin people shouldn't break their arm patting themselves on the back, because imo it's usually not due to our own will.

> The only way to lose weight without damaging oneself is to combine more exercise with less eating, which means becoming comfortable being hungry

No, not really. Yes, this is how you lose weight, but this is not how you have to be to be a healthy weight.

I'm thin, I don't exercise, and I'm not hungry. I feel great.

I can sit around and jerk myself off about discipline, but the truth is I have none. I have done absolutely nothing to be in this position, it's all luck and factors far beyond my comprehension.

if a drug is able to induce that same feeling in others, I say go for it. It sucks that a normal caloric intake translates to pain, hunger, and constant brain noise for a large segment of the population.

> The part being questioned is why it's more difficult for others. For example, my wife and I share an almost identical diet and activity level, yet i struggle to keep weight on and she struggles to keep weight off and with similar lifestyles. CICO works of course, but not only do our bodies innately do different things with the calories that they process but we simply experience that world differently.

If you and your wife eat the same diet in the same quantities, it's no surprise she would have a propensity to gain weight and you wouldn't unless she's substanially larger (i.e., taller and/or heavier) than you. Women in general just burn fewer calories for similar sized vs. men. That said, this is ALL population averages. Everyone knows someone who seems to be able to eat literally anything and never gain weight... it likely is just as simple as their metabolism is such that they burn more calories than the average person. Population variation will always lead to some people with outliers both in high expenditure and low expenditure.

> it likely is just as simple as their metabolism is such that they burn more calories than the average person. Population variation will always lead to some people with outliers both in high expenditure and low expenditure.

That's the point though. I'm saying that we burn calories at different rates. We burn fat at different rates. We have different rates of addiction, cravings, etc.

Just saying CICO is the same boring and borderline inaccurate language that has led to nearly zero change in the population at large. may as well just tell them to use physics correctly to lose the weight, because it's the same effective language.

To even determine CICO is fraught with difficulty and inaccuracy in both CI and CO. You can hand make everything, weigh every ingredient, and even then you struggle to determine how much you're CO. At best you'll have an estimated CO but then what do you do when your weight isn't changing? you have to start adjusting the math because clearly you're not burning as much as you think you are.

This is made much, much worse with the fact that we don't actually burn that many calories with exercise. And even with what is burned, the rate of burn changes drastically based on your current weight and how long you've been losing weight.

The fact is, the point is, CICO ignores all the real challenges and thereby all the real problems people need to understand and face.

> The fact is, the point is, CICO ignores all the real challenges and thereby all the real problems people need to understand and face.

I think we'll have to disagree here. At the end of the day CICO is the formula. That obviously doesn't account for the human factor in regards to the adherenace rate, but it does, fully encompass the 'if you were a robot and were fully adherent how do you lose/gain weight' method.

> To even determine CICO is fraught with difficulty and inaccuracy in both CI and CO. You can hand make everything, weigh every ingredient, and even then you struggle to determine how much you're CO. At best you'll have an estimated CO but then what do you do when your weight isn't changing? you have to start adjusting the math because clearly you're not burning as much as you think you are.

I won't say it's 'easy', but it's also not particularly hard either with the multitude of widely available food databases for measuring calories in. As for calories out, it's arguably even simpler: measure your weight every day, take the average across the week, and watch your weight trend week over week. Calories out can be calculated simply by comparing calories in vs. weight lost/gained... and extrapolating. It's simple math, and very effective in my experience.

> This is made much, much worse with the fact that we don't actually burn that many calories with exercise. And even with what is burned, the rate of burn changes drastically based on your current weight and how long you've been losing weight.

Essentially irrelevant if you follow my above suggestion for how to measure calories out. It's just part of the bucket of calories burned, so as long as you're reasonably consistent with the amount of exercise you do then your averaged weight will account for any exercise based caloric expenditure.

> CICO is the formula

This is like trying to solve aerodynamics with Newtonian physics only. It’s not useful. CICO ignores the variability of base metabolism.

What does base metabolic variability have to do with using CICO to modify your weight? The intake is easy to measure. The outtake is empirically knowable by change in weight over time. It’s really that simple.