You can't stop the muscle loss. The drug doesn't actually do anything except that it makes you starve yourself. The people are losing muscle because they're starving.
No I mean more like this doesn't seem to work as well as you expected. It only sort of masks one of the symptoms.
We absolutely should ask if the advantages outweigh the drawbacks, and only use it in cases where it does. Not every new thing is good, in fact most new things are crap. New only seemed to equal better when people were more careful and only adopted the new things that were better. It isn't given in any way. You do need that bit of neophobia to get real progress instead of confused wandering around.
Then someone must teach those people that for weight loss only the intake of carbohydrates and that of non-essential fats must be reduced, while the intake of proteins and essential fats must remain the same.
The daily intake of proteins must never be less than 60 g to 100 g, depending on body size.
Even the older recommended in USA daily intakes of proteins of less than 1 g per kg of body weight have been discredited as too low, especially for elderly people, and now better recommendations are between 1 and 1.5 g of proteins per kg of body weight and per day (towards the upper limit if the proteins are of vegetable origin, when a lower fraction is digested).
Even when you are not hungry or you follow a weight loss diet, you must still take care to eat the minimum necessary to keep you healthy.
If you eat much less calories than necessary, e.g. 1000 kcal/day or even less, you will also lose muscle mass.
However, if you do not eat enough proteins, you will lose muscular mass and the albumin amount in blood will diminish, regardless how many kcal are provided by your food.
So for preserving muscular mass, both enough proteins and a minimum intake of kcal per day, which varies between people, but it is typically somewhere between 1500 and 2000 kcal/day, are required.
Nevertheless, usually only the amount of proteins requires special care, because it is extremely easy to eat enough kcal per day when you eat enough proteins. Normally a great effort is required to diminish the amount of kcal of the food that contains enough proteins, especially if it is of vegetable origin or of dairy origin.
The only natural source of proteins without extra kcal is lean meat, like turkey breast or chicken breast or cod fillet. Fat meat, most dairy and raw vegetables have a kcal content that is usually more than double of what corresponds to their protein content.
For example, when the easy method of eating lean meat is excluded, enough proteins for a male of average size could be provided by eating 500 g of wheat flour and 167 g of lentils per day. That alone would provide 2235 kcal/day, which is too much for someone with a sedentary life.
Preserving the amount of proteins and also allowing the eating of other food besides that, without using industrial methods of protein extraction that are expensive and require energy and chemicals, could be achieved by making dough from the flour and washing it to remove most of the starch.
This example is meant to show that unless you eat only turkey breast or the like, as long as you eat enough proteins you normally have no need to worry about eating enough kcal.
Enough protein intake is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Your body is constantly breaking down and rebuilding muscle tissue (and all other tissue). The amount that it rebuilds is effected by many things like protein availability, and (basically) how much you have been using the muscle. This is why staying active is important.
In addition, since your body has a limit of how quickly it can metabolize fat, even if you had sufficient protein intake and sufficient activity to signal to your body to retain muscle mass, if your caloric deficit is large enough, your body may still be forced to burn protein (ie directly or indirectly reduce muscle mass) to stay alive.
These are factors that you can usually manage around with some careful, but relatively straight forward planning.
EDIT: Note that the 'careful but straight forward planning' is basically exactly the same planning for "a diet". Traditionally, you'd see diets aim for no more than a 300-500kcal deficit for this exact reason. It's not just a question of keeping the food reduction minimal to help your brain stick to the plan, but also as your calorie deficit becomes larger, it becomes much more difficult to fit in all of your proteins (amongst other things).
* Fat is a lever to adjust based on your goal (lower for weight loss, increase for weight gain)
But there are still edge cases, like if you get zero carbs and a ton of protein your body will compensate by converting protein to carbs (glucose, via gluconeogenisis)
It’s not really gated by prescription. There are tons of prescription-mill doctors and clinics that will happily do the bare minimum “exam” to not lose their license and charge you a few hundred bucks for a piece of paper that lets anyone buy this wildly popular class of drugs.
It’s easy money for them. All propped up by the state that prohibits the sale of the medication without that slip of paper.
I’m on mounjaro, and do my best to ingest 150g of protein per day, plus lifting 3x a week. Prior to the increase in protein (as a percentage of my diet) I’d lost about 5# worth of muscle, as measured by an in body 270, and about 20# of fat. Since I’ve upped my protein intake I’ve started gaining the muscle back while continuing to lose fat.
Can’t do this stuff without tracking your body comp or you’re going to end up in a world of hurt.
It helps you eat at a caloric deficit. I wouldn't say that is starving yourself. It is basically the same mechanism for how any weight loss would work. Less calories consumed versus burned on a daily basis.
There are additional mechanisms that are still being studied, but at minimum it is helping people to eat at a level that supports weight loss.
Once being skinny becomes a sign of drug ingestion rather than fitness, its desirability would vanish fast. People will choowe whatever form they are comfortable with.
Nobody likes skinny people because they're fit. People like skinny people because it's rare, because food is so abundant. 200 years ago, it was beautiful to be fat, because everyone was skinny (because poverty).
Being skinny because of drugs will still be desirable, because only rich people can afford these drugs right now. Once we see generics, maybe that will change.
This is a ridiculously pessimistic take. I'd hardly say that a drug which is used by obese people which lowers their appetite to more normal levels "makes you starve yourself". I've yet to see any reports of people on Ozempic et al who lost so much weight that they died. Usually it's more like they went from obese to "just overweight".
They are losing muscle because whenever someone loses overall body weight there is less mass to carry, so their muscle adjusts accordingly. Similarly, if you put on a fat suit that added 50 pounds to your frame and walked everywhere in it you'd quickly gain muscle.
it's true though, younger folks need like 1 gram/kg of weight in protein daily or so. When you're female and over 40 that goes up to 1.6 grams up to 2.0 grams/kg.
If you think you can get that from lentils, you might wanna look into bio-availability.
AND if you have any problems with absorbing nutrients in your gut, you are probably not getting enough of everything, no matter how healthy you eat.
Literally nothing you have written is evidence for the idea, which I was challenging, that Ozempic-like drugs "make you starve yourself".
Most of the people, currently anyway, who are prescribed these drugs are morbidly obese. There are an entire host of well-known, evidence-supported extremely negative consequences from being obese. So why are you talking about, basically, "eating too many lentils??" in the scope of this conversation? We weren't exactly talking about ensuring vegans get enough nutrients.
Based on our current understanding its the same as normal weight loss. So imagine all these people basically just eating less of the terrible diet they likely were originally eating. Forget muscle loss, we are gonna get ozempic malnutrition, wont be surprised when we see people with scurvy
> wont be surprised when we see people with scurvy
While I wouldn't be shocked to see it happen very rarely, I was under the impression that it was hard to get scurvy today because vitamin C gets added to so much food because it's a preservative.
Cuts are hard, but focus on nutrition (lots of protein) and heavy weight lower volume. The lower volume because on a cut you just don't have the energy to go crazy. The heavy weight keeps the body wanting to hang on to the muscle. But, unless steroids are involved, no one is getting stronger/bigger while on a cut.
Not to nitpick but general guidance for bodybuilders seems to me to be going in the other direction these days: keep volume and reps relatively high and weights relatively low during a cut to provide a bigger anabolic counterbalance to the catabolic effect of cutting calories.
> But, unless steroids are involved, no one is getting stronger/bigger while on a cut
Not true, beginners and detrained athletes get bigger losing weight all the time. This is really a function of body fat %. The lower your bf % the harder it is to gain muscle while losing fat.
That is a cut. A cut is literally any calorie deficit from maintenance. If you lose weight by changing your diet (or energy expenditure while keeping diet the same) by definition you’re on a cut. Most people that deliberately do this would cut at 200-600kcal a day to be effective though, otherwise minor fluctuations make a, say, 100kcal deficit difficult to measure.
The only news here is that lots of people, especially older women in my experience, continue to be allergic to lifting weights despite overwhelming medical and anecdotal evidence that it's one of the most potent quality-of-life interventions available.
0.01% of people will have some pre-existing condition that prevents them from lifting. For the other 99.9%, I don't care who you are or what your excuse is. Practice some sort of resistance training and you'll be much fitter, happier and healthier as you age. This goes double for every decade above 20. I wish I could pop a pill that's just as potent as a squat but the facts are the facts are the facts.
Better than nothing but you want to go reasonably heavy to get the improvements in bone density. Also hard to get hypertrophy in the posterior chain, which is a major area for atrophy with age.
I think calisthenics/gymnastics can give a heavier load but there is a substantial skill component there, much harder to learn than, say, squats and deadlifts.
If you're able to increase your strength using body-weight exercises, then they're excellent. And they can go a long way - most people probably can't do a pull up, and very few will ever be able to do a pistol squat or a handstand pushup. However, for basics like pushups and squats, body weight offers only a beginner's level of resistance, and going to the gym not only offers the ability to continue making improvements, it makes incremental progress accessible for all kinds of movements, not just those two. Specifically, most people doing pushups and body weight squats are probably doing no pulling movements, or overhead movements.
> Specifically, most people doing pushups and body weight squats are probably doing no pulling movements, or overhead movements.
yeah - I'm definitely not. Need to fix that - gotta find a place to do pull-ups, and get some actual weights.
One issue is that I know I'll never go to the gym; besides the comparative time required (driving/biking to the gym, vs. just going downstairs to the basement), it's just a weird psychological quirk of mine.
Thinking about this more, I'd say the convention wisdom on body-weight exercises is completely backwards. They're terrible for beginners, but can be valuable for people already strong enough to do them. Why are they terrible for beginners? Two reasons, either their potential for improvement is too low, like the pushup or squat, where the average person can get to 5-10 reps pretty quickly- the point at which a given resistance is no longer able to elicit strength gains. Or, the first step is so large that it's effectively unreachable. Pull-ups are great, but if you are a beginner, doing your first pull-up by doing only pull-ups is a great challenge, compared to going to the gym and doing pull-downs or assisted pull-ups starting at an appropriate weight, and making incremental progress. In short, body weight exercises can certainly be challenging, think of a gymnast, but they offer very little in the way of incremental improvement from any starting point, which is what beginners need most.
Depends on the fitness of the person doing them, really. For many populations, they might be too advanced. For others, too easy. As long as the person has to exert themselves, it's a good exercise. Make sure to use all the muscles you'd like to keep (which I hope is all of them).
They also do well. The mechanics of this process can be described as the body, given calories defecit, will start optimizing energe consumption and will start 'turning off' big consumers (muscles). In general you just need to use your body muscles in two directions - endurance and strength. Two because we have two (simplified statement) types of fibers, strength and endurance.
Good example of body weight excercises could be calisthenics.
Body-weight exercises are very good for population health. They can produce muscle growth sufficient to look muscular, much less the sort of maintain-mobility goal that should exist for almost everyone. Losing muscle mass is one of the largest factors in the reduced mobility we experience as we age.
Body weight exercising is much more than just pushups, crunches, and pull-ups. In addition to a large number of unique exercises, there are techniques to decrease the challenge or increase the challenge of most body weight exercises that should be taken advantage of. Over the entire fitness community the knowledge of how to make a body-weight exercise routine work is spread thin.
I honestly think we need more of the aging (55+) community taking good calisthenics classes. My elderly father (70s) visits the outdoor calisthenics park often when he is staying at my house.
People are going to be trying to solve this in 100 years, because no one actually wants to do the hard work of eating correctly (keeping track of macros and not overeating) and exercising.
There's no long-term miracle drug that's going to allow you to be fit and strong without any effort.
Everything else is just either short-term solutions or straight up juju-science that's equivalent to moving around pieces aimlessly on the same game board.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadWe don't ask "should this tech even exist", we ask, "what tech can we figure out that offsets the bad things from this"
We absolutely should ask if the advantages outweigh the drawbacks, and only use it in cases where it does. Not every new thing is good, in fact most new things are crap. New only seemed to equal better when people were more careful and only adopted the new things that were better. It isn't given in any way. You do need that bit of neophobia to get real progress instead of confused wandering around.
The daily intake of proteins must never be less than 60 g to 100 g, depending on body size.
Even the older recommended in USA daily intakes of proteins of less than 1 g per kg of body weight have been discredited as too low, especially for elderly people, and now better recommendations are between 1 and 1.5 g of proteins per kg of body weight and per day (towards the upper limit if the proteins are of vegetable origin, when a lower fraction is digested).
Even when you are not hungry or you follow a weight loss diet, you must still take care to eat the minimum necessary to keep you healthy.
However, if you do not eat enough proteins, you will lose muscular mass and the albumin amount in blood will diminish, regardless how many kcal are provided by your food.
So for preserving muscular mass, both enough proteins and a minimum intake of kcal per day, which varies between people, but it is typically somewhere between 1500 and 2000 kcal/day, are required.
Nevertheless, usually only the amount of proteins requires special care, because it is extremely easy to eat enough kcal per day when you eat enough proteins. Normally a great effort is required to diminish the amount of kcal of the food that contains enough proteins, especially if it is of vegetable origin or of dairy origin.
The only natural source of proteins without extra kcal is lean meat, like turkey breast or chicken breast or cod fillet. Fat meat, most dairy and raw vegetables have a kcal content that is usually more than double of what corresponds to their protein content.
For example, when the easy method of eating lean meat is excluded, enough proteins for a male of average size could be provided by eating 500 g of wheat flour and 167 g of lentils per day. That alone would provide 2235 kcal/day, which is too much for someone with a sedentary life.
Preserving the amount of proteins and also allowing the eating of other food besides that, without using industrial methods of protein extraction that are expensive and require energy and chemicals, could be achieved by making dough from the flour and washing it to remove most of the starch.
This example is meant to show that unless you eat only turkey breast or the like, as long as you eat enough proteins you normally have no need to worry about eating enough kcal.
Enough protein intake is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Your body is constantly breaking down and rebuilding muscle tissue (and all other tissue). The amount that it rebuilds is effected by many things like protein availability, and (basically) how much you have been using the muscle. This is why staying active is important.
In addition, since your body has a limit of how quickly it can metabolize fat, even if you had sufficient protein intake and sufficient activity to signal to your body to retain muscle mass, if your caloric deficit is large enough, your body may still be forced to burn protein (ie directly or indirectly reduce muscle mass) to stay alive.
These are factors that you can usually manage around with some careful, but relatively straight forward planning.
EDIT: Note that the 'careful but straight forward planning' is basically exactly the same planning for "a diet". Traditionally, you'd see diets aim for no more than a 300-500kcal deficit for this exact reason. It's not just a question of keeping the food reduction minimal to help your brain stick to the plan, but also as your calorie deficit becomes larger, it becomes much more difficult to fit in all of your proteins (amongst other things).
* Carbs should have a ceiling
* Protein should have a floor
* Fat is a lever to adjust based on your goal (lower for weight loss, increase for weight gain)
But there are still edge cases, like if you get zero carbs and a ton of protein your body will compensate by converting protein to carbs (glucose, via gluconeogenisis)
It’s easy money for them. All propped up by the state that prohibits the sale of the medication without that slip of paper.
Can’t do this stuff without tracking your body comp or you’re going to end up in a world of hurt.
There are additional mechanisms that are still being studied, but at minimum it is helping people to eat at a level that supports weight loss.
Being skinny because of drugs will still be desirable, because only rich people can afford these drugs right now. Once we see generics, maybe that will change.
They are losing muscle because whenever someone loses overall body weight there is less mass to carry, so their muscle adjusts accordingly. Similarly, if you put on a fat suit that added 50 pounds to your frame and walked everywhere in it you'd quickly gain muscle.
AND if you have any problems with absorbing nutrients in your gut, you are probably not getting enough of everything, no matter how healthy you eat.
Protein needs https://health.gov/our-work/nutrition-physical-activity/diet...
bio-availability https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6723444/
Most of the people, currently anyway, who are prescribed these drugs are morbidly obese. There are an entire host of well-known, evidence-supported extremely negative consequences from being obese. So why are you talking about, basically, "eating too many lentils??" in the scope of this conversation? We weren't exactly talking about ensuring vegans get enough nutrients.
Is there anything new about these drugs specifically that causes muscle loss, or is it the same as with natural weight loss?
While I wouldn't be shocked to see it happen very rarely, I was under the impression that it was hard to get scurvy today because vitamin C gets added to so much food because it's a preservative.
Think cod and brocolli with no butter.
Not true, beginners and detrained athletes get bigger losing weight all the time. This is really a function of body fat %. The lower your bf % the harder it is to gain muscle while losing fat.
0.01% of people will have some pre-existing condition that prevents them from lifting. For the other 99.9%, I don't care who you are or what your excuse is. Practice some sort of resistance training and you'll be much fitter, happier and healthier as you age. This goes double for every decade above 20. I wish I could pop a pill that's just as potent as a squat but the facts are the facts are the facts.
I think calisthenics/gymnastics can give a heavier load but there is a substantial skill component there, much harder to learn than, say, squats and deadlifts.
yeah - I'm definitely not. Need to fix that - gotta find a place to do pull-ups, and get some actual weights.
One issue is that I know I'll never go to the gym; besides the comparative time required (driving/biking to the gym, vs. just going downstairs to the basement), it's just a weird psychological quirk of mine.
Good example of body weight excercises could be calisthenics.
edit: improved example
Body weight exercising is much more than just pushups, crunches, and pull-ups. In addition to a large number of unique exercises, there are techniques to decrease the challenge or increase the challenge of most body weight exercises that should be taken advantage of. Over the entire fitness community the knowledge of how to make a body-weight exercise routine work is spread thin.
I honestly think we need more of the aging (55+) community taking good calisthenics classes. My elderly father (70s) visits the outdoor calisthenics park often when he is staying at my house.
What? Why?
I don’t want to live in a skinny-girl dystopia.
There's no long-term miracle drug that's going to allow you to be fit and strong without any effort.
Everything else is just either short-term solutions or straight up juju-science that's equivalent to moving around pieces aimlessly on the same game board.