I am constantly arguing with all of my friends and family who believe primary way to loose weight is to exercise more.

Exercising is great, absolutely, but eating less is the actual primary method. While acknowledging complications of metabolism and psychology and weird states body goes through when it's hungry, primary part is to reduce calory intake vs expenditure.

So as snide and silly as it may be, in my neck of the woods, I would agree, lots of people don't believe eating less is the primary method of losing weight.

"Eating less" as a strategy for losing weight is like "make a lot of money" is a strategy for becoming rich.

It certainly works, it is just an unhelpful strategy.

Keto changes the way you feel about eating if you enter ketosis for long enough.

Fasting does too, for that matter.

Paleo is just trendy keto with some woo on top.

The don't use the same mechanism as glp, nor do they have same success rate, but similar idea.

Eliminating sugar makes it harder to consume a 64oz soda at 800 calories in 3 minutes and still be hungry.

Anywho, most diets achieve some weight-loss.

But! keeping your mind and body from demanding you eat more to return to homeostasis is actually the 2nd hard part, and the part that most people fail at. And we'll see how much glp losses are sustainable (without shots) here pretty soon.

Regardless, this technology is good and we should subsidize everyone getting to a healthy weight. Searching for reasons they are actually morally inferior or stupid is counterproductive.

I agree sort of, but the argument here is do the simple thing, like "eat less". There; we're done - ha! My initial reaction (and also with the chose boring tech) is that's not the solution, that's where you start LOOKING for the solution! So boring is great, simple is fantastic - from a position of understanding. Too many people jump onto any "new thing" - diet, technology, whatever - because it's easy and right in front of them. Simple is often neither.

I would push back against your pushback and say nearly everyone knows that, it's just the brain is great at making excuses when things are physically difficult.

They did that because the other thing didn't work. It doesn't matter that the reason it didn't work is that they can't do it: the implication is identical.

Don't underestimate how impossible it can be to force your own body into a new behavior pattern.

That's true, but the fact that it wasn't easy created a huge industry of fake information regarding alternative explanations of weight loss from CICO. It's nice to have some more obvious evidence to convince people that no, your body can't magically move and exercise for free when you eat less, among other strange claims I've heard from people struggling to lose weight. People stuck in that rut of not being able to eat less were prone to being deceived by countless weight loss products when the real solution (also hard mind you, but at least more viable) would have been to focus on which activities and diets actually allowed them personally to maintain a calorie deficit.

And as a bonus, now they also have one. A lot of people didn't even believe that was the solution though, and the belief change is important.

The interesting solution to smoking was social pressure. No smoking in restaurants, no smoking on planes, general intolerance to smokers, insane taxes on tobacco... suddenly, smokers for 30 years started quitting at a certain breaking point.

The real solution to weight loss (especially in the U.S.) is to change the social norms. When everyone is hitting the buffets and going to Cheesecake Factory and buying high calorie garbage at a discount, of course to population gets fat. France, for example, makes all of that much harder. Maybe Ozempic will help reduce the Walmart-wheelchair-fat population, but truly becoming fit as a country requires significantly more friction for everyone.

This ignores how food today isn't much like food of the past. It has all manner of added sugars and things to make it more marketable, hence higher profits, but also causes over-eating. Snack culture is pretty much an attempt to make food as addictive as possible, and many of those methods are in 'regular' food too.

Not everyone knows this and many who do can't afford an expensive farm to table whole foods diet.

Now toss in car culture and the suburban model and a culture very strongly against any sort of socialized commons like public trans and the little exercise they otherwise would get isn't available anymore. I live in a walkable neighborhood and take public trans, I know my health would be much worse if I didn't get all those steps, fresh air, sense of community, etc in everyday.

Pretty much everything Americans do is wrong when it comes to food, diet, walkable communities, and transportation. What we need to fix this is not putting everyone on ozempic, but a frank look at how our society is organized and figuring out ways to move to a saner society.

But the people claiming that they were some special case that just "couldn't lose weight" no matter how little they ate were bullshitting you. They couldn't handle the suffering, and as such the calorie intake was larger than the calories burned. They wanted you to believe eating less wasn't the solution. The drug proves that it WAS the solution, suffering aside.

>People had/have a hard time accepting "eat less to not be fat".

It's kind of like saying "Smoke less to avoid lung cancer". You can say eating is a fatal addiction. If you stop you die. The hard part is is balancing it so you keep on living and avoid the negative health outcomes.

Why is this hard? First the cause and effect are separated by a lot of time. If I eat a sweet fat sugary treat I get the good feeling RIGHT NOW. The negative health effects are way later.

Other reasons it's hard is our eating habits are mostly created in our childhood and very hard to break as an adult. If your parents fed you poorly you're at a significant health disadvantage.

The last one I'll list is crap food marketing. The most unhealthy crap seems to have the brightest packages to catch our eye. It has huge amounts of salt, fat, and sugar, things our evolutionary body craves because the number one thing it wants to avoid is starvation.

So yea, it is reachable, but it is not trivial at all.

“Eating less” is the bottom line, but the road there can be fraught.

Many people don’t understand what the high calorie drivers in their diet are, many wildly mis-estimate how much they’re eating, most people inflate the weight loss impacts of training and neglect the appetite rebounds, and the interplay between insulin and appetite and how to manage satiety signals is voodoo for even a lot of doctors. Availability of proper food and time to prepare it are hurdles on top of hurdles.

My estimation is that a lot of people are using way, way, more energy and willpower in their ‘diet’ cycles than necessary but tragically getting poor results because of miscalibration. Our society is geared around profitable food delivery, not healthy dietary wisdom.

This one has a super simple answer. They eat too many carbs.

When carbs spike their blood sugar, insulin swoops in to convert the excess glucose into fat. When they try to restrict calories, they focus on cutting the wrong macros. Calories from carbs are hard to avoid and easily miscounted/underestimated unless you're literally weighing the food and know every ingredient used.

You're not even wrong that women are more likely to have a sweet tooth and fall for crap diets like "low fat" or "plant based". It's decades of evil marketing at play here. The result is not only that they stay fat, but then lose muscle and the number on the scale doesn't budge.

You know what's a whole lot easier to eyeball and get full on? Meat and veg you cooked yourself. That's the easiest solution by miles, but people will continue serving themselves way too much pasta and bread (because it looks right on the plate), adding sauces that are smuggling even more carbs, eating ultraprocessed junk loaded with sugar you can't even taste or filler carbs to cut production cost, and saying their occasional piece of "fun size" candy or favorite drink "doesn't count".

Basically every diet program for the last 4 years, every change to food or social habits at least in the US, failed to curb it. So in a pretty real sense we did not know how to eat less successfully, emphasis on successfully.

Are you saying that Ozempic allows you to escape society or that all the fat people are actually just druggies? Like, either way it's wild, but I'm struggling to come up with a more charitable take.

> We had hundreds of thousands of years of successfully "eating less"

Ah yes, our old friend starvation.

I'm sure your comment is made in good faith and I agree with it (in meaning), but this:

> because people as a whole are incredibly intolerant to any friction in their lives

...somehow makes me picture you saying it with a smug expression and instantly dislike the whole comment. Maybe it's the broad, catch-all "because people" generalisation, I don't know. But again, I agree with the comment... in meaning ;(