alt Hacker News> Which is why I find it pretty funny that Ozempic is arguably the biggest weight-loss breakthrough in decades - and all it does is make you…eat less. Billions in R&D, and the answer was the platitude the whole time. Ha.
The problem was not that we didn’t know what to do ("eat less"), but to enable that solution.
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Classic case of "simple != easy". Things can be simple, yet hard, and that's an underrated measure of difficulty in my experience.
The problem was always about enablement. We know the solution to smoking too, the problem is enablement.
Reducing the (frankly near-miraculous) host of effects that GLP-1 medications induce in the human body to "make you eat less" is grounds for instant mistrust. There is so, so, so much more that goes into them than just reducing appetite (whether it's helping your brain modulate dopamine signals, smoothing out glycemic control, reducing inflammation more generally, the list goes on). I think the pharmaceutical industry is as guilty of time and money wasting as anyone, but billions in R&D did actually yield quite a coup this time!
I'm far from being an expert on this specific subject but, I have the impression that Ozempic does a lot of things in one's body in order to reduce the appetite and result in eating less. Which is to say that, the author sounds like he's implying that the solution to this was trivial all along, by deliberately omitting the underlying mechanism that makes it work.
After reading this sentence, I don't trust the author. Misleading as hell.
The success of GLP-1 is based on the fact that the patient can eat less without suffering. No food noise, reduced feelings of hunger, smaller stomach capacity.
Saying that the platitude works is like saying that "just stop doing fentanyl" is the recipe to solve the fentanyl crisis in the US.
I will poke at the last sentence a bit, as it's important to understanding the phrnomena you described. There was and is a lot of FUD about this. Many people knew it's true, including from first hand experience.
Discussion about it in news, conversations would get it mixed up into stories of genetics, free will, macronutrient balance, personal identities, culture etc. Call it nuance; complexity, or bullshit. People had/have a hard time accepting "eat less to not be fat".
This is one of the things you actually can change about your body, appearance and health outcomes! There are many things that are immutable - people would try to convince you the biggest mutable thing is also out of reach.
The whole irony is that quote is making the exact mistake his post is about: "eat less" is great advice for people where eating less isn't that hard, but it's not helpful advice for people who struggle mightily with eating less and who live in an environment of calorie rich, nutrient poor foods. I've naturally always been skinny, I often find eating a chore. Eating less is incredibly easy for me, but eating right and exercising enough to maintain muscle is the hard part for me.
I mean, we've been telling people "eat less" for literally decades and Americans are fatter than ever. The only thing that finally brought down societal-wide obesity stats was GLP-1s.
And we laugh at AI for being simple minded
The mind is always the biggest battle
In the first place, the focus on weight loss is missing the point. Weight loss is just a side effect of metabolic change, and ideally you want to lose the fat instead of muscle.
Any means of positive metabolic change is fine, but some are better than others. Ozempic is definitely on the lower tiers of success because the body recomp and more meaningful habits never happen.
It is literally crazy how many people, (particularly women, just an observation) have told me that they are some sort of special case, where eating less food will not make them lose weight. Earnestly told me to my face that “calories in, calories out” is simply not true for everybody. “Where do you think the matter that makes up your body comes from??” I ask incredulously, already knowing that this is just going to get me into trouble.
Obviously there are dozens of completely legitimate social and physiological complicating factors, but at the end of the day, you are what you eat; but there is a certain segment of the population who refuses to believe it. They hold sacred the food they consume and the weight they gain.
To be fair, we also knew how to enable it long before Ozempic arrived. We had hundreds of thousands of years of successfully "eating less" to look back upon for answers.
But drugs allow one to remove themselves from society, which is far more appealing.
Plenty of options exist that enable the solutions around weight loss. The issue is that 99% of those are difficult to either start and/or maintain consistency with. Ozempic just happened to address both of those issues in one swoop because people as a whole are incredibly intolerant to any friction in their lives.
I would push back and say that a lot of people didn't actually know that. They came up with elaborate reasons why eating less doesn't work, but keto works, or paleo works, or eliminating sugar works, or vegan works, or it's just physically impossible to lose weight.