To be really jealous of people who can afford weight loss injections?

[Charliede1182]

It seems like everyone and their dog is taking them, I personally know several people who are on them with significant and effortless weight loss, and I feel like there is becoming more and more of a disparity between those who can afford to buy themselves a smaller appetite and those who can't.

It's not just a social or cosmetic issue, it's about health equity.

In my case I don't want to lose weight for vanity or to cater to patriarchal beauty standards, I am comfortable and confident in my appearance and keen to model body positivity to my daughter.

However I am on the combined pill (for important medical reasons not contraception) and my weight is starting to threaten my ongoing access to this.

I am very fit, walk 5-8 miles a day, some of it with a weighted vest, gym 2-3 x weekly, resistance training, cook almost everything from scratch and although I am no angel I would say my diet is about 90% healthy.

I just don't feel full with small portions, it is an apparent mismatch between appetite and metabolism which is why I would love these injections to make me less hungry.

Even if I had the willpower to just eat less, being hungry all the time isn't a good quality of life and my attitude has always been I would rather enjoy myself and be a bit heavier than society thinks I should, than be thin and miserable.

Whilst I could probably get the money together for a couple of months of treatment, this is not how these drugs work, as people's appetite just comes roaring back if they stop, and then they can end up in a worse position having lost lean mass as well, so I would only go down this road if I could afford it longer term.

Just wondering if anyone else has Ozempic envy right now??!!!

Honestly? Don’t you think that obese people haven’t thought of that? If I could have done it on my own I would have! There aren’t enough face palms in the world for these kinds of comments.

You can face palm all you like!

I will and do. Just wondering what the point of that sort of comment is? Of course if I could have managed to address it on my own I would have. Why do you think that it’s that easy and possible for people to do, that simply being told to stop over indulging might help?

Actually, Japan is a bad example for a couple of reasons.

The first is that us being Japan is not one of your choices, because Japan has never had the percentage of already obese and overweight people that the UK does. There's no evidence that there exists any path to turn a population like ours into one like Japan.

The second is that while they historically have much lower BMI than other wealthy countries, Japan are also are experiencing rising obesity rates. This is true of most countries where the population has enough money to buy more calories than they need either have growing obesity problems or are reversing this increase due to increased WLI use like the US. The absolute numbers are still small, but if they keep growing, the Japanese are going to have a problem. Maybe at that point they'll want to be more like the US and manage it with increased WLI usage too.

Japan also have higher smoking rates than the UK, which I don't suppose we'd want to emulate.

I think the use of a hormone to create remarkable weight loss achieved by people who have hitherto failed, is evidence of hormonal imbalance in many people. Tbis just restores tge balance and puts them on a level playing field with everyone else

People who take WLI’s to get to a healthy weight are then much more likely to eat healthily and exercise. It’s pretty basic stuff.

When I was overweight I didn’t exercise much and was eating quite a bit of unhealthy stuff.

Now I’m slim I exercise every day because it’s much easier and I eat 90% healthy food bc I want to put mainly goodness in my body now that I can’t eat as much.

When you are a healthy weight you are much more likely to have higher energy levels, enabling you to move more.

People who continue to eat unhealthy food and don’t exercise when slim were also doing that when they were fat - so it doesn’t make much difference except they’re less likely to die young of obesity related illnesses.

China is not a good example of healthiness bc their low obesity rates are more likely to be related to the fact that they were a relatively poor country until recently and didn’t have access to the western junk foods we do here. Now that they have, obesity levels are rising. And as another pp said they are one of the highest rated of smoking in the world whereas it’s become pretty passé in the uk:

From Google:

smoking is very common in China, which has the world's largest smoking population (over 300 million), particularly among men (over half of adult men smoke), though rates are declining slightly

Smoking is an appetite suppressant, with very serious side effects:

Globally, smoking kills up to 8 million people each year, including about 1.2 million non-smokers from secondhand smoke, making it the leading cause of preventable death

As far as we know so far, WLI’s have not caused death in anyone.

The thing that strikes me most about some of these anti-WLI posters is their obvious lack of any kind of critical thinking.

*apologies, Japan not China

You mean people change to a healthier lifestyle or just frankly eating less as their body simply doesn’t need as much calories as it did previously?

All people need to eat, this by your logic everyone is on a “diet”

Everyone I know whose on WLI, hasn’t put the weight back on, most eat like they did previously only with smaller portions.

Why do think that some people suddenly get these ‘hormone imbalances’?
Humans have lived on this earth for thousands of years without needing to inject themselves with hormones and they were still slim and strong?!

It’s the WLI that stops me over indulging though, so no, I can’t. Not for the lack of trying either.

@Lemonlimonade humans have only very recently lived in a situation where as much high calorie food as they like is available essentially 24/7. Our bodies are still set up for a much harsher and shorter existence where food was scarce, and you’d better eat as much as you can when food is available to get fat stored as much as you possibly can. It’s no great surprise that when high calorie food is abundantly available that many of us, the majority in fact, will over eat and put on weight.

I don't know much about hormone imbalances, but as a point of fact, most humans have lived in an environment where starvation was an ever present threat. The bulk (no pun intended) of humans living in societies wheee there's essentially no risk of starvation is very new. Only been that way a few decades, and a lot of people have also been on the appetite suppressant drug nicotine during that time. We actually have no idea how many ancestral humans also had a tendency to hormone imbalance in an entirely food abundant environment, because most of them never lived in one.

The conditions in which humans evolved don't exist for the majority of us now. So we cannot assume that because something used to be true, it will be still.

And don’t forget that Japan/Asia has the highest rates of stomach cancer due to their diets.

Dont waste your breath (or typing fingers!), posters like that are just being disingenuous, this has been set out over and over and over again.

And my worry is that we become reliant on injections to deal with the problem rather than address the root causes (junk food, lack of exercise etc)!

@Lemonlimonade that’s not a concern that should prevent obese people from accessing an effective treatment. And I’m curious how you think that people losing weight would make them less likely to exercise? Seems illogical to me. I’m absurdly more active than I was when I was 22 stone. I run regularly and walk everywhere. All my fitness markers are up and in the average or higher range.

The root cause is most humans having access to more calories than they need, for whole lifetimes. We evolved for the opposite, hence so many of us having the tendency to become obese. For most ancestral humans, wanting to eat lots of high calorie food whenever it was available was an advantage.

I'm all for curbing the worst excesses of the food industry anyway. We should do that. But the reality is that it would still leave entire societies of people with enough resources to access more food than they need. There is no evidence, not one example throughout history, of a human society where people could do this, chose not to and thus prevented obesity purely by choices and willpower.

I wonder if there will be a time in the future where those of us who have managed to lose the weight without the help of a WLI (whether by choice, finances, or existing health conditions) but who would JUST like the drug support to maintain will be able to access a low dose. Which might also be more affordable.

It seems strange if you can legitimately be prescribed maintenance but only if you’ve used the drug from when you were obese. Happy to be corrected if I’ve misunderstood!

But the horrible envy for me is because of how hard it is to keep up the control, it’s awful to feel envy like this as I really am pleased for those who were morbidly obese to turn their lives around, but I think it is a human reaction. The fact that talk (and visual evidence) of the magic of these drugs is so loud it amplifies the food noise struggle right now and makes the divide greater.

Yep. Ask ourselves why, as a whole, our pets are also overweight

They will eat too much given the opportunity, its an animal instinct, we seek out calorie rich foods.

We are over supplied with food and food is a commodity making manufacturers extremely rich. There is no/little motivation from either the public or successive governments to put safeguards in place and the ones that are put in place like lowering the sugar contents, are then undermined by allowing artificial sweetners to proliferate into everything which keeps our tastes sweet.

Sugar, fat and salt is not an enemy, over use and over eating is our enemy

I keep quoting Matthew Wiener on these sorts of threads, he is on youtube, he does a series of seminars about a number of weight loss and food topics, one of which is about sugar (he is a bit anti sugar) and cites the stats about sugar consumption in the US since 1900, its way way way through the roof, its one of the sole reasons why we eat too many calories. Its added to foods that are in no way needing to be sweet.

I've read, though didn't look into it as I met the criteria anyway, that it's to do with lack of research data for usage on lower BMI people. We have more data for those who are obese/overweight with conditions. So it's easier to be able to weigh up the risks of the drug against the risks of remaining obese. Which statistically most will. Harder to do a risk/benefit calculation when you haven't much data, and it's going to be a bigger hurdle to clear because being lower BMI is less risky.

But there's groups of lower BMI people who have more risk than others, due to say ethnicity, pre-existing conditions or fat distribution. I will watch with interest if we get more test data for those groups.

Yep, Ive lost 10 stone, more or less, just been for one of my 3 mile walks, barely out of breath, nice and brisk. Couldnt have made it to the end of the road previously.

Ah, how interesting. So you wouldn’t be in favour of life saving treatment for alcoholics if it was available? And you think obese people similarly don’t deserve treatment because we’ve brought it on ourselves? Enlightening.

This is the crux of it I think - it’s actually very interesting from a psychological viewpoint.

“You’re fat/greedy/feckless/lazy/weak and therefore don’t deserve treatment that could save your life” - even if it’s something (like MJ) that you can buy privately at no cost to the taxpayer.

Horrible mentality from very bitter, sad individuals imo.

It’s because some posters above have mentioned cancelling their gym memberships and spending the money instead on WL injections.

I personally find that a terrible idea as exercising and building muscle is what allows me to enjoy my food and feel good & strong!

It’s quite disturbing actually (as well as fascinating - people don’t usually reveal their thinking quite so starkly). Both obesity and alcohol related liver disease cause many deaths. But heaven forefend we have treatment available to prevent these deaths! Some self examination required, I think.