OK I'm convinced, weight-loss drugs are Incredible and will change the world

[AliceAbsolum]

DH has been on them for a couple of months and they've changed our lives for the better. He's an over eater/ mild binger and generally quite obsessed with food. Never managed to keep weight off.

Now he's happy, calm, doesn't think about food, eats like a 'normal person' and it's freed up so much space and joy in our lives.

Apparently in the future it'll be a pill you can either take that day or not, e.g. Most days but not Christmas day. Incredible!

Yes I know people get side effects and they don't work for everyone, etc. But I'm very impressed.
Apparently they also help alcoholics and other addicts as they work on the reward centre's of the brain. Amazing.

Already on there

I think depression might count on some of the questionnaires anyway.

New and improved

Love this 😂 Is there any way to squeeze in one about muscle loss, and being a guinea pig…so hard when the card is already jam-packed full of bangers.

I'm going to have to work on a re-design. You're quite right about those other ones.

That doesn't make sense, surely - once you've got your weight down and are on a maintenance dose, you are now "slim or slightly chubby people". Assuming you don't need the drug for diabetes, you're in exactly the same position as those you've characterised as abusing the drugs.

I mean, I understand why you're permitted to maintain - I'm just questioning your logic here.

That sounds really tough, and agree that forewarned is forearmed. Good luck @Itissunnysomewhere

So creative @1clavdivs 👏🏻👏🏻

Really? I thought it was doctors doing the prescribing with the online orders? I'm in a different country and you cannot get it without a script.

I had my covid vaccine the moment I could and am currently on ozempic. Not sure why you seem to have assumed I am anti-vac and anti-weightloss meds.

Here's a new side effect of Mounjaro that nobody else is reporting on: ANGER.
I have been using MJ since May, and as a direct result of using it, I am angry.
Very angry. And it's a side effect that does not go away.
I'm angry at the weight loss industry.
I'm angry at being told if I count the points in food and stop at 27 points then I will lose weight.
I'm angry at being told if I ate only green food or only red food then I will lose weight.
I'm angry that I was told to track my calorie intake and my exercise levels to make sure my calorie intake was smaller than the amount of calories I burned.
I'm angry that I was told that if I followed a high fibre diet I would lose weight.
I'm angry that I was told if I did intermittent fasting I would lose weight.
I'm angry that I invested all of my faith in the above but none of them worked.
I'm angry that I paid good money to attend weekly diet club classes for years to be patronised and told by leaders in front of the whole class that I can't have been following the plan correctly otherwise I would have lost weight. I was following the plan correctly. I'm an intelligent woman. I know how to follow instructions. But it didn't work for me. I didn't lose weight whilst diligently following those instructions.
I'm angry that I have spent 2 decades of my life weighing and charting and diarising every single solitary thing that I eat, and stopping at a level that would create a calorie deficit, yet it didn't work and I didn't lose weight.
I'm angry that exercising every day, like I was told to, didn't make me lose weight. It cost me a fortune in David Lloyd membership over the years. But it didn't make me lose weight like my gym trainer told me it would.
I'm angry that doctors have told me to stop eating convenience foods and to start cooking healthy foods from scratch, when I have never eaten convenience foods and have spent all my life cooking healthy foods from scratch.
I'm angry that when I was a child at school, all my friends got sent in to school with a packed lunch of white rolls filled with processed ham and mayonnaise, chocolate bars and crisps with a can of fizzy drink. Every day. And all of them were skinny. Whereas I got sent in with a packed lunch of wholegrain bread filled with marmite and alfalfa sprouts that my mum used to buy from the local health food shop, a piece of fruit, some cucumber, and a bottle of water. Every day. And I was fat. Very fat. Yet my mother never, ever fed me confectionery, processed foods, convenience foods, puddings, fizzy drinks, sweets, crisps. Never. She fed me as she ate, which was pure, fresh, clean, home cooked foods. The very foods we are taught to eat for a lean body. Yet I was heavily overweight throughout my childhood and teenage years.
I'm angry that nobody worried about me when I stopped eating at 19 because I was so, so desperate to shed this heavy weight I'd been carrying around with me all my life despite being reared on a textbook healthy diet. I could see in the eyes of the adults around me that nobody could understand why or how I was fat when I was given such healthy food to eat and sent to regular sports classes and taken out for hikes every weekend. It didn't make me lose weight.
I'm angry that all through my life, people have said to me "kindly" that if I ate less, I would lose weight. I did eat less. I ate less than every other person I know. I have spent my entire life eating less. It didn't stop me from being fat. It didn't make me lose weight.
I'm angry that being fat has given people the green light to make personal comments about my weight throughout my entire life. Teachers, school friends, uni friends, colleagues, family members, adult friends, in laws. I don't know if these comments were designed to catapult me in to losing weight. They didn't know I'd been dedicating my life to trying to lose weight.
I'm angry that I was told walking 10,000 steps a day would make me lose weight, so I got a pedometer and set out over the downs on a daily basis for a 5 mile walk come rain or shine after an exhausting day at work, and I kept going with it for a year, fuelled by the instructions from others that if I kept doing it I'd lose weight. But it didn't work. I didn't lose any weight.
I'm angry that I have spent a lifetime feeling shame. Feeling guilty. Feeling ugly. Feeling like I look awful. Developing low self esteem and low self confidence in response to the unkind comments about my weight that I grew up receiving. Feeling upset that other people think I eat too much and don't move enough. Feeling demoralised that other people think I need to be educated on healthy eating. About exercise. About TDEE.
I'm angry that, at some point in my life, nobody told me I have a disease. I'm angry nobody told me the disease is called obesity. I'm angry nobody told me that no matter what I do, I will not be able to conquer the symptoms of that disease all by myself through sheer grit and determination. I'm angry that I've had to work this out myself. With no support from anyone, anywhere, including professionals.
And now, here we are. 4 decades into my life and I've been given an injection that is making me lose weight. It's as simple as that. After decades of battling against my own body and believing all the lies I've been sold and ending up feeling a complete and utter failure because I did everything they told me would work yet none of it worked for me, here is 1 quick, simple injection that takes 5 seconds to use once a week and that's it. That's all I have to do. And I'm losing weight. Slowly. Steadily. Consistently. Successfully.
And now I have a new anger.
I'm angry that people are telling me I shouldn't be taking this drug.
I'm angry that this drug is working for me, yet I'm being met with negativity about it.
I'm angry that I'm being told I shouldn't be buying it privately. That I shouldn't be spending this much of my money on it. That it will make me ill. That the side effects are terrible. That I don't know what the long term effects will be.
So watch out people.
WLDs should come with a great big side effect warning: 'Caution. When this drug starts taking effect and you begin losing weight, suddenly everything you've questioned your whole life will start making sense and as a direct result of that you may develop anger'.

No you aren't the same category as someone who has never been obese at all. Being obese changes uour body. Fat cells that have been obese are altered/damaged and more prone to storing fat again. People who have lost weight are recovering from obesity from an unspecified time afterwards, their bodies don't become the same as someone who has never been obese. That's why people using WLIs are likely to need to stay on them for maintenance for a period of time or risk regaining the weight. It's not just about 'habits' .

This is like telling someone who takes medication to lower their blood pressure that once their blood pressure is normal they need to stop taking the medication.

Or someone who takes antipsychotics to stop taking them as soon as they feel mentally stable.

Staying on those medications which make you ‘healthy’ is very different to giving them to people who never needed them in the first place. Same with GLP1s.

@SweepingChimneys
I appreciate a lot of your feelings here but come on - you don't just have the disease of obesity. That's not what is meant when it's referred to as a disease. You get the disease of obesity by eating in excess of your calorie needs for a long time to the point that you become obese. Your posts implies that you never did that and just became obese because you have the disease of obesity. I also never ate processed junk as a child and always cook from scratch etc etc but I'm obese because I ate too much, over a period of time. It's like alcoholism. We may be predisposed to getting the disease but we trigger it through our own actions. All the things you talked about as things you tried to lose weight - I've done most of those. We all have. And they work! For a period of time, you lose some weight. But then your body seeks to return to its obese state because obesity damages your cells and creates a dependency on overeating. So they don't work for long.

After starting MJ I have no interest in food shopping at the moment however, I have started watching food hauls on YouTube which, I find therapeutic. Odd I know.

Oh, but all or most of those things are true, you would lose weight. And you don’t need to just take an injection and like magic you lose weight, you need to follow a calorie controlled diet, it’s very easy not to lose weight on the jabs,

im not remotely angry, im delighted, because i also tried all those things, but the truth is I couldn’t do them long enough or hard enough to make them work, and im delighted the jabs are now a tool to help me do those things.

@TheSilkWorm I think the SweepingChimneys was saying she's been obese from childhood despite being fed healthy foods from being tiny. If her packed lunch is anything to go by she wasn't consuming excess calories. We don't know the portion sizes however but it sounds like something biological rather than behavioural. I'd be interested in looking at research around that. Sorry SweepingChimneys, I don't want to make you feel like a lab rat but I find your story fascinating and heartbreaking I had a childhood of packed lunches with white bread sandwich, crisps, a chocolate bar like a single twix, club biscuits, 54321 biscuit, yogurt, breakfast was bacon, egg and sausages on a lot of days, dinner always meat/fish, veg and potatoes, a fuck ton of sweets and not a massive amount of exercise. I was a skinny child. There was only fat child at school and she wasn't that fat, just chubby and probably what would be deemed a little overweight these days.

It's not possible though. You can't get obese without consuming excess calories. They can be 'healthy' calories but there needs to be an excess. Fat doesn't appear out of nowhere. It's basic physics.

I’m not sure it applies to that PP, but some ethnicities (mine included) have a lower bmi threshold where things like insulin resistance and metabolic issues start kicking in, even with just a slight weight increase. Then that starts a chain reaction where gaining weight is easier while losing it is harder. So it’s not actually as cut and dry as you might assume. For example, going from a bmi of 22 to 25. Yes you need to initially be eating a bit more or not exercising as much as you should, but we’re not talking drastic amounts.

I’m sorry but what you posted didn’t contradict what the pp said, who was right, you can’t gain without consuming excess calories. What you posted was a reason some people might consume too many calories. The poster never said it was simple or cut and dried, they made an accurate statement of fact.

the bottom line is every single one of us gained weight due to consuming too many calories, irrelevant of the reason why we did that. Insulin resistance, mental health, disabilities. We simply ate too much compared to our energy output.

For example, going from a bmi of 22 to 25. Yes you need to initially be eating a bit more or not exercising as much as you should, but we’re not talking drastic amounts.

I take full responsibility for eating too many calories as an adult. Obesity in childhood set the precedent but ultimately it is me choosing to eat what I eat as an adult.

My slim friends always tell me they have to work at it too and I believe them they are just better at it than me.

MJ is not magic. It helps a great deal but you have to accept ultimately you are eating less calories and that is why you are losing weight.

"But excess calories!" Sort of misses the point.

the physics may be basically true but the problem is that it's a dynamic equation that's not fully under people's control. Metabolism is an adaptive mechanism. Your body can lower or raise its energy expenditure. And you can be eating quite a normal amount of food, but expending fewer calories than you are taking in.

what this "but calories in, calories out!" stubbornness means is insisting to fat people that they need to ignore signals to be hungry, or to eat ridiculously small amounts of food. From a physics point of view this may be true, but it's not actually possible to do. We aren't built to live in permanent caloric deficit and hunger this way. What can wind up happening is that dieting makes your metabolism worse. Your body thinks it is being starved and starts conserving energy.

it's very frustrating, and I hate to use the word gaslighting as it's so misused, but it really is cruel, when people insist to fat people that we must be lying about how much we eat. Why is it so difficult to imagine that people have different metabolisms? Everyone knows someone who is rail thin despite eating loads, or having an appalling diet, and when that happens we chalk it up to luck. Why can't we do the same in reverse?

the opposition to medication is often really a moral stance. If the goal is truly health, and drugs work without causing harm, then they should be fine. But many people simply act like it's "cheating." That's because dieting isn't merely about weight control. It represents self control in general. Drugs represent some kind of cheat code for gluttons. What people want is not simply for us to be thin "for our health," but for us to demonstrate appropriate control and morality.

(and I'm not even touching social determinants of health here!)

Weight gain is from excess calories over what you need. That need varies between people. In older bodies, that threshold becomes lower, which is why weight gain happens easier as you get older. But in metabolically sick bodies, it's not just about that threshold. People with metabolic disorders do not metabolise properly. Even if they stay under that threshold, their bodies still don't necessarily behave the way they should. They don't get the energy they should. They don't burn fat the way they should. They gain weight easier and find it harder to lose it. The longer it goes on and the more weight that goes on, the more disordered the body comes.

These are the people the injections help the most because they address some of those metabolic issues, like regulating the blood sugars in bodies who are unable to do that themselves and they reduce hunger in bodies that lack the "full" signal etc. People who don't have diabetes/insulin resistance won't benefit from that side of it, and people who don't have excessive feelings of hunger will be at risk of anorexia.

That is why these injections are only meant for people with high BMIs and/or health conditions.

It's not about eating more calories than you need. It's about eating more calories than you can metabolise. This is unnaturally low in some people. There genuinely are people who gain weight if they eat more than 800 cals a day. It is because they have a sick/disordered metabolism. Yet people still insist they must be eating more than they realise. No.