> I'm saying that healthy habits are simply a matter of understanding.
Plenty of people have heard everything there is to hear on this, understand it, and still fail to implement it.
> I did not change my diet.
You plainly did. You do not lose weight without your diet changing.
> If anything I just added more variety with a specific intent and it worked.
This is changing your diet.
> Even just changing the order in which one eats things (fiber before sugary foods) can make a big difference
Changing your diet to eat more filling foods is a very frequently recommended thing, yes.
> Once I got the blood glucose under control all the strong cravings and eating mistakes basically went away on their own without my conscious effort.
My blood glucose has always been excellent. It did not stop me from having food noise and cravings.
Sorry, you're right. I meant that I did not make significant changes to my diet. My point was I didn't really change what I eat, but how I eat. I still hate certain vegetables like carrots, kale, brussel sprouts, etc. and just added more of the nutritionally equivalent and culinarily far superior vegetables I was already eating.
That's not willpower. That's looking things up in the USDA database and tweaking my existing recipes. Why force nasty carrots onto the plate when I can eat spinach, cantaloupe, pumpkin, sweet potato, etc.?
I guess I also didn't emphasize enough that I took things super slowly? Taking 5 years to do what I did is a really modest goal. I just wanted to manage risk with minimal change. This is the pareto principle in action.
If we're really going to argue over stats, the effects of GLP-1 is meaningless noise in comparison and probably way harder to commit to. I just wanted to eat good and not feel like shit all the time. Isn't that what everyone wants? What if instead of there being "one weird trick" or a "miracle drug", we consider that basic nutrition is simply misunderstood and full of hundreds of weird tricks that are proportionally much easier to implement and they're damn tasty too?