alt Hacker NewsThis is so stupid.
If you want to not be fat, exercise and eat fewer calories. Full stop.
The fact that a certain group of individuals don’t have that self control is just evidence that education and public health have a place. Drugs won’t solve that.
These drugs are needed for people with metabolic disorders caused by years of food abuse or poor genetics. It’s not a population wide solution.
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A meta-analysis of 29 long term weight loss studies[1] found:
> By 5 years, more than 80% of lost weight was regained
I think a much better hypothesis is that CICO does work, physically, but there are metabolic, hormonal and mental factors that either predispose towards obesity or make it difficult to escape.
It's a bit like telling gambling addicts to "just stop gambling" or depressed people to "lighten up".
And along comes GLP-1 drugs, where obese people find it easy to lose weight, find new motivation for life, etc. The GLP-1s aren't increasing metabolism, nor are they making people exercise, nor are they making food less available. Yet somehow, a hormonal mediation is greatly successful, hmm.
“This is so stupid, if you want to stop smoking put down the cigarette! Full stop.”
Like (a) no shit and (b) the question is why can’t people. Because we know objectively they can’t.
The drugs work by literally solving your self control issue, and to such an extent it works beyond just food.
We have 50+ years of incontrovertible evidence that that advice doesn’t work for the overwhelming majority of people. “Just have self control” is the stupid take imho.