Launch HN: Fella (YC W20) – Tackling men's obesity using medication and coaching
I am sorry, but this is nothing less than an abomination.  Drugs, drugs, drugs.  More drugs.  Let&#x27;s drug everyone.  Let&#x27;s have everyone popping pills for everything.  Why not.  And make millions, billions, while we are at it.<p>And your sob story?  Do you think you are the only person in the world who has had to deal with stress?  This is ridiculous.  How about this for stress:  My grandparents were genocide survivors.  They saw portions of their family killed in the most horrific ways.  And they somehow managed that and moved on.  Me, personally, I&#x27;ve had one pretty horrific business failure that drove me to the edge of understanding why people take their own lives after ending-up in the hospital twice due to stress.<p>WE DO NOT NEED PILLS!<p>Yes, I am yelling.<p>We need action on better food quality and education.  People are filling themselves up with nothing but crap.  Ketogenic diets and balanced living work, 100% of the the time.  Exercise and activity is the magic &quot;pill&quot; that manages stress.<p>Frankly, I am astounded that YC would fund and support something like this.  I don&#x27;t care about your credentials and sob story.  This is an abomination.  Yes, you are likely to make billions.  Congratulations.  You are not going to fix a damn thing.  All you are going to accomplish is to get millions of people hooked on yet another &quot;once daily&quot; legal drug of some sort.<p>If you truly cared about helping people you would work towards fixing what&#x27;s actually wrong rather than getting millions of people to pop pills.<p>What when they stop?  Huh?<p>They will have developed no good habits at all.  They will not have a clue as to how to manage stress.  They sure as fuck are not going to understand that exercise is important and necessary.  They are not going to become discerning about what they eat.  And our industrialized toxic food industry isn&#x27;t going to change a thing.  They will pop your pills as they suck-in a two liter drink with insane amounts of sugar and inhale cheap carbohydrates in their burritos, burgers, pizza, etc.<p>Weight management isn&#x27;t at all about eating less.  It&#x27;s about not eating food that actively want to slowly kill you and, yes, engaging in a modicum of exercise in order to deal with insulin resistance, keep bones strong, etc.<p>I&#x27;ve had my own battles with this.  Lots of people do.  Until I finally listened to my wife (an MD).  So I proposed an experiment:  I would do no exercise at all other than taking walks with her a few evenings per week.  She was pushing me to take-up a low carb ketogenic-style diet.  As an engineer, I wanted to isolate exercise from a change in eating habits.  That&#x27;s what we did.  And the results were hard to ignore.  It was slow going, but the fat just came off  --without having to run a marathon every day to burn extra calories.  I eat as much as I want.  No restrictions other than &quot;don&#x27;t eat garbage&#x2F;sugars&#x2F;simple carbs, etc.&quot;.  After dropping two pant sizes and feeling &quot;normal&quot; again I can now go for the finishing touch and add exercise to this in the form of strength training.<p>The most important outcome was to reeducate myself about what and how I should be eating.  That&#x27;s it.  It&#x27;s as simple as that.  No drug is going to do that.  Ever.  Unless the intent is to hook people for their $149 per month in perpetuity.<p>Sorry, to take such an aggressive tone.  This is, to use the term, deplorable.  Shame on you.  Invest the money educating people on how NOT to use a drug to improve their lives.  Pills isn&#x27;t a long term sustainable solution.  You are bound to ruin more lives than you save.  And you are not going to do anything about improving the quality of the food that our population consumes.<p>Think of kids.  Their food choices --particularly in the case of lower education parents-- boil down to choices between different kinds of toxic garbage.  By the time they leave high school they have already imprinted horrible habits and done damage to their bodies.  And now you show up and say &quot;Take this pill...we will save you&quot;.  Sick.