Something like 15% of the world lives in extreme poverty. This is darn near the best it's been in the history of the world (there used to be much more poverty by percentage), but this group would likely have trouble being fit. They might be skinny, but surely not fit.

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.

I don't understand, impoverished people aren't taking Ozempic, either.

Parent poster wasn't referring to Ozempic but a general healthy lifestyle. Which requires resources many people do not have such as time, money, education etc.

The work-life balance & climate in some areas of the US (and other areas of the world) does make it hard to exercise... but that's only part of the story.

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.

Studies have repeatedly shown that lifestyle modification does not result in sustained weight loss for most.

Not going to waste my time providing sources to remedy your ignorance. You are more than capable of doing this research yourself.

Proving a negative is a hard and sometimes annoying in itself ask plus you're probably frustrated with the general attitude to this kind of conversation (especially if your main expectation/experience is others don't like the pill answer out of spitefulness) but that doesn't make this kind of response any more okay here.

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.

Yeah the problem with providing a study is that proving a negative is so hard. Everyone assumes there exists a successful RCT with a 5-10 year time horizon for weight loss via lifestyle interventions. And there just isn't one, and the only way to know that is to search for one.

How does "burning more calories than you consume" not result in weight loss for most people, lmao?

How do people not realize that the digestive system is dynamic and that as you change the calories in (and the type of calories) that the body changes the out.

You can't outrun thermodynamics. But your body will change its efficiency.

Because your metabolism changes. If you ate 700 calories per day it would be harder for you to lose weight than if you ate 1400 and worked out.

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.

Yeah. So that's why working out is the solution lol. How is this controversial?

Because working out, alone, is not the solution. You could work out all day and still not lose a pound. Plenty of studies have shown this.

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.

they could like roll around idk

Cool. Let me know if you figure out a solution.

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.

Bringing up mortally obese 450lb people (a tiny fraction of the population) is not a good faith argument against my position that it's a travesty Ozempic and other "weight loss drugs" are being prescribed to people en masse when most of them actually are very capable of just eating more healthy diets and exercising more. What we actually need to do is un-fuck our food supply and encourage healthier lifestyles... not give big pharma yet another chokehold over the population.

Fine. I was 265. Not morbidly obese, just obese.

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.

Cool, I hope you are on your way to a healthier weight. I can see why medication could help in the short-term for someone who has dug a deep hole. My reaction of disgust is towards the premise of "how long until we're all on Ozempic?" and the current state of affairs, where far too many people in the US are being medicated for that and various other things.

> ... where far too many people in the US are being medicated for that and various other things.

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?

GLP-1 is not a get out of jail free card. It will have long-term side effects.

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.

> GLP-1 is not a get out of jail free card. It will have long-term side effects.

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 think we can just agree to disagree lol. Yeah all of these problems are just naturally occurring and humans were screwed until Ozempic and Adderall were invented. Thank God for the pharma companies!

That isn’t what I said. You are conflating multiple things.

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.

> What we actually need to do is un-fuck our food supply

Seems like something you could lead with instead of moronic gut reactions...

There's nothing moronic about the argument that calorie deficits can cause weight loss. Most people using Ozempic have never tried multi-day fasting as an alternative. There are plenty of ways to lose weight that don't require taking medicine that might be fucking up your digestive system long-term.

> There's nothing moronic about the argument that calorie deficits can cause weight loss.

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.

Nor will I waste time proving the opposite.

Until next time we meet on the internet. :salute:

Oh well, back to my unhealthy lifestyle because study of some thousand something in one country said it’s impossible to change!

I didn't ask if lifestyle modification resulted in sustained weight loss. I asked in what ways is fitness not accessible to the majority of people.

Fitness require making efforts and determination.

Taking a pill doesn't.

That's why it will always be out of reach of some people.

just look around outside

Fitness is in reach for almost everyone on Hacker News. There are folks who have serious health issues or disabilities that preclude exercise... but the rest of us [the majority?] can walk more, do body weight squats, some form of incline push ups, and so forth and build larger successes on top of smaller ones. We can start by taking a morning and evening walk.

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.