alt Hacker News> Diets also don’t stick when you discontinue them.
Yes, obviously. Which is why sustainable weight loss takes a commitment to making a change in lifestyle.
What’s more sustainable, changing your lifestyle to maintain the weight you lost, or being beholden to taking a drug to maintain that same lifestyle change for a hope at maintenance?
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The drug is more likely to work long-term. Diet & exercise, as a treatment plan, are distressingly ineffective.
Well-studied problem.
It makes more sense when you realize that something like sheer dieting/exercising willpower isn't why some populations are skinnier than others. Pick another country with a healthier-weight population, start placing some of them in the US, and they'll gain weight. Put them back, and it'll drop again.
If "just diet and exercise" (the advice, and individual effort to that effect) aren't what are keeping some populations skinnier, why would it cure a population with an obesity epidemic?
From the last time I looked at studies on basically any diet, I think prescribing people drugs for life probably lasts longer. Do you have any longitudinal studies of people making lifestyle changes for 10+ years to keep off weight?
> What’s more sustainable, changing your lifestyle to maintain the weight you lost, or being beholden to taking a drug to maintain that same lifestyle change for a hope at maintenance?
That's some pretty... charged language. But even so: the drug, clearly. People take drugs reliably as a matter of empirical fact. People likewise emphatically don't "change their lifestyles" as a general rule. If they did we wouldn't be talking about this new drug, would we?
At a large enough scale, being beholden to a drug is far more sustainable.
We’ve tried shaming people into being healthy. Amazingly enough, it doesn’t work very well.