I wouldn’t be so fast to downvote this. There is strong evidence that willpower is sometimes not enough, and if we have to provide a drug like we would for a brain chemistry or other chemical imbalance, we shouldn’t turn away from an appetite suppressant to solve for this. We simply need to drive the price down to make it less costly than all of the healthcare currently going into second order effects of broad population obesity.
That’ll help you look good with your clothes on. Gotta lift those heavy weights if you want to look good with your clothes off though.
I don't know much about this stuff, but could anyone explain why willpower isn't enough? Like - isn't this something that is in our control?
Also - if you don't have the willpower to lose weight, wouldn't taking weight loss drugs put you at risk of relying on meds for everything? (Including stuff you might have the willpower for - now that you've tried meds, why would you ever do stuff the hard way?)
It is chemical and metabolic and hormonal. Stop eating for a week, and that feeling is not your willpower waning.
It's not easy to willpower past biology, which for many includes unbalanced hunger control mechanisms. I chose a low-carbohydrate diet to control my appetite. But if semaglutide allows people to lose weight, then it's probably better than obesity.
They probably could have been doing keto this entire time, but doctors cant prescribe it, the US Dietary Guidelines recommend against it, and the largest US medical organizations say it might kill you. Nor is it terribly difficult. But keto is not effective because of willpower, it's effective because it's chemical and metabolic and hormonal.
It's a chronic disease and there are many chronic diseases that are treated with permanent medication - diabetes, blood pressure, mental illness, HIV, to name a few. You can't will yourself to stop being obese any easier than you can will yourself to stop being depressed. We simply aren't consciously in control of our appetite or metabolism.
And it's worth remembering that obesity contributes to many other diseases and premature deaths. Treating it long term will prevent a lot of human misery and billions in healthcare costs down the road, even with the high price tag that it currently has.
I think the fact that millions of people want (and try) to lose weight, but fail, over and over again, is 100% proof that will power does not matter in the slightest. These drugs like Wegovy, Ozempic, etc are showing everyone that we don't consciously control our appetite. Our bodies and our brains will betray us and take control despite whatever our desires may be. Hopefully people start to view obesity with more compassion and less blame on the people who have the disease.
It may turn out that Ozempic has all these negative side effects that we just don’t know about yet.
But irrespective of that, what Ozempic/Wegovy/etc have clearly shown is that this isn’t a moral problem. It’s not a will power problem. It’s a freaking chemical problem.
If a simple drug that isn’t even designed to help people lose weight can help them lose weight so easily, it strongly indicates that the idea that obesity is a biochemical problem should be the front runner in explaining weight gain.
I lasted less than a week on semaglutide (Rybelsus). The hit to my general energy levels were too dramatic for it to be worth it for me. Especially considering that research shows that stopping semaglutide usually results in gaining around half the weight you lost back.
Fats are also super dense in calories, so reducing oil for cooking and reducing high fat food will also help tremendously. Combined with low sugar food it will lead to gradually decreasing the weight, bc other food is not so dense in calories
It's hard to eat once a day and accumulate needed macro. It's much easier with 2-3 intakes. Macro deficits can lead to pretty bad health consequences longterm.
7 days is quite extreme. In fact, I've readed somewhere that TRE provides about the same benefits as clasic fasting without the downside of stressing the organism that hard
Get a calorie counting app. I use Waistline which is open source.
Actually use it: enter everything. Find out the calorie values.
And then re-assess what you're eating after you have some actual data to work with.
There are plenty of metabolic rate calculators online: you don't need to be super accurate, you need to be consistent and follow the data (i.e. if you're still gaining weight then you're either not entering things into the app or you now know your BMR is lower than expected so you adjust accordingly).
Just starting to record food in an app made a huge difference for me, I was working out pretty aggressively and making progress on lifting/biking but my weight wasn't moving until I started recording calories. I still have days where I go over by a lot, but grazing was the number one behavior that improved out of just laziness. Recording 8 Oreos, one at a time across a day, is annoying. I've lost 27 pounds across the past two years, pretty consistently/slowly (with a few backslides).
My average calorie deficit on a daily basis is probably 100-150 calories max which is barely noticeable (I'm never hungry) but the app does prevent erasing that by eating 2 cookies at 1 am when I'm not actually hungry.
It's against the HN guidelines to comment on whether someone read an article, but I find it interesting that nobody has yet commented on section 3 of the article, which, um, stands out, calls attention to itself. The elephant in the room, as it were.
"That night, you deadlift your body weight. You sneak a photo of yourself in the mirror and email it to yourself with the subject heading “You Are A Warrior”."
I agree. It doesn't matter that it's his regretful private thoughts. I'm not a therapist, but that email is an artifact of a bigger mental health issue that is expressed in other ways. Narcissism? At least that!
This is uncharitable and I urge anyone thinking this way to consider if sometimes it’s okay to champion oneself /especially/ when done to escape feelings of self doubt.
If someone were like this all of the time? Sure. But that isn’t what this is about so I find it unfair to treat it as if this is some innate character flaw.
Totally. It's a story about love and yet that's not the thing most people are responding to.
I notice this a lot. When I wrote a blog post about the Remarkable 2 recently and it ended up on HN, very few of the comments were about my article - instead they were all about other people's thoughts on the Remarkable. This is ok, of course, but it's interesting to me that this is often how it goes on here. I wonder if it's high levels of self-absorption in HN readers or just a more widespread thing online where people respond to headlines rather than in-depth articles.
It's normal, and it's not even an online thing - it's an actual well-known phenomenon with newspapers. Most people read only headlines, be them online or on paper, and then react to them. They used to react while at a cafe or club, now we do it here.
#2 is basically it. #1 and #4 should be rolled into #2.
Portion control isn't such a strict thing either. Eat slowly and gauge your remaining appetite as you go. You'll naturally eat less when you don't care about "cleaning your plate". You don't have to eat 3 meals a day either. Self awareness is the key to controlling your consumption and this is beyond just food. Hit your macros otherwise and you're good.
That's silly, and a bit like saying "See, you didn't need to budget to get rid of your credit card debt. You just needed someone to give you a million dollars."
I'm relatively fit and tried semaglutide for reasons other than weight loss. The "full" feeling you feel when on it is nothing like I've ever experienced in my life. It's a cheat. I'm not saying people shouldn't take it, but I'll forever fight the idea some people have that it's just making you feel like skinny people. Most of us need to work for it too: deliberately stop eating before we're stuffed, not have terrible snack food in the house, limit sugary drinks, etc.
1. The analogy in your first paragraph isn't right, it wouldn't be like someone giving you money, it would be like someone intercepting your pay, doing all your payments, and then giving you only a small fraction to spend with for the month.
2. I dislike this "it's a cheat" thing. It makes it sound like it's easy on semaglutide. Which as someone who's been on it for a year or so... I can tell you. It's not easy. So when people say it's easy or a cheat or whatever. It diminishes the reasons why people are on it. It also makes the assumption that the people who are on it, didn't do anything else first. They just jumped straight onto the meds, diminishing their struggles before it.
I had tremendous problems losing weight, I'm a runner, I put in about 50km running each week, I would fight myself to not eat. I refused to drink, because that would lead to eating. I lived a miserable life. But more importantly my knees were getting damaged by the weight. So in the last year I lost the weight, because the one thing I couldn't fight with just willpower alone (eating), was suddenly far easier to fight.
That full feeling. That's one thing it does (which diminishes over time btw). The other thing it does is it totally removes the constant "what am I going to eat" thoughts in my head.
Imagine waking up, and you're already planning lunch, you skip breakfast to eat less calories. So when lunch comes, and something gets in the way of you eating.. you get furious. Same with dinner.. the whole day is consumed by thoughts of eating.
I mean, that last point is - again - normal for everyone. There's a reason "hangry" is a term. I had that same experience on semaglutide where I had to actually remember to eat...and drink water too, though I don't know if that's normal. That was novel to me.
None of us can live in eachother's bodies so we'll never know how everyone else experiences things. I have tried that medication though, and what it does to you isn't just putting you in line with my normal lived experience, nor my (skinny) wife's from what she tells me about how she feels about food.
Again, by all means, take it. If I were in your shoes I probably would too, and I wouldn't feel all that bad about it. Just don't think it's that easy for most of us normal-weight people to not eat. It's not, and it takes work every day.
I will say though, once I got a standing desk + treadmill it became a lot easier. They say you can't outexercise what you eat, but it's a lot easier when you're burning 1,000 calories a day walking. If you have that opportunity I'd recommend it.
Did you stop taking it just because it felt like 'cheating'? I don't understand this logic. If you had been taking it for weight loss, was it effective? Do you think that people should try it for weight loss?
No, I was trying it for another medical condition. It worked most of the week other than the 2-3 days after injection where a side effect made that condition effectively worse, so it wasn't worth it.
I did Keto for about 40 days a couple of years ago, it was very effective. However, it wasn't really about ketogenesis so much as it was about having a substantially reduced list of foods that I could eat. It forced me to select certain foods and I ended up with smaller portions.
I was away from my hometown for a couple of years, and had gained quite a bit of weight. My long-time, long-distance girlfriend wrote me a letter telling me that she'd gotten engaged to someone else and it sent me into a spiral. I lost somewhere on the order of 50 pounds over 6 months. I was depressed, I had very little appetite. I didn't have a car, so I was walking and biking everywhere. And I was in my early 20s, which makes a bigger difference than most of us are willing to admit.
It's a really lousy way to lose weight, but very effective.
I found intermittent fasting works well for my lifestyle.
Have no time in morning for gym. I replaced breakfast with coffee and almonds, have lunch with reasonable portions, dinner normal portions, and no food after 8 pm.
alternative title: “how to cope with depression after a break up” by Conan O brien’s web guy
Agree with no beer and limited alcohol. That saved me 10 lbs without working out. However, if you cannot live without beer or some other sugary treat, prepare to do a lot of cardio. It’s more of a preventative measure though. I find using VR for cardio workouts help a lot to counter the monotony with a wide variety of video games. I constantly tell myself that I’m just playing a video game.
As others have wrote, intermittent fasting is really great for portion control and general health.
If you really want to lose weight, you can’t really avoid weight lifting or resistance training. I feel with AR this will also get gamified just like cardio. Apple fitness helps with this, but I think there is now an AR Quest app that focuses on weights too
it does not get better. I've seen enough to tell you that. It's the same stories on repeat, remixed, reheated and served on a different plate. You have the same three part course over and over and over and over again on the lazy susan of samsara. Fuck that! Patience and waiting for the good times is a young mans' game. When you're older, you know that the same way your joints are shittier now and they're never getting better and you need to take ibuprofen more and more, the same is happening with your life. There's no point in lying to yourself that you're going be happy in a year or two or ten, you just need to keep going and keeping patient and waiting and then it never happens and you die alone having shat yourself. Fuck that. Fuck that. Fuck that. This is life. This is suffering. And this is fine. And the sooner we all lose this fucking delusion of hope, the sooner we all become enlightened and the sooner we can actually nonviolently cure this disease that's eating the planet.
Wow. This is just a nice story but it hit me unexpectedly hard.
My loss wasn’t to a bad relationship but losing my wife of 14 years to cancer. She was amazing. We conquered the world together and achieved remarkable things that will be her legacy to future generations. Her story will live on.
But loss is so universal. It is the one thing we can all absolutely be assured of. Every one of us will die. The “lucky” among us will live long enough to watch many of our friends and loved ones fall away. Many will be taken before they should have been.
It is a harsh reminder that the only thing of value that anyone has is often that which we trade for things of lesser value.
Time. It is the finite resource, and you don’t know how much you have. Worse yet, for every person in your life that matters to you, there is an unknown quantity of seconds that you might spend together before one of you is gone.
Just gone. Not away. Not apart. Not estranged. Just gone.
Value your time. Treasure time shared with loved ones. Make every day count for something that stretches out farther than yourself.
Live without fear, the worst is coming anyway. The things that you think limit your possibilities are most likely irrelevant from a different perspective. Find that perspective and the fear falls away.
55 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 107 ms ] threadThat’ll help you look good with your clothes on. Gotta lift those heavy weights if you want to look good with your clothes off though.
Also - if you don't have the willpower to lose weight, wouldn't taking weight loss drugs put you at risk of relying on meds for everything? (Including stuff you might have the willpower for - now that you've tried meds, why would you ever do stuff the hard way?)
It's not easy to willpower past biology, which for many includes unbalanced hunger control mechanisms. I chose a low-carbohydrate diet to control my appetite. But if semaglutide allows people to lose weight, then it's probably better than obesity.
They probably could have been doing keto this entire time, but doctors cant prescribe it, the US Dietary Guidelines recommend against it, and the largest US medical organizations say it might kill you. Nor is it terribly difficult. But keto is not effective because of willpower, it's effective because it's chemical and metabolic and hormonal.
Willpower is a limited resource and some people have more of it than others.
And it's worth remembering that obesity contributes to many other diseases and premature deaths. Treating it long term will prevent a lot of human misery and billions in healthcare costs down the road, even with the high price tag that it currently has.
But irrespective of that, what Ozempic/Wegovy/etc have clearly shown is that this isn’t a moral problem. It’s not a will power problem. It’s a freaking chemical problem.
If a simple drug that isn’t even designed to help people lose weight can help them lose weight so easily, it strongly indicates that the idea that obesity is a biochemical problem should be the front runner in explaining weight gain.
2. skip one day a week
3. skip 7 days twice a year
4. eat real food
7 days is quite extreme. In fact, I've readed somewhere that TRE provides about the same benefits as clasic fasting without the downside of stressing the organism that hard
Get a calorie counting app. I use Waistline which is open source.
Actually use it: enter everything. Find out the calorie values.
And then re-assess what you're eating after you have some actual data to work with.
There are plenty of metabolic rate calculators online: you don't need to be super accurate, you need to be consistent and follow the data (i.e. if you're still gaining weight then you're either not entering things into the app or you now know your BMR is lower than expected so you adjust accordingly).
My average calorie deficit on a daily basis is probably 100-150 calories max which is barely noticeable (I'm never hungry) but the app does prevent erasing that by eating 2 cookies at 1 am when I'm not actually hungry.
I can see why she left him...
I agree. It doesn't matter that it's his regretful private thoughts. I'm not a therapist, but that email is an artifact of a bigger mental health issue that is expressed in other ways. Narcissism? At least that!
If someone were like this all of the time? Sure. But that isn’t what this is about so I find it unfair to treat it as if this is some innate character flaw.
I notice this a lot. When I wrote a blog post about the Remarkable 2 recently and it ended up on HN, very few of the comments were about my article - instead they were all about other people's thoughts on the Remarkable. This is ok, of course, but it's interesting to me that this is often how it goes on here. I wonder if it's high levels of self-absorption in HN readers or just a more widespread thing online where people respond to headlines rather than in-depth articles.
People don't care about the love story just say how to lose weight haha
Portion control isn't such a strict thing either. Eat slowly and gauge your remaining appetite as you go. You'll naturally eat less when you don't care about "cleaning your plate". You don't have to eat 3 meals a day either. Self awareness is the key to controlling your consumption and this is beyond just food. Hit your macros otherwise and you're good.
Portion size in US restaurants is crazy. There, I'd have to box 2/3 of the meal.
I'm relatively fit and tried semaglutide for reasons other than weight loss. The "full" feeling you feel when on it is nothing like I've ever experienced in my life. It's a cheat. I'm not saying people shouldn't take it, but I'll forever fight the idea some people have that it's just making you feel like skinny people. Most of us need to work for it too: deliberately stop eating before we're stuffed, not have terrible snack food in the house, limit sugary drinks, etc.
1. The analogy in your first paragraph isn't right, it wouldn't be like someone giving you money, it would be like someone intercepting your pay, doing all your payments, and then giving you only a small fraction to spend with for the month.
2. I dislike this "it's a cheat" thing. It makes it sound like it's easy on semaglutide. Which as someone who's been on it for a year or so... I can tell you. It's not easy. So when people say it's easy or a cheat or whatever. It diminishes the reasons why people are on it. It also makes the assumption that the people who are on it, didn't do anything else first. They just jumped straight onto the meds, diminishing their struggles before it.
I had tremendous problems losing weight, I'm a runner, I put in about 50km running each week, I would fight myself to not eat. I refused to drink, because that would lead to eating. I lived a miserable life. But more importantly my knees were getting damaged by the weight. So in the last year I lost the weight, because the one thing I couldn't fight with just willpower alone (eating), was suddenly far easier to fight.
That full feeling. That's one thing it does (which diminishes over time btw). The other thing it does is it totally removes the constant "what am I going to eat" thoughts in my head.
Imagine waking up, and you're already planning lunch, you skip breakfast to eat less calories. So when lunch comes, and something gets in the way of you eating.. you get furious. Same with dinner.. the whole day is consumed by thoughts of eating.
That's now gone.
None of us can live in eachother's bodies so we'll never know how everyone else experiences things. I have tried that medication though, and what it does to you isn't just putting you in line with my normal lived experience, nor my (skinny) wife's from what she tells me about how she feels about food.
Again, by all means, take it. If I were in your shoes I probably would too, and I wouldn't feel all that bad about it. Just don't think it's that easy for most of us normal-weight people to not eat. It's not, and it takes work every day.
I will say though, once I got a standing desk + treadmill it became a lot easier. They say you can't outexercise what you eat, but it's a lot easier when you're burning 1,000 calories a day walking. If you have that opportunity I'd recommend it.
It's a really lousy way to lose weight, but very effective.
- fast
- eat whatever tf you want
Have no time in morning for gym. I replaced breakfast with coffee and almonds, have lunch with reasonable portions, dinner normal portions, and no food after 8 pm.
Been losing weight at about 1 pound per month.
https://youtu.be/9mbp0DugfCA?feature=shared
Agree with no beer and limited alcohol. That saved me 10 lbs without working out. However, if you cannot live without beer or some other sugary treat, prepare to do a lot of cardio. It’s more of a preventative measure though. I find using VR for cardio workouts help a lot to counter the monotony with a wide variety of video games. I constantly tell myself that I’m just playing a video game.
As others have wrote, intermittent fasting is really great for portion control and general health.
If you really want to lose weight, you can’t really avoid weight lifting or resistance training. I feel with AR this will also get gamified just like cardio. Apple fitness helps with this, but I think there is now an AR Quest app that focuses on weights too
My loss wasn’t to a bad relationship but losing my wife of 14 years to cancer. She was amazing. We conquered the world together and achieved remarkable things that will be her legacy to future generations. Her story will live on.
But loss is so universal. It is the one thing we can all absolutely be assured of. Every one of us will die. The “lucky” among us will live long enough to watch many of our friends and loved ones fall away. Many will be taken before they should have been.
It is a harsh reminder that the only thing of value that anyone has is often that which we trade for things of lesser value.
Time. It is the finite resource, and you don’t know how much you have. Worse yet, for every person in your life that matters to you, there is an unknown quantity of seconds that you might spend together before one of you is gone.
Just gone. Not away. Not apart. Not estranged. Just gone.
Value your time. Treasure time shared with loved ones. Make every day count for something that stretches out farther than yourself.
Live without fear, the worst is coming anyway. The things that you think limit your possibilities are most likely irrelevant from a different perspective. Find that perspective and the fear falls away.