‘Breakthrough’ obesity drugs that have stunned researchers
Just making sure everybody understands that these drugs are not a solution to the problem. Assuming they work, they just make dieting easy.<p>Look at people who successfully lost weight with diet -- studies show that almost all of them will regain most of their weight within 5 years. And the basic reason is because almost all dieting regimes are shitty, unsustainable way to live and at the end people are left tired of the diet and looking to get back to the eating habits they love and caused the problem in the first place.<p>Also calorie restriction comes with a host of other problems. You need to provide better nutrition while on a diet -- your body still needs same things but now there is less food with which it has to be delivered. But if you got obese you probably don&#x27;t know how to eat properly.<p>Prolonged calorie restriction causes muscle wasting. You can counteract it to a certain degree for some time with exercise. Which if you are obese you probably don&#x27;t know how to.<p>Calorie restriction also typically causes basal metabolic rate drop. Which means you have to keep tightening the diet to see results. And when you are off the diet it will be extremely difficult to impossible to keep your weight.<p>You can still cause a lot of damage to your body by snacking and eating wrong foods even if you are on calorie restricted diet. It is better to learn to not snack and keep your eating window to 4-6 hours every day rather than eat through entire day.<p>I personally dislike meds like this. It is good it exists but I would never take them or recommend to anybody. There are a lot of medications that are supposed to help (like metformin) but all these meds do not address the main cause of the problem -- which is what you eat, how you eat and when you eat it.<p>--<p>For background, I got obese once and lost weight. Then regained the weight over a decade. Being engineer and problem solver, I vowed to understand the shit out of the problem, loose the weight properly and never regain it back. Which seems to be working. Understanding how to loose weight allowed me to do fantastic things like loose weight at 3 times the rate I did it previously while not feeling hungry or cold.<p>The previous time I was on calorie restricted diet loosing and I was completely miserable for almost entire year, cold, slow, irritated, unable to focus.<p>This time I completed the same weight loss in 4 months while actually feeling better than ever (at least most of the time). Most important for me, it is not interfering with my work.<p>I am also not taking any meds.<p>I am not preaching any diets here. I am just suggesting that if you are feeling hungry throughout your diet you are probably doing something wrong and it would be worth the while to understand what and how to fix it. And the only way this happens is if you get interested. No drug is going to magically fix it for you.