I think it is because if 90% of the population did half of what you do (and kudos for you for doing it), they wouldn't have a problem with weight, you just happen to be one of the unlucky few where it doesn't work and these drugs are useful.
There are clearly minority of people who can only achieve weight loss using drugs but for most people they can achieve the same effect by a lifestyle change, has this been proven incorrect?
I think the best empirical result for this is to compare US with any other western country (say Japan or France) or even US states with each other, clearly lifestyle plays a huge role in obesity.
Are you suggesting there are people who can burn more energy than they ingest for a prolonged period of time and not lose weight?
That… would fundamentally rewrite everything we know about how mammals consume energy.
Of course not. Nobody needs drugs to lose weight, they need to consume less energy than they use.
Commenter 2: Kodus to you. Let me just discount your anecdote as being unlucky and keep my current belief. But again, kudos.
HN threads on weightloss are an utter waste of time.
As a direct reply to the challenge that the original poster made:
> > Why do we find it acceptable to help people who struggle with alcohol abuse, or nicotine addiction, or opioid addiction, but not to help people who struggle with food abuse?
They said nah, you were unlucky. In other words just dismiss his point outright.
Is that still uncharitable? Then so be it.
> GGP said themselves that their issue is volume, that they're doing well in many other ways.
Yes they said that they have a food addiction.
- The alcoholic said that his problem is the volume of alcohol intake
- The smoker said that…
Then asked why we won’t help food addicts. Just waffle on about self-discipline or hint at it.
This question is still yet to be answered.
> GP is saying if everyone could do what they've done, many fewer would have the problem, and so maybe it would have less stigma.
Maybe if those people had more self-discipline. Then maybe there would be less of a stigma.
You’re using the rationalized stigma to explain the stigma. This is at best circular.
Maybe we would respect ex-smokers more if they had the discpline to not ingest nicotine gum.
In other words I was giving kudos that the commentator put in a lot of effort to verify that it was an illness in their case.
People seem to think that once these drugs became popular, suddenly obese people around the world awoke from a deep slumber, like zombies, and decided to see a doctor for the first time in their lives about their weight.
Please. These people are walking into doctor’s office having given up hope because most of them have, to one extent or another, tried everything.
Our society does not make it pleasant to be obese, no matter how you feel about body positivity or anything else.
The implication that obese people have never considered or tried eating less, working out more, etc., is in and of itself the problem. It implies laziness and imbues negative morality, when the reality is that most people who are obese know it, hate it, and have tried most of their lives to overcome it, unsuccessfully.
So now that there’s a medication that can help kickstart their creation of new habits for the first time in their lives, I don’t see how that is a bad thing.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41813589
It is simply not true that if 90% of the population “tried to lose weight the right way” that they wouldn’t have a problem with it. That is an assumption you are making, and the underlying postulate is that that same 90% hasn’t tried.
> In other words I was giving kudos that the commentator put in a lot of effort to verify that it was an illness in their case.
The illness being addiction/food abuse?
Again we circle back to the question that OP posed. Because I have never seen someone say that they are an alchololic or smoke/tobacco addict and then get told: okay maybe, but first you should put in the work and find out if you really are that.
(Step one: admit that you are an addict. Step two, uh, confirm that you really are?)
Not being snarky, but is this truly "better" than a single weekly injection - 10 seconds and done for the week? I do think our wider society sees medications for overeating as "cheating". Perhaps we might benefit from rethinking that.
I would compare something like scale measurements to sex education. If kids were all exposed to some period of measurement of foods to learn what they were eating, it would stick. Studies show that ANY form of tracking causes people to make more mindful choices. Everyone I know personally that is taking these drugs uses it as a crutch entirely. They take it and make even worse food choices than before. It's very sad and I worry about the next issue they will cause with this behavior to then stack another medication on top.
I started doing it mostly out of curiosity, and it turned out one of the meals I thought it was high-calorie was actually lower than my other meals.
Yes, obviously. I'm stunned that it needs to be said, but since it apparently does:
1. You propose taking a medication regularly which is probably completely unnecessary, and paying for it regularly. (This was worse with "metabolism boosters" etc. since the patient would be paying for the medication to have the privilege of eating more, and thus paying more for the extra food.)
2. Knowing what you eat, and being able to denominate it in calories, is knowledge. I thought we were hackers here? My experience has been that ordinary people have some truly absurd ideas about how fattening certain things are or aren't, or about how much they're actually eating, or about what healthy daily intake ranges, portion sizes etc. look like. (They also have absurd ideas about how much it costs to "eat healthy", as well as about the connection between "healthy" food and caloric intake.)
I think "perfect is the enemy of good" applies here. People en masse are not controlling their intake. They just aren't. They can't do it. We can rage about it and criticise - and many do for all the good that's doing - or we can explore options. Medications with few side effects have some appeal here. Evolutions will likely reduce those. Eventually that will not be a strong argument against the medication option is my prediction.
1. People might want to help, but they don't think taking a pill every day for the rest of your life is a proper solution. I'm not aware of any such things for other addictions you mention,
2. People don't want other people to have it easier than they did. "I had to diet and exercise etc, you should too",
3. People don't want to help. They want other people to be fat because it makes them relatively more attractive.
EDIT: And to be clear, there may be specifics with these particular drugs which are problematic, maybe they're by necessity expensive or resource intensive to manufacture, maybe they have problematic long-term effects, I don't know. I'm purely talking about the general aversion some people claim to have regarging taking some medication on an interval to help with a health problem. It makes little sense to me.
ADHD medicine is highly problematic. The medications are controlled to ridiculous levels, and there are strong social stigmas against both the condition and the disorder.
If you’re eating the right thing for your body, you’ll be satiated when you eat your full.
It really depends on you and the activity levels.
I used to ride to and from work - and I would ride hard, a solid 1.5 hour of riding every single workday. Yet this just caused me to gain weight as my appetite just shot through the roof. This new drug would have been SO good for me back then.
These days I find it easier to control my weight with regular strength exercise vs riding, as I tend to go too hard on the riding which causes me to feel famished. And then the control is just hard.
However when I just do (Olympic barbell) weights, a bacon, egg and onion + cheese omelette in real butter and EVOO does the trick to break my IF then, along with a WPI/milk shake- I get stronger and also lose weight. No need to keep eating. However, I'll then do cardio a couple of times per week which tends to undo the weight progress; I guess the real trick would be to stop doing the hard intervals I love on the Kickr, but going slow on the bike is nearly impossible for me. :-)
Eat low calorie (and ideally high protein) after exercising. Fruit and Veg are amazing for this.
"Getting fit and staying fit" is a form of social capital, because it's extremely hard and only within reach of a small portion of the population. "Being fit" is strongly aligned with "being attractive" which confers all sorts of cross-cutting social benefits.
Some people feel cheated when medication allows others to "effortlessly" join this social club, and then become vile and hateful in response.
Ignoring that extreme the questions maybe different: How many hours does a median person have free from work, commute, and sleep? How much time must be spent managing exercise and diet to achieve fitness?
I think if you took the time to answer those questions for the median or modal non-impoverished person in the world you might find that fitness is actually quite difficult to achieve.
It seems really hard in the US.
Eating healthier requires very little extra time: perhaps 2-3 hours a week for shopping and meal prep.
- making a salad take 5 minutes.
- baking 10 meals worth of chicken takes 30-45 minutes, with about 5-10 minutes of actual prep time.
- baking a few meals worth of salmon, or some other fish is about the same as chicken.
- cutting up an apple takes 1-2 minutes. Bananas, peaches are ready to go, almost no prep required.
- steaming fresh broccoli takes 3-5 min of prep... and about 15-20 minutes total.
- Equally important is making small decisions to avoid or limit less healthy foods, which requires no time at all and often saves us money [that we can spend on healthier foods instead].
Exercising: 30-60 minutes a day, most days, is ideal but anything is better than nothing. A morning and evening 20 minute walk is great place to start (and can be so relaxing). If a person spends time on Hacker News, they could instead allocate that time to exercise. There are free 15 minutes yoga videos on Youtube. A set of push ups requires 60 seconds. Sometimes I do body weight squats at my desk at work (especially during Teams calls, camera off of course).
Sleep: get at least 7 hours of sleep a night... ideally starting to bed before 11pm. more sleep gives us more energy to put towards being awesome during the day and more energy for exercise and doing the extra work to eat better.
I think almost everyone can set aside 6-10 hours in their week towards building their health. It is a matter of priorities... a person's health should be one of their top priorities.
Not going to waste my time providing sources to remedy your ignorance. You are more than capable of doing this research yourself.
For others open to listening to why it's often out of reach: Outside the go-to "motivation" type discussion gravitation (and, keep in mind, not everyone can just 'motivate themselves past their addictions' in the first place or they wouldn't be addictions) it is also disproportionately hard for those struggling in other ways of life (financially, mentally, physically/genetically). Some of these can be cascaded effects, like support systems (e.g.not everyone's partner is willing or able to go all in on it like above). Others can be that it is medically not as easy for some people to lose weight at a given intake amount which makes it just that much harder.
Most people would like very VERY much to be fit. That most still aren't fit should be a good indicator it's out of most's reach to "just eat less" independently. All this said as a person who is not overweight themselves but has been around many people in different situations, abilities, and luck that have left them unable to be so as well.
You can't outrun thermodynamics. But your body will change its efficiency.
You’d still be eating less, but retaining more weight. Why? Because your metabolism slows down significantly if you don’t fuel it, and that makes it harder to lose weight, not easier.
Most things in life are not binary, and are affected by more than just a single choice.
Moreover, have you ever tried to work out at 450 lbs? No? It is an immense effort, often literally impossible for most people at that weight, and the best they can manage is a walk around the block before their cardio can’t keep up.
What then?
See above, where I reminded people (which includes you) that things are rarely binary.
Otherwise, perhaps let people get healthy instead of admonishing them to get healthy the way you think they should, which turns out to be… the same way they have always tried and has not worked.
The rest of my argument still holds if you change that.
Your contention of “most of them actually are very capable of just eating more healthy diets and exercising more” is a nonsensical assumption, based on no data, and a prejudiced assumption that they are lazy and haven’t tried, ever.
> What we actually need to do is un-fuck our food supply and encourage healthier lifestyles...
Great. We should do that. I completely agree. It will definitely help our kids.
That won’t help anyone get healthy in this lifetime. It takes too long. Obesity would kill you first.
But you’re right, that’s probably better than taking a medication that is clearly helping people change their habits and get healthy, because you feel it would be better if they didn’t have the problem in the first place.
Nicotine gum and patches help curb smoking and change people’s habits. Why? Why not just force everyone to quit cold turkey, like my dad did? Should we just change the way we talk about smoking and produce fewer cigarettes? Sure.
But nicotine patches and gums saved lives and helped people quit that had never been able to before them, and not for a lack of trying.
GLP-1 meds are an aid. The alternative isn’t fixing the food supply, but dying from obesity.
What, precisely, does this mean? If medication is appropriately prescribed, by well-educated and well-trained doctors who have, upon actually meeting the patient which neither of us has done, decided that this patient could benefit from said medication... why is that bad?
39.6 percent of U.S. adults are obese. If all of them were prescribed GLP-1 meds (which would definitely never be true, for lots of reasons), and if all of them got healthy because of it... that's bad? Simply because they used medication to help?
Clarify for me, please, why medication is somehow not allowed to be used as a tool to fight illness or injury. Because people should somehow be "stronger" and able to fight it more on our own, despite not having been able to in the past?
Mass medication is an undesirable state of the world because it doesn’t address the root of any problem. It simply negates or masks some of the effects. The Ozempic situation is just like how kids are now being prescribed Adderall in the millions, when really the problem is they are just given iPads too much and fed unhealthy food that causes ADHD. Adderall doesn’t address the cause. Then you end up with a slave population that needs this medication to function. which is only good for the pharma companies making money on those meds.
Source? Because so far it seems like you and others really want it to have long-term negative effects, but that the evidence for that is made up and entirely in your head, to date.
> The Ozempic situation is just like how kids are now being prescribed Adderall in the millions, when really the problem is they are just given iPads too much and fed unhealthy food that causes ADHD. Adderall doesn’t address the cause.
Ah, finally, the mask comes off. Your issue is with people getting help for disorders and illnesses they have, period.
The trope that ADHD is caused by iPads is nonsense. ADHD is caused by an underdeveloped pre-frontal cortex. Plenty of kids actually have it. I did, for sure. I wish I had found out what ADHD was, instead of holding my preconception about what it was, much earlier in life. I didn’t need that struggle against a thing I could never beat, because your brain controls everything you do.
> Then you end up with a slave population that needs this medication to function. which is only good for the pharma companies making money on those meds.
Do you? Show me a “slave population” that “needs adderall to function.”
I agree we created many of these problems (food being unhealthy, for example).
I also agree fixing many of them would be good.
I don’t agree that that is the only way to help people, and I don’t agree with the implication that “all pharma is bad,” because I don’t make outlandish binary statements like that.
Seems like something you could lead with instead of moronic gut reactions...
That’s not the argument you are making, and that is one I’d agree with.
> Most people using Ozempic have never tried multi-day fasting as an alternative.
Source? This is an assumption that requires data, because it is intuitively not true; and anecdotally, it is also not true.
This is purely a prejudiced assumption.
> There are plenty of ways to lose weight that don't require taking medicine that might be fucking up your digestive system long-term.
Or it might not, and hasn’t, at any meaningful scale, since 2005. Seems like you really want it to, though, and that seems like more a problem with you than it or them.
Until next time we meet on the internet. :salute:
Taking a pill doesn't.
That's why it will always be out of reach of some people.
We all can make healthier decision about what food we put into our bodies (a lot could be done to make our food supply healthier, as well). I find I have to be more strict about eating right as I get older to maintain my health.
I feel like folks saying 'fitness' isn't in reach [for most/many of us] is a cop out. This is anecdotal, but i know people who have lost 100+ lbs in their 40's and 50's and completely turned their life around; I know people who have reversed Type-2 diabetes through diet and exercise. These people have busy lives with a lot of responsibility... some of these people live in city areas where access to gyms or outdoor spaces for walking, etc. is not convenient.
I have a few doctors and other medical professionals in my family... knowing what I know, I am 'almost terrified' of becoming metabolically unhealthy and overweight. Many of the maladies that afflict us are metabolic disorders (in whole or in part) due to the long term effects of poor diet, lack of exercise & quality sleep (high stress doesn't help either). Poor metabolic health tremendously increases risk of almost every disease and malady: diabetes, heart disease, heart attack, dementia & Alzhiemer's, many cancers, stroke, depression and other mental illnesses, sleep apnea, susceptibility to infectious disease, etc. Poor metabolic health also indirectly leads to higher likelihood of issues causing chronic pain: e.g., herniated discs in the spine, ankle/knee/hip problems, migraine headaches.
I'm glad Ozempic exists but it is not a cure... it is an aid towards building a healthier life. Use Ozempic as a tool, by all means!!, to start your journey and get yourself into a better situation physically. But please use that good start to pursue the 'best/healthy you'... do it for yourself.
Aren’t you are ignoring the way western society influences behavior? eg lack of walkability of suburbs, massive price difference between fresh and processed foods, constant advertising of junk food & alcohol.
Where there’s a will there’s a way.
> constant advertising of junk food & alcohol.
Nobody is forcing you to eat those.
No, I think force feeding junk food is pretty rare but that seems like a straw man.
Consider children. Their brains are not fully developed and they have little agency in determining the food they have access to. Childhood obesity is on the rise. So blame the children’s choices?
Ok, sure, blame the parents. I agree of course it is the parents responsibility, but the cards are often stacked against parents by big corporations with government subsidies (in the us).
It’s really weird to me to argue that this is completely a problem at the individual level and not a social one—and I see no other way to interpret your comment.
Been there. It’s always bad parenting. I had to fix shitton of issues myself, because of idiot parents.
At the same time, we are all still individuals. We agency to make life decisions. I generally don't subscribe to the notion that people are helpless even in the face of a big scary corporation. There are two competing ideas. Either 1 there is some unknown force creating this problem(but doesn't extended to the entire human population for some reason) or 2 we know there are environmental causes. For #2, why systemically stack a drug on top if we know what the boogy man is? #1 we need to seriously buckle down on research on what the environmental/behavior factor is so we can bring everyone back to human baseline. Using drugs for people already in great suffering is one thing, but that is very different from widespread distribution as a preventative.
If you think I am advocating medication or implying that “people” are helpless against corporations, read again. I agree with most of what you say although I am not sure we need more research (although of course I don’t discourage it). Maybe one day we’ll prove that the government subsidizing corn so that big corporations (spun off from former tobacco companies as another comment pointed out) can super cheaply mass produce syrup which our evolutionary biology finds difficult to resist and market directly to children turns out to be bad for health outcomes and good for profits (for the medical industrial complex as well). Oh wait, we already know that.
Yeah? Even if I’m disabled, I should got for a walk, just because I want to?
Pretending the world is binary is a fun exercise, but it is always untrue.
No, but social conditioning normalises it and those in the lower socioeconomic areas of living buy the cheapest rather than most nutritional food and are way less likely to read informative articles or posts about healthy eating. It really is heavily influenced by a lack of supply of healthy affordable food.
And our answer to it is… another endocrine disruptor. But this time we’ll call it something else (GLP-1 agonists) and laugh all the way to the bank.
- diet alone
- diet + extra protein
- diet + exercise
- retatrutide
- tirzepatide
- semaglutide
tldr is that, despite some muscle loss, muscle as a percentage of body composition is higher (~50% FFM at start, whereas weight lost with GLP-1 meds ranged from 25%-39% of muscle). It also seems like the muscles will likely function better with less insulin resistance:
> Intentional weight loss causes a greater relative decrease in body fat than FFM or SMM, so the ratio of FFM/SMM to fat mass increases. Accordingly, physical function and mobility improve after weight loss despite the decrease in FFM/SMM, even in older adults with decreased FFM and SMM at baseline. In addition, weight loss improves the “quality” of remaining muscle by decreasing intramyocellular and intermuscular triglycerides and increasing muscle insulin sensitivity
https://www.reddit.com/r/tirzepatidecompound/comments/1dtzr2...
It seems to me we're curbing eating by flooding with insulin, when one of the big damaging effects of overeating is insulin floods. (Or perhaps I'm misreading, perhaps insulin floods are only bad b/c they cause insulin resistance which causes more overeating?)
A GLP-1 med stimulates the release of insulin slowly over a sustained period of time, not just as a massive spike when I eat.
Everyone (that isn’t diabetic) has a massive insulin spike when they eat something that spikes their glucose. GLP-1 meds don’t make that better in any way.
Which countries? As far as I know, most Western countries have roughly similar issues with obesity, at least directionally.
The essence of the argument against drug interventions is that the root cause is personal choice, and therefore a drug is a shortcut or crutch and does not address the root cause.
Many people feel that the real cause is the structural changes to the person's brain, body, and daily routine that reinforce, and are reinforced by the initial tiny over-consumption, which compounds over time. It's like a debt where you are stuck paying interest, no matter how much you'd like to pay off the debt. Addiction is a system in which the person's willpower goes against everything they have set up over decades. It's unreasonably challenging for nearly everyone to walk it all back. Insulin resistance is one of the most pernicious effects of even small over-eating over time. The body and mind do not feel satiated even though enough calories have been consumed. It's not "I would enjoy another slice of pizza", it can be "I am still starving".
And yes, the environment in which we live, where it is less stigmatized to overeat, and food is treated a certain way, more like a drug than fuel, is part of that system.
In a “traditional” weight loss strategy, you paired calorie deficit with an increase in physical activity (cardio, resistance training, etc). This increased physical activity helped protect you from muscle loss (your body tended to recognize that muscle was important so it burned fat at a higher rate)
With ozempic, people can lose weight without changing their sedentary lifestyle. Since your muscles are not needed, your body is free to grab energy from wherever it can. In some studies, almost half of weight loss can come from lean tissue.
Is it better to for an obese person to lose weight vs not lose weight? Absolutely. But it would be even better if they also changed their lifestyle to protect their muscle mass.
I'm not denying that under some circumstances like in the case of severely obese patients their bodies might think protein is better energy source than fat but in people with normally functioning bodies it shouldn't happen a lot especially if they get enough protein in their weight loss diet.
Nice one. I think it's a bad idea to be dependent on drugs for something you can achieve on your own, especially if the drugs don't have a long term safety profile. Pretty sure I read somewhere that they don't. If you're going to use them for a short period of time, that's fine. Don't say nobody warned you if that doesn't pan out though (or worse, you have a bad drug response).
I don't think this is just about a social club. Battling weight loss and habits is foundational to the human experience from the most recent centuries. Be it drugs, or anything else really that changes the nature of these challenges, people are going to feel discomfort because it's an attack on their understanding of the world, and in some ways, their beliefs.
You know by far the biggest benefit of doing hard workouts or doing extreme sports? Its not muscle mass nor how much they lift. Its about how it changes your personality, resilience to mental or physical suffering and ease of overcoming it. You know, hardest part of doing anything is winning the mental resistance game and just start it. Keep doing this every day in various forms for decades... A very strong resilient personality under various circumstances is almost an unavoidable result if you are putting in enough effort.
If somebody can't even stop themselves buying and paying for junk food at grocery store or has to overeat constantly otherwise getting anxious, that part of personality is missing and another, less desirable is present.
Who would you prefer to have as a close colleague you depend on, life long partner, a close dependable friend? Who do you think women would prefer subconsciously? Societies have always some form of castes, even hardcore communists have/had them, in US one of very popular is based on career/income/wealth. And this is just another dimension or caste, so let's not act like we are not humans with flaws and subjective preferences, we don't give our respect out for free.
These medication help with none of above, in fact they strongly reinforce such behavior and personality traits. But to each their own. One benefit I can see that they could start / help with movement from former to the latter, but that's rarer than people like to admit.
I have achieved much, largely due to my resilience. It would be very difficult to argue, after growing up very impoverished and getting to where I am today, that I am not resilient.
I played sports, lots. I competed in martial arts. Resilience isn’t my issue.
But thanks for telling me I have a moral problem I don’t have, instead of perhaps considering that what people are telling you might be the truth.
You don’t always know better, even if it flies in the face of what it is you do know.
The therapeutic amphetamines dosages for ADHD is below the threshold required for produce meaningful weight loss. It's not surprising that it didn't help you lose weight.
That’s not been my experience at all. My dosage absolutely significantly suppresses my appetite and always has. This has directly led to sustained weight loss. It did so badly enough at one point that I was underweight significantly.
I have to force myself to eat on my meds, even though the thought often makes me ill.
I’m on 30mg dexamfetamine daily.
“Dexamfetamine can make you want to eat less, so you may lose weight while taking it.
Some people gain weight, but weight loss is more common.”
Doesn’t seem to be hit everyone but equally doesn’t seem rare.
>> And you know what it is? It's volume. I eat too much.
But yeah, it's not HIIT. You won't really build up your fitness level by walking - it's not demanding enough. You need to be pushing yourself until you're out of breath, if you want to build up your cardiovascular health.
I think if the widely available help for alcoholics, smokers, or opioid addicts mainly mitigated the negative consequences - enabling them to drink, smoke, or dope more - it wouldn't be nearly as acceptable.
I personally expect weight loss medication that simply makes people want to eat less will reach cultural acceptance.
Case in point, cigarettes have been known to suppress appetite for ages, and people have elected to smoke to help stay thin for decades. There was never any crushing social stigma attached to doing this as a weight loss strategy (that I know of).
Sometimes I wonder if it was a some neat trick by US gov to diagnose and put 1/5 of the population on amphetamines (2024 data +60mil prescriptions of Adderall), so that most everyone who is actually like smart or sensitive or anything of value to the industry, can (almost) freely microdose on it and as a result increase productivity.
Which... means 1/5 of the population suddenly increases output. Perhaps we all'd be on Aderall at some point, dunno bout the Ozempics...
Since you can find it being sold at raves in EU I’m absolutely sure a) it works; b) not convinced only one in five prescribed takes it and all other toss it in the toilet; c) there’s a surge in use and demand.
When I also found my high profile friend working FAANG for years, who’s straight edge and goes regularly to church’s is taking it for productivity boost, and happy about it… well I realised what actually is happening.
Indeed the good thing about adhd is tis a very vague diagnosis. And yes it works well on many undiagnosed people, and particularly in countries where ADHD is not a recognised ontology.
So let’s be real and honest.
Besides media is hyping in September’24 about dangerous shortage of Adderall as if people are left with no access to vitals. It is hyped more than the fact that coffee prices are likely to double and triple in months to come.
I’ve heard studies show Adderall doesn’t help people without ADHD… googling now seems to confirm. Apparently lots of people, especially college kids, take it thinking it will help, but it actually can slow them down.
The main difference is that the magnitude is greater in people with ADHD than those without. A reduction in hyperactivity, for example, is not really apparent in people that are not overtly hyperactive to begin with.
Beside, ADHD is kind of a nebulous label for a lot of symptoms. Having ADHD vs. not having ADHD is not exactly binary.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/darreonnadavis/2023/06/14/takin...
People using it for studying don’t take adderall to be more productive, they take it to be productive for much longer. It’s a stimulant that keeps you up all night and lets you study, not makes your studying more efficient.
My wife, who does not have ADHD (at all), gets hyper from stimulants.
That’s the difference.
Being tired after drinking caffeine is common.
People without ADHD get hyper, not calm. Some others also get calm.
But people with ADHD who take stimulants do not get hyper.
Weird daydreams on this site.
I wonder if there's a connection between diet during development and adult processing of and cravings for food. Maybe eating candy for breakfast (cookiecrisp!) every day in elementary school messed a bunch of us up.
Truth is, we really don't need more than one meal a day (maybe a snack) when we get older and our metabolism slows.
100% this.
I lived in Asia for a few years and obesity is rare (though increasing for youth). It's not like they get more exercise (most people don't) or eat healthy (it's mostly carbs), but 100% portion sizes.
I see people who work manual labor jobs eat lunch that is a bowl of noddles, a few thin slices of chicken or pork, and a few veggies. I highly doubt it exceeds 500 kcalories. It's probably half the portion size you'd get in the US.
Mystery solved. If you're only eating 1500 to 1800 kcal per day as an adult male doing manual labor, it's pretty obvious why you're at 10% body fat.
A lot of the sides in your average US restaurant is easily 1000kcal on its own
It amazes me that Americans head scratch over their obesity epidemic then reach for a product to solve the issues their food industry and culture made for them.
For the same reason why skinny person taking steroids is frowned upon - it is perceived as a shortcut.
In an alternate world where steroids had a good safety profile, it would be ridiculous to not use them if you were looking to add on muscle mass.
I’m pretty sure if you have professional pharmacist working on you then you can mitigate the issues and make it semi healthy. The point is that it is being frowned upon not because of health issues, but because it’s not an “honest work”.
But even with significant additional intervention, when you move beyond that to the "blast and cruise" setup, those interventions are just mitigating factors, not truly preventative.
I get what you're saying, I've never touched any of them myself, because the juice wasn't worth the squeeze (hah), but if they did have very good safety profiles, I would have zero problem with anyone taking them and would think it would be silly if anyone did.
If it tastes good spit it out. Countless people ready to tell you no sacrifice is needed in that domain but they have something to sell or trade.
Bingo. I've had this conversation with my girlfriend. She's not overweight by any means (160 cm ~55 kg) but I am quite underweight (182 cm, 65 kg, < 10% body fat) and the conclusion I've arrived at regarding our differences in body composition is because she routinely eats 1.3x to 1.5x the amount I eat. We both exercise and eat little junk food.
I'm convinced it has to do with upbringing. My family never ate a lot and the portions I was served as a kid weren't big. Nobody in my family is anything more than skinny. Her family however, they eat a lot (and healthy too, mind you). This is all influenced by other factors, her parents and grandparents grew up with not a lot to their names and with food scarcity, so when they reached a position in life where they could comfortably afford to eat they gained the habit of having big meals. My family was mostly more privileged in that regard so maybe they never felt the need to focus on food as much.
> ...
> Yet... the number on the scale kept on creeping up.
That is absolutely terrifying. What oils did you use for cooking?
Have you considered eating less?
My wife and I cook every evening. We never eat food made in a factory. We buy raw products and spend a good amount of time every day cooking them.
Every morning I wake up and go on a 5 mile hike.
And still weight kept on coming on. Worse yet, I am on ADHD medication, which are amphetamines and actually make you lose weight. Yet... the number on the scale kept on creeping up.
And you know what it is? It's volume. I eat too much. And I have no cookies at home. I have no chips at home. No soda, no alcohol. I drink black coffee with a splash of milk. I don't eat any sweeteners.
I have had weight loss surgery (lap band) which was later reversed as it hurt 24/7.
Now, on ZepBound I lost 20lbs in 2 months. I am not hungry. My brain can actually focus on the things that matter.
Why do we find it acceptable to help people who struggle with alcohol abuse, or nicotine addiction, or opioid addiction, but not to help people who struggle with food abuse?