This isn’t surprising, but I have trouble taking anyone seriously when they use the term “jabs”. I’m rather shocked it’s in the headline of a BBC article.
Dieting forces you focus the actual problem which could be lack of cooking skills, poor shopping choices, lack of accurate information, lack of available healthy foods, poor lifestyle choices or much more.
Ozempic/Wegovy and the like while they have their place, are simply useful tools in the hands of doctors. They are not a magic bean that will cure over eating but they are being marketed and discussed as that.
There are almost no short cuts in this world of losing weight but there are extremely worthwhile trade off’s.
I found it very disturbing how heavily these were marketed as miracle drugs that would "bankrupt fast food". Seems like another instance of create a problem ("food" industry) and sell a recurring "solution" (big pharma).
The few doctors I've seen react to these news all seem to share the same opinion, which is: Duh, if you're prescribed GLP-1 for a medical reason, you're expected to keep taking it basically for life, it's the safe way to proceed. It's not a diet pill.
I lost 40 lbs with Ozempic and kept almost all of it off a year after stopping the drug. The little I have gained is almost certainly been muscle. But I have had to pay attention to what I eat. Nothing crazy. I don’t count calories, but I can’t house pints of ice cream in the middle of the night anymore.
Similarly, people get their weight back after liposuction, or after stopping the diet, as the article posits.
This boils down to the fact that the weight, and its quality (fat vs muscle) is a function of habits.
Given the number of studies that show the complexity of factors that influence the weight, from neuroscience and psychology to studies of metabolism, it is a wishful thinking to have an injection or a pill alone as a long-lasting solution.
If purely used as an appetite suppressant, then of course people will put the weight back on as soon as they regain their appetite.
People get lulled into a false sense of security that their diet is fine because they're losing weight! But it isn't.
However the jabs work well if you use the time to "retrain" your appetite, diet, and tastebuds. Then you keep the weight off because you no longer crave processed, high calorie, or junk foods.
I think the problem is in the marketing of these medications. They're not slimming jabs, they're appetite suppressors. If you never fix the appetite you will need to go back to suppressing it!
Other studies [0] report that people end up under their starting weight
It seems this meta-analysis estimate the average amount regained this week and then projected that forward - but that doesn't quite match what is reported [0]? Does anyone know more about this?
One thing that seems missing from a lot of these comparisons is the base rate of success for dieting itself.
Most people who “start a diet” never meaningfully lose weight in the first place, or lose a small amount and plateau quickly. The cohort of “dieters who regain weight” is already heavily filtered toward the minority who were unusually successful at dieting to begin with. That selection bias matters a lot when you then compare regain rates.
GLP-1s change that denominator. A much larger fraction of people who start the intervention actually lose substantial weight. So even if regain after stopping is faster conditional on having lost weight, the overall success rate (people who lose and keep off a clinically meaningful amount) may still be higher than dieting alone.
In other words: “people who regain weight after stopping GLP-1s” vs “people who regain weight after dieting” ignores the much larger group of dieters who never lost anything to regain. From a population perspective, that’s a pretty important omission.
I've switched to a low carb diet this year and have cut out just about all processed foods. I am considering getting a GLP1 injection privately in the near future. I'm hopeful that when I do get down to my target weight, my diet will remain changed, my habits will have improved and I'll be putting my new mobility to some use.
I don't plan on going cold turkey, I'll taper off the dose slowly and see what happens.
It matches my intuition. Long term change requires skill acquisition. What foods contain more calories than people realize? What foods are more satiating? What kind of portion sizes for each food will keep me from eating a surplus? How much snacking is too much? How does the amount of oil in the foods I eat change the equation? What does the non-drug-augmented sensation of stomach fullness tell me about when I should stop eating? Can I eat more slowly and stop at the right time? The list goes on.
From personal experience alone these drugs feel fairly easy to start and stop taking. So taking them every third or fourth month (or similar) would seem like a straight-forward option, unless I'm missing something.
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[ 6.1 ms ] story [ 42.1 ms ] threadI think, barred some horrible, long term side-effects, we need to accept that people will be staying on those drugs for a long time.
It wasn’t like I didn’t know what I was doing though. I was enjoying food again in a way that Zepbound meaningfully repressed.
So it’s not like the drug scammed me, I just wanted to eat more again naturally
Ozempic/Wegovy and the like while they have their place, are simply useful tools in the hands of doctors. They are not a magic bean that will cure over eating but they are being marketed and discussed as that.
There are almost no short cuts in this world of losing weight but there are extremely worthwhile trade off’s.
This boils down to the fact that the weight, and its quality (fat vs muscle) is a function of habits.
Given the number of studies that show the complexity of factors that influence the weight, from neuroscience and psychology to studies of metabolism, it is a wishful thinking to have an injection or a pill alone as a long-lasting solution.
If purely used as an appetite suppressant, then of course people will put the weight back on as soon as they regain their appetite.
People get lulled into a false sense of security that their diet is fine because they're losing weight! But it isn't.
However the jabs work well if you use the time to "retrain" your appetite, diet, and tastebuds. Then you keep the weight off because you no longer crave processed, high calorie, or junk foods.
I think the problem is in the marketing of these medications. They're not slimming jabs, they're appetite suppressors. If you never fix the appetite you will need to go back to suppressing it!
It seems this meta-analysis estimate the average amount regained this week and then projected that forward - but that doesn't quite match what is reported [0]? Does anyone know more about this?
[0] https://glp1.guide/content/do-people-regain-all-the-weight-l...
Most people who “start a diet” never meaningfully lose weight in the first place, or lose a small amount and plateau quickly. The cohort of “dieters who regain weight” is already heavily filtered toward the minority who were unusually successful at dieting to begin with. That selection bias matters a lot when you then compare regain rates.
GLP-1s change that denominator. A much larger fraction of people who start the intervention actually lose substantial weight. So even if regain after stopping is faster conditional on having lost weight, the overall success rate (people who lose and keep off a clinically meaningful amount) may still be higher than dieting alone.
In other words: “people who regain weight after stopping GLP-1s” vs “people who regain weight after dieting” ignores the much larger group of dieters who never lost anything to regain. From a population perspective, that’s a pretty important omission.
I don't plan on going cold turkey, I'll taper off the dose slowly and see what happens.
It matches my intuition. Long term change requires skill acquisition. What foods contain more calories than people realize? What foods are more satiating? What kind of portion sizes for each food will keep me from eating a surplus? How much snacking is too much? How does the amount of oil in the foods I eat change the equation? What does the non-drug-augmented sensation of stomach fullness tell me about when I should stop eating? Can I eat more slowly and stop at the right time? The list goes on.