I can buy pre-chopped Cole slaw, diced peppers / onions, etc. Whole Foods is best in class (Alnatura doesn’t come close)

While to me, the layman, it seems health regulation in general in Europe is more conservative about what can be put on the body / be consumed, I think it’s mostly Americans don’t want to eat healthy. And the portion sizes here are insane (just look at the evolution dinner plate. 1960s plates at an antique sale only pass for salad plates)

There's a massive amount of junk food and ultra-processed food in grocery stores, even though (rough estimate) 50% of floorspace is "raw" food. (Fresh fruits and vegetables, meat, fish.)

Processed food tends to have more sugar (high fructose corn syrup) than other countries. The same brand in the US vs another country will have more sugar.

Cultural momentum: Everywhere you go there's unhealthy food.

---

Speaking from personal experience, junk food is just plan addictive and satisfying. It's not like alcohol or other drugs where you can just abstain; you gotta eat and we all get hungry.

Turns out that if you care enough and have the work ethic to grind out that sort of living to better your family, you also tend to care what kind of foods they eat.

There are of course seasons in everyone’s lives - but this observation has held generally true no matter the demographic or geographic location I’ve lived around.

I was obese - there is no intended judgement here for folks who struggle with it. I did for the better part of my adult life. The social tropes are simply unhelpful.

All these tell that people do have a preference towards buying healthy stuff, given the choice. It's not their fault that they have been misled by the media/scientists in some of those cases.

In the US I heard there is now parity in terms of quality products, but maybe culture takes some time to adapt to such environments.

What I've seen consistently amongst the non-healthy eating Americans is that they argue:

1. Dieting requires them to be hard on themselves and they're focusing on self-love, which they struggle with

2. They deserve a daily treat. They look forward to it, it brings meaning, etc

3. The taste of their food is super important to them, such that they can't imagine repetitively eating (meal-prep) or eating cleanly (no added sugar, monitoring sodium)

1. Practicing a healthy diet is self-love

2. A daily treat is not what breaks your diet. Have _a piece_ of chocolate, sweets or snacks now and then. If you (still) lack the self-control to not eat the whole package, help yourself out by repackaging in daily-compatible portions. Meaning is not gained by consuming anyway.

3. Taste preferences are in big parts a matter of habit. Also prepping doesn't necessitate you eat the same thing for a week. You can freeze a lot of things for longer and thaw them in a mixed manner.

Imo the issue is that people seem to lack a combination of knowledge, time to prep or motivation. Lack of knowledge could be solved with information campaigns, lack of time/motivation is a consequence of people having to spend so much of their time doing a dayjob just to get by, embedded in a culture that puts no value on thriving humans.

They're saying this without irony? Or by "important" do they mean "the way I like it"?

My theory is that in US compared to Europe, you are going to need the path of least resistance more often. If you are working two part-time jobs with variable hours and schedules to make ends meet, then you are going to reach for the easy & fast food options. Whereas if you have the stability of 40 hour work weeks, regular schedule and social safety nets - regardless of the total income - then you have the time and mental energy to eat healthier.

In North America there are a lot of "food deserts" especially in poorer neighbourhoods. "Healthy" foods become a class marker. Distribution of higher quality food is through more upscale grocery stores.

Same goes for walkability in neighbourhoods. To live in a place that has transit accessibility, green grocer and bakery you can walk to -- that's not possible for the vast majority of North Americans because it exists only in urban areas that have gentrified beyond the reach of most people.

When I moved to Toronto in the mid-90s it was possible for a middle-income earner to rent or live in a home adjacent to some of the corridors in the city that offer this (e.g. Roncesvalles/High-Park, Spadina/Chinatown, College&Clinton, etc) and you could see a higher diversity of people living near the stores and in the neighbourhoods off them. As a person in my early 20s making not very much money, I could make it work. That is now no longer possible, the city has become a wealthy fortress. I imagine the same for parts of Brooklyn&NYC, Chicago, SF, Vancouver etc.

Almost nowhere in the US walks to go to the grocery store. Exceedingly small portions of major cities. Where I live in Chicago is quite walkable, but the vast majority of my neighbors load up the car for the vast majority of their shopping trips. There are pockets of course, but they are rare.

My neighborhood also happens to be much more fit than the national average - obesity is somewhat rare to see. The correlation is with wealth. Why there is such a correlation is much more interesting, and it likely is not as simple as people want to believe.

Same goes for the poor inner ring suburbs where I lived in my 20's in a different state. Very high rates of obesity. In the rich outer suburbs obesity levels were visibly less.

It's far cheaper to meal prep and make your own food from base ingredients. It doesn't need to be fancy. When I grew up poor (working class) this is how we made it work. By buying staples in bulk and buying other items opportunistically on sale. We didn't even own a car for most of that time - and the nearest grocery store was at least 3 miles away. It simply wasn't an option to exist off of junk food since it was too expensive.

Eating junk is easier and more convenient. It feels good in the immediate moment and is low-effort. It's the default, and the environment around you encourages it. Add in lack of any peer pressure and it being normalized by those around you and I believe that explains nearly everything. Lack of walkability certainly hurts, but it's not a primary driver anywhere I've lived.

These accessible food options come with a premium that I strongly suspect put them out of what a median income household can sustainably afford.

No they don’t. Even my local Walmart has cheap vegetable selections included pre cut versions.

You know what is expensive, though? Meat. There’s still plenty of meat consumption in the median household.

It’s not a price issue.

This is no joke. I picked up a 3 pound package of garden variety 80/20 ground beef last week and it was over $20. Maybe I just don't buy it often enough to notice, but that seems far higher than even a few months ago. I would have expected to buy a modest cut of steak for that price.

Most simple salads are actually more expensive than chicken (boneless thighs, ground meat) per kg!

If you compare the price per kcal, as one really should, the difference becomes absurd.

There are more food options than meat or salads.

Citing salads and leafy greens as the alternative to meat is a common strawman, but there are more food options than those two extremes.

First, pre-cut isn't that much more expensive. Second, cutting is an accessibility thing now? A kitchen knife and 5 minute YouTube video should have anyone being to chop/dice without much trouble. And once they learn they will only get faster/better at it allowing them to use whole veggies adding more variety.

Yes, it's a boon esp. for old people who live alone, have mobility or sight issues, and don't trust themselves to hold a knife. It's also a convenience thing, but as you said, the general population can cut things just fine and won't suffer much without it; which isn't the case for this growing demographic.

On one hand, you a processing step. On the other hand, you can process 'ugly' produce into mince. (Mince also transports more compactly volume-wise.)

Not to mention the median income (in PPP) is higher in the US all but 4 countries.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...

$2 at Aldi, and I'd happily pay double. Sure beats having to break down (and use) a whole head of cabbage, which are huge.

Even my local Walmart has pre-cut vegetables.

It’s not an affordability issue either. It’s cheaper to buy the same number of calories from vegetables, fruits, and legumes than meat right now. Meat prices are unusually high and it doesn’t seem to be slowing consumption.

You need to make a distinction between leafy greens and starch.

I don't know why the problem is shied away from. It is because people are addicted to fast food and to their sedentary lifestyles. It's not the price or availability of good food, not the first order effect anyway.

You'll never be able to force "whole foods" sellers into unprofitable places and if you did by some miracle, you'll never be able to force people to buy it no matter how much money you gave them. Vegetables and grains and basics could be free and many obese food addicts will go buy a burger from a drive thru.

I typically spend more than an hour in the kitchen cooking every day, and then there is half an hour clean up after my family is done eating. I eat much better and healthier food, but it takes time. (If I'm having noodles I'm making them from scratch myself - I could save some time buy less of things like that and the cost wouldn't be much different if any - but even then the whole meal takes time).

Protein + carb + veg is cheap and takes less than 30 minutes to prepare, I have no idea what people are talking about in these threads.

Also, you're comparing making noodles from scratch to a typical meal. I can do an asian style chicken/veggie/rice meal in < 30 minutes and have the kitchen mostly cleaned by the time the rice is done.

i agree you canecook faster than I normally do - a lot of meals benefit from simmering while the flavors blend.

This comment is so out of touch it must be a joke right? At least I hope so.

Far more time was spent in front of the TV than any other activity by far by my peers and their families. Moving to a more middle class area opened my eyes in how many other options people had to do with their time, and how much time and effort was spent maintaining their lifestyles.

And it's a little more complicated than even just that. Another reality is that, at 12 bucks an hour, nobody is going to be giving you a steady 40 hours. You need extra shifts for buffers, and your shifts will be shorter.

Sure, working 50 hours a week across 7 days isn't technically more than 50 across 5 days. But it does certainly drain your will to live a lot more, from what I've seen.

And using numbers to support that idea doesn't work, it actually goes against you. A small (much smaller than most obese people will eat in one sitting) fast food meal costs about an hour of minimum wage! Buying stable calories in cereals where the time to buy and cook them can be amortized into many more servings can be amortized is actually cheaper and also takes less time.

In the US, obesity rates rise as income drops, but it continues to rise beyond the point at which income drops below a full time federal minimum wage income.

It's over-eating and under-exercising. I know this is hard for certain ideologies to accept because it means obesity is not inflicted upon victims against their will and beyond their control. If you really need to minimize their agency and responsibility for their choices you can call it addiction to food and addiction to sedentary lifestyle if it helps.

This does not address what I wrote though because it is not what I was arguing against.

I agree part of the reason people buy junk food and fast food rather than "whole food" is because the real or perceived effort required to turn it into something they will eat. Or they don't know how to make things that can compete on taste and satisfy their food addiction like those fast foods. It's not because they are time-poor either. They are just addicted to this sedentary "lazy" lifestyle. 30 minute drive to get fast food and eat it while watching TV or tiktok for the next hour or so beats making food and cleaning up for an hour.

It's shocking.

Things like obesity, smoking, and alcoholism all kill you before you can get too old. Healthy citizens end up using far more of the far more expensive end-of-life care, to the point where it outweighs the extra healthcare the unhealthy citizens use in their youth.

[0] https://www.ofdt.fr/sites/ofdt/files/2023-08/field_media_doc...

It has to do with culture and wealth. Europe is getting fatter and richer.

This is like thinking medieval peasants or sub-saharan Africa are skinnier because of their robust paternalistic governments

Despite access to "superior food quality", weight issues are absolutely a problem in the EU, too. Maybe it's not at the same point as in the US, but 51% of the population of the EU (outside Ireland and Germany for some reason) are "overweight or obese" [0].

---

[0] https://drees.solidarites-sante.gouv.fr/publications-communi... In French, from the ministry of health, but there's a chart which should be clear enough for everybody.

https://data.worldobesity.org/country/france-71/#data_trends

My country (Poland) is an unfortunate leader in childhood obesity (and close to the top in terms of obesity in general), but it's very easy to see why: people live very different lives than they did just 20 years ago.

[0] https://www.obesitefrance.fr/lobesite-cest-quoi/les-chiffres...

This is a tired argument. Most people who have BMI in the obese range do not have one of oft-cited exceptions that make BMI an imperfect measure.

Everyone knows BMI is imperfect at this point, but the number of people who have BMI in the obesity range yet have healthy body composition is very small.

Indeed.

BMI is the best thing that people can readily calculate with easily available equipment (a tape measure and scales either at home, gym, pharmacy, etc) plus some relatively basic maths or sticking the numbers into a website.

Measuring body fat using calipers is better but hugely error prone. Similar for waist/height ratios. Body fat scales can be wildly inaccurate.

BVI is far superior but very few people have access to the equipment needed to measure that.

So we're kind of stuck with BMI as the best "simple" measure.

I say this as someone who did enough weightlifting to be in the overweight BMI range with a low percent of body fat (no steroids involved). Trust me when I say it’s a lot of work to get there. It’s not a category that includes a lot of people or invalidates the measure.

I know very fit people that still fall well in the BMI 20-25 range. Most around 23. You have to be very focused on natural bodybuilding for years if you want to become an outlier on BMI.

Or some combination with being super short or super tall. But this again affects a tiny minority.

But being obese is a higher BMI than overweight, and the bar is actually quite low. Lower than most people think. A lot of people think they're overweight, but they're not, they're obese.

Health risks of being overweight are very well researched and are significant (cancer risk, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular health). If you meant the mortality, then it is also worse for overweight people when confounding for smoking and reverse causality.

But the BMI takes into account the mass, not the size. Usually women have less lean muscle mass than men, which would mean that for a given size and weight, they'd have more fat, without influencing the BMI. I also think there's quite some leeway. My BMI is "normal" at 24, and I have a fair bit of belly fat.

Very athletic people also don't fit in the BMI tables, a dude like Schwarzenegger is probably well in the overweight category if not above because of all that lean muscle, but is also probably healthier than average. These people are extreme outliers, though. I don't think they're anywhere near 1% of the population, so you can't really argue they skew the numbers.

> As for offering them that is a nice thing, but I am curious about the mechanics (mutuelles) and such of the medicine.

It's apparently paid by the social security, but doctors are only to prescribe this when other means of controlling the weight have failed, such as adjusting nutrition.

For illustration, Arnold was 107 kg at 1m88 at his prime, giving him a BMI of 30.3, which is clinically obese. But yeah, LOL at all these people with 130 cm waists going 'BMI is useless'.

Unfortunately it's not so easy to get a good BF%. BIA scales are probably what most people have access to, either at home or at their local gym, or calipers, but both are very inaccurate at getting totals and at best can help you understand trend directions. There are places to get cheap DEXAs in a lot of cities these days, but not everywhere, and $30 each time you go is still expensive for some people.

BF% and FFMI are both a lot more useful for everyone than BMI.

What quality standards are you referring to?

Or, perhaps, the state of mental health in the US is really bad.

But the trend is the same worldwide. Obesity is on the rise. I don't think demographics has as big of an influence as you assume.

Also from a purely financial pov they're a a major strain on the healthcare system when they're obese and still a major strain when we have to put them on drugs for the rest of their lives because the drugs will never fix their willpower and only temporarily fix the symptoms

We should also obviously send 90% of food industry CEOs for a life long retreat in a dark cell somewhere underground because they clearly are part of the problem. I understand some people have legit health issue making them more prone to being overweight but these people don't even account for 10% of the total.

My position is way more empathetic than the other side who think people are dumb beasts or cattle who can't do anything about their conditions and need external magic pills to save them from themselves

An Ozempic cure might be just the right push needed for someone to start a healthy cycle, which then has massive beneficial effects in all aspects of life for that person, as well as for others.

> Also from a purely financial pov they're a a major strain on the healthcare system

Except for victims of crime, you cannot point to a single adult receiving healthcare services, who is not to blame for "burdening the system". Whether that is obesity as you mention, or chronic injuries, or sports injuries, or traffic accidents, work accidents, any disease spread by virus or bacteria, and so on. All of those could be avoidable, and the patient is solely to blame for that and for "burdening the system".

Europeans generally have the perspective that people are born a certain way and cannot change. That's why it is a continent with immense hatred against the rich and successful, because those are considered inherited statuses, something you get from estates and serfs. That's why so much focus in European politics is to ease out differences instead of striving for success. And naturally, that's why Europeans are (the only people in the world) against Ozempic. Because it's seen as helping people who are inherently bad to cheat on their discipline and gain benefits they don't "deserve". Not as a first step to a great new life for the individual.

Just look at the angry European hackers censoring and [dead]ing the other guy's comment below mine, where an already admirable individual used this medicine for great personal health benefits.

Some are way more avoidable, and much more of a burden (cig, alcohol, obesity, &c.). Nobody's upset at old people who get the flu and use an ICU bed. But if you're 40, smoking, obese and get the flu imho you're ripping what you sow and I won't be crying for your demise.

> Europeans bla bla bla

If you want to go into caricature I could tell you Americans are trying to recreate Matrix style pods, for them it would be paradise, you could go from birth to death without any single inconvenience. All of your problems come from over consumption... of foods, of medicine, of tech, and you keep piling more on top of it thinking the next layer will solve the previous layer's consequences.

I've made a concerted effort to consume less "junk media" in the last couple of years. In that time I've gotten an Amateur radio licence, I've built a couple of keyboards and speakers, I've started golfing (after a 20 year hiatus), I've learned to bake bread (from scratch, including grinding wheat!), I've read a lot of novels, and I'm happier for all of it.

Everyone has to work -- this is not unique to the United States. But outside of that, eating and living healthier is absolutely possible, it just takes some effort.

Get a hobby (or several!)

For a lot of people, finding the time to do either (let alone the financial outlay) is impossible.

You want to tell single parent working two jobs in an apartment that's moldy to "try playing golf. Read more!"?

my hobbies included waking and running around, making stuff on an old laptop (I kept that one!), reading, making planes out of whatever material i could get my hands on that sort of stuff. i ate pasta, eggs, rice, water, tomatos. i never cared about eating the same thing everyday (i still don't but ive learned to eat a little better).

theres plenty more hobbies, obviously none of these being forbidden in the USA lol. and most make more money than I did, not to mention have food stamps and the like.

Manual labor which was so grueling that he had sue his company in order to retire early because he could literally no longer walk and required surgery to remove the extreme bowing in his legs.

You could come in, look at the latest Creosote burns on his skin, and tell him that something-- anything! --would be better than watching an hour of Football.

And, while you're at it, you could try to convince him that smoking's bad too.

Also, he should probably quit smoking (unclear if it's too late for that, if so I'm sorry)

Sorry! I wasn't in a great place when I wrote my reply last night. I'd delete it if I could.

When citing poverty, simply look at poverty rates, not a different statistic. Income inequality is higher in countries with higher incomes, like the United States.

Regardless, obesity is not limited to people in poverty.

> It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US.

Your comparison of your friends in Germany vs "insanity" in the US doesn't feel relevant

There can be a discussion about the perverse incentives of systems without judging the individuals.

He implies that people who are using Ozempic are eating too much processed food. And more or less also that mostly Americans eat processed food?

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/ultra-processed-food-consum...

https://nutri.it.com/who-eats-the-most-processed-food-a-glob...

The food producers need to be sanctioned. It's unsustainable for a whole nation to be on these expensive drugs.

If you think an outside perspective is irrelevant I'm also not sure why you don't just move on and not comment.

We used to make baby food ourselves. That was like twenty portions of baby food in ten minutes, for pretty much no cost (all basis fresh staples are pretty much free: fresh carrots, potatoes, rice, onions, pumpkin). Chop some vegetables and perhaps add little leftover meat, steam it, blend it, freeze it. Philips had a great machine for that. But we were somewhat 'out there' here too. Most people give babies food from glass pots. Then I see [1]. Got healthy teens now who eat pretty much everything. We still cook most of the stuff ourselves, although time constraints are a bit harder now than a decade ago.

Same as for walking. That is the most basic instrument for health. But if you cannot go out for a good walk because your environment is car only, what can you do? You can sanction the car makers for not making us walk. But that's a bit silly? (You are not saying that, trying to make an analogy with the food producers.) I'm blessed with lots of forests nearby, with separate paths for walking, cycling, MTB-ing and horseriding. Going outdoors is trivial here.

Point I'm trying to make is that an unhealthy and sedentary lifestyle is a lot of factors working combined. That's why international comparisons are so hard (or impossible). I think the 'Boulder, Colorado'-lifestyle is comparable with my local EU-lifestyle. But all environments are different on many vectors.

[1] Nearly two-thirds of baby foods in US supermarkets are unhealthy, study finds - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXyVJpTe8NQ

Unless I've been horribly misled, it is the whole world that has very steadily increasing obesity rates. Framing this as a US problem is deluding yourself.

> Your comparison of your friends in Germany vs "insanity" in the US doesn't feel relevant

It's incredibly relevant, why are GLP-1s less needed in Germany vs. US (and other countries like Canada)? This is the insanity they are talking about, not the users of the medication.

Couple that with a very car centric lifestyle and yea. Its not great.

I'd love to hear any sort of actual facts backing that claim. It sounds truthy.

Aside from whether the local healthcare coverage will pay for it, and the rate of GLP1 usage probably being proportional to the obesity rate, what is the basis for assuming there is disproportionately fewer people in Germany using these medications? Most people don't announce it.

That'd be a BMI of 47. There isn't a lot of statistical data for such high BMIs, but [1] lists prevalence of BMI>40. In Germany 1.2% of men and 2.8% of women had a BMI over 40 in 2011, in the US it was 5.6% and 9.7% respectively in 2016. That's nearly four times as many as in Germany.

1: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7078951/

How does that compare to, say, Japan? Why is Germany so much fatter?

Most of the industrialized west is following very similar growth curves here to the US. America just got their first. Even Asia isn't immune - Korea has been following similar trends, as have parts of southeast asia, etc.

I suspect the prevalence of GLP-1 class drugs will halt this trend before the rest of the world catches up, but without them or similar drugs, I would have bet that 50 years form now much of the rest of the world would look just like America

It’s the suburban mom (or dad sometimes) who wants help losing a little weight. Instead of being 300lbs like your example, she’s 160lbs and wants to be 140lbs.

I do want to get back into biking though. Haven’t ridden in a long time.

Those that still want to reduce their weight: All of them are on GLP-1s now (and losing weight!)

Those that had totally given up: They had long since stopped attempting anything to reduce their weight

I suspect that the larger you are, the more likely you are to fall into that second category - getting to 300+ lb involves a certain level of accepting defeat to begin with.

With this one simple trick Denmarks GDP goes down by multiple % points.

Compounding a drug doesn't suddenly make it non-prescription. You still need one for them.

It just lets you buy stuff where the raw API is made in China by some random pharma lab instead of from Novo or Lilly.

That's the first time I hear about this. A close friend of mine uses it and she just goes to the pharmacy. Never heard about any problems with supply.

https://www.fda.gov/drugs/drug-safety-and-availability/fda-c...

Currently, only Liraglutide is officially in shortage. Although others have been in shortage in the last couple years.

This sounds pretty much like the supply is somewhat limited for whatever reason.

---

[0] https://www.ameli.fr/pharmacien/actualites/antidiabetiques-a...

There were previously supply issues with these drugs throughout Europe, but those were mostly resolved by the end of 2024.

By mid-2025, it was (and still is) possible to easily get all of the medicines for any of the approved uses, including weight loss and diabetes.

We have been able to diet for millions of years, our body is pretty good at it, but some people NEED that to diet. Yeah, just like some people can’t be put to work. Everyone know that kind of people who are a burden on society and themselves.

It just happens that this drug is more available in the USA, but with the same availability in Europe, I bet there would be around the same percentage of user.

So, while they are very expensive, your understanding is not reflective of the situation on the ground.

The terms and conditions are confusing. You can only use the half-off coupon they provide if you have prescription drug insurance. Even if insurance doesn't cover it, they still require the processing pharmacy to check that you have some sort of valid insurance and only process the coupon if so. If you fall into that bucket, it's $1200 or something. (Had to pay that amount one month because Amazon Pharmacy was very confused about my gender marker changing on my insurance. Many, many support tickets later, and it got fixed.)

There is also some price difference between the autoinjector and the single-use vial + provide your own needle and syringe. I haven't looked into that because it's the same with the coupon, but if you can't get the coupon to work, it's an option to just inject it yourself. Honestly I prefer not using the autoinjectors (I inject other medications), but it's the path of least resistance.

Finally, the coupon claims it only works for 7 fills, but I've been taking the medication for a couple years and all my fills have been covered. I don't really understand it. I have a feeling that I'm the only person in the world that read the fine print, including the pharmacies and manufacturer :/

https://presse.inserm.fr/en/obesite-et-surpoids-pres-dun-fra...

"People really want these things - exercise, weight - to be important moral objectives for others, when they're not that important in the grand scheme of things. Now you'll just have to find another easy visual marker for ranking people by moral superiority."

Let's put this into perspective. On average, the US has about twice the obesity rate as Europe (though in both cases there is a fairly wide variation regionally). And Europe has 4 or 5 times the obesity rate of Japan. So relatively speaking, Europe is not in a position to argue that their regulations or lifestyles are the answer.

You can tell Germany cares for its population via food regulation and from what's offered; whereas, it's a toxic trash heap in America solved with drugs or paying a higher premium for healthier items. The healthier items in America should be a baseline instead of pricing out people. Feels like Americans are paying for a premium upfront or downstream via pharmaceutical/healthcare solutions.

Although, rural Americans are also used to driving longer distances than rural Germans. I would venture that a 30-40 minute trip is not thought of as significant, especially if only done 1-2 times per week.

Rural grocery shopping (real food, not snacks), is typically done at Walmart or a smaller grocery brand or independent. For quick errands, DG does get a lot of it. You're starting to see grocery store logistics push in to what were traditionally gas-and-convenience-store corners, including Aldi, so the commutes for groceries are getting shorter.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the US with the price war over GLP-1 weight loss pills. Unlike Ozempic injections, they're going to penetrate into low income and rural households.

what percentage of people on Ozempic etc. are poor enough that they would be priced out by healthier food?

This is not to say you are wrong. The food supply in the US is not healthy. The bad news is that the same greed that destroyed our food will find ways to get around the ways GLP-1s work.

Weird that it virtually did not exist pre ww2 and that it now affects 75%+ of your population

Are all these lean and healthy people from archive videos actually suffering and in distress? Poor souls...

Vast numbers of these 'lean and healthy people' were suffering from serious nutritional deficiencies. Pellagra (generally caused by eating nothing but corn) wasn't really knocked out until around WWII, for example.

If you don't have enough food, no one is going to be fat. If you have plenty of food availability, then certain people are going to have genetics that make it more likely they end up fat.

On the flip side I don’t think your comment holds much weight either. A large portion of the population worked trade jobs and the access junk food was a lot less prevalent. You kind of have a good recipe for unhealthy population now. Low quality foods and less activity.

My step dad was obese and blamed everything and everyone but himself. We installed an app to count calories on his ipad, he lost 1/3rd of his bodyweight in less than a year and he's now cruising at an healthy weight, it really isn't rocket science

People who look for excuse will always find something, it's genetics, today is a cheat day, today was a bad day, I'm not feeling good, I crave chocolate, #healthyatallsizes, &c. people who stop making excuses get out of the hole surprisingly fast

This is a pretty massive assumption that your "craving level" is the same as everyone else. This takes a complex process (the feedback from the body to the brain on feelings of hunger, satiety, etc.) and pretends that it is a simple A-B thing. Just for type 1 diabetics, their insulin levels have a huge effect on feelings of hunger, with hyperphagia (feelings of insatiable hunger) being common. Diabetes is just an extreme example of the spectrum of how individual bodies regulate insulin, and insulin is just one hormone effecting and effected by food.

We didn't go from sub 10% obesity to 40%+ obesity in 50 years because of people cravings.

I don’t think we fully understand why but it’s becoming increasingly clear that it’s a real problem. After all there is a reason that glp1 show efficacy with other addictions.

Accountability is important and I even think there is a healthy level of social shaming to be made, we should not be normalizing obesity. But I also realize that there is something at play that’s more than simply excuses.

I ask these as that is what the GLP-1's are showing. They change the hunger feeling and it might just be that you and others got lucky with a lower hunger feeling than others. There is no objective measure of food noise, but I think we all need to be open to the possibility that the food noise is different for different people and its not all willpower or laziness.

Again I don't really care, I managed to help people around me following this dead simple recipe, if you want to make excuses for yourself or others go ahead and suffer. Suffering from obesity is much harder on the body and soul than "suffering" from skipping a snack or counting calories

Fix your shit, it's much better than taking pills for life to fix your obesity, which is arguably the very last link of a long chain of problems. Eat clean, exercise, understand that food is fuel, understand how the fuel is used, learn discipline, learn timing, learn to recognise good and bad fuels... pills won't do any of this, and being skinny won't bring health if you don't do/learn the things I just enumerated. Obese people need a complete lifestyle overall, not pills. No amount of pills will help if they keep everything else the same, and if they implement the changes they don't need the pills to begin with

Why is that so bad?

I laughed at loud at this. What an insane thing to claim. "I can experience the qualia of others, quantify it, and claim that mine is identical" lol

Also it's empirically false that all people experience the same level of craving. We have studies demonstrating different dopamine responses etc.

Feel free to guide me to the literature explaining these phenomenons, it seems extremely interesting, I'm especially interested in knowing how the genetics of 3/4th of the population somehow converged to this "uncontrollable cravings" pattern over two generations

> you have insight into the qualia of other people.

Yeah that's called statistics, averages, &c.

And again, you can not say your cravings are the same as others. I'm not going to explain qualia to you.

How could you possibly know that? You don't even know how your brain works, let alone how other people's brains work.

I can drink alcohol and be perfectly fine, but a lot of people can't, because they're alcoholics. Similarly, Ive met people who have tried to smoke but couldn't pick it up, meanwhile for me it will be a lifelong, every day, struggle.

The mind is complex, have some humility. You are not necessarily a beacon of purity by your own doing.

No you dont. Have some epistemic humility. People experience reality in unique ways, you can not push your experience onto anyone else with any level of confidence. https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Nagel_Bat.pdf

We know that people just have different metabolisms, different levels of hunger response, different levels of "food noise," etc.

We see obesity rates raising in nearly every country across the world as economic power and access to ultra-palatable hyper-calorie dense food increases. This is universal across the developed world with very few exemptions - Japan seems to largely be immune, but Korea and other portions of Asia aren't.

The growth curves look very similar, despite many of these cultures across the world putting even more emphasis on discipline and responsibility than America, things that in theory directly align with being more responsible about diet. If genetics weren't involved and it was all willpower (and where does the capacity for willpower come from? Is there no genetic component to it?) we wouldn't see these growth trends be so similar to America and each other.

There may be cultural or behavioral issues - attitudes and habits around cooking, expectations of what a meal includes or does not include, taste preferences on what's too sweet or too fatty, etc - but it's not genetic.

It's not genetic, this is just your family refusing to take responsibility for their own eating habits. The proof is people who have bariatric surgery so that they can't eat as much, and people on GLP 1 drugs so they aren't hungry. Both groups lose weight. It's not your genes, it's the fact that you put too much food in your mouth (and probably the wrong kind of food). As an overeater myself, knowing this does not help reduce intake... People have to make changes and stop blaming genetics, or thyroid (there are drugs for that too) or whatever it is they think is beyond their control.

We know that alcoholism is genetic, addition is genetic, etc, and those are just tiny subsets of problems that genetics are involved in.

I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes five years ago. I radically changed my diet to a hard keto diet with a cap of 50g of net carbohydrate per day (carbs - fiber = net carbs). My caloric intake quadrupled due to fats being high calorie. My weight dropped by 48 pounds. In every measurement, I'm healthier despite being older. My diet is also expensive and difficult:

Most foods in the us are high in carbohydrate. Cereals, added sugars, fake sugar free (sugar alcohol instead of sugar), and foods that have lots of integrated carbs... sandwiches, tortillas, etc. There's a huge preference for bad foods baked into the culture. It's hard to eat well. So culture is as much of a problem as any other factor.

Source needed.

I do think there's a strong argument that lack of fiber and protein are huge contributors to the world's obesity problems.

Nobody really knows how GLP-1 agonists work, but given the other effects (e.g. insulin stability, change in other addictive behaviours etc.) it's definitely not just this.

At the start of 2025, about 3% of adults in UK had used GLP-1 drugs in past year in the UK. And "most GLP-1 for weight loss in the UK is from private, rather than NHS provision" [1].

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12781702/

For another example, rates of COVID-19 vaccination are significantly lower in the UK not because people there don’t want vaccines, but because the NHS only makes them narrowly available to people above a certain age or with a strict set of conditions.

I imagine you'll find that people of certain lifestyles tend to cluster together a bit, with those with more active lifestyles and healthy diets likely to have their friends and family be of active lifestyles and healthy diets, and in turn less likely to be in need of such drugs. Lifestyle changes are difficult to implement by nature.

Although, the term "processed food" is awful as it covers so many unrelated things. The problem is ultra-addictive, ultra-high glycemic index foods consumed in large amounts partly due to their addictive qualities - a quality some processed foods have.

For reference, Danish sausage sandwich toppings are highly processed foods, but it won't drive anyone to obesity or diabetes. Elevated blood pressure, perhaps. Junk takeaway, candy and sugary cereals on the other hand...

Nothing to do with "processed foods" in general, despite a good portion of the affected foods being under that label. It's simply a matter of malicious companies combined with unknowing, unempowered consumers.

By trying to single out something as massively generic as "processed foods", you're just making it easy for companies to avoid the problem: Using and manipulating official definitions to be removed from it as a "solution", justifying the whole thing in the basis of numerous good things being in the same category, drawing attention to other foods in the same category that are more commonly associated with the term despite theirs being way worse, etc.

If you want to fix the problem, you need to attack the problem. That is not processing - it is addiction and glycemic value. Going for the underlying attributes means you cannot redefine your way out of it, and gives consumers a better chance to learn what to actually avoid.

for everyone who says "i've tried etc doesnt work" all i would say is, possibly if you dont have the time due to kids etc.

Otherwise, get to it!

It's not like I live off McDonald's or anything. But I'll be overweight, change only my exercise habits, and notice big changes in body comp on the timescale of a couple months.

So clearly I'm out-exercising my evidently-bad diet.

IDK. Maybe it's different with this kind of functional exercise vs 30 minutes on the elliptical or whatever.

I'm assuming of course that you are "normal". If you are allergic to peanuts they are of course worse than a cookie. If you are diabetic cookies are bad.

> (like a handful of peanuts or a single large cookie).

IMO, especially when one has snacks fully stocked, it's easy to 'forget' that you ate something.

One big breakthrough for me was reading Arnold S. "encyclopedia of body building". There's a lot of physiological tips and also very practical advice.

I'm sure you can get it from anywhere, but for me this was a big change. Sizing the reps, the workouts, the weights helped a lot in trying to make progress. Additionally endomorphic bodies need different excercise and I was doing too much ineffective cardio for months with few results.

Weights changed my results within a few weeks.

It's always a balance, there's always nuance, and there's no one single solution.

I guess I have pretty defined eating times and don't really think about food until I am hungry.

One thing that has changed a lot is that my lunches use to be either plain sandwich (like cheese meat and bread) or whatever I bought from a local restaurant.

I hated the sandwich days. I don't like mayo but the sandwiches always left me hungry and scavenging. Adding some hummus spread was a pretty huge change in the satisfaction that I got from that meal, and it doesn't leave me hungry.

If you eat only vegetable and meat, you’re going to have a hard time gaining weight.

If you live in a suitable city, there is an even simpler solution. Just walk to wherever place you need to go.

Unfortunately, the century of individual automobile ownership has made most cities unsuitable for this natural mode of transportation.

Completely agreed. That said, I've been to Germany a handful of times but not in the last 7 years (sadly) and two things always stuck out to me:

* There's way more attractive/healthy looking people.

* There's wayyyy more young attractive people that smoke (wtf!).

Not sure if the smoking has subsided, but it was far more prominent than in NA since I've last visited.

The society is built to sit in a chair 8h, get in your car and drive 1h home and sit in a chair. Then repeat.

Also "eating 3 meals a day"

I eat 3 full meals, I blow up like a balloon. I don't get it. It's like they have to constantly eat. When I was a teen or in my 20s yes. Now in my 30s its game over.

It is also the way society, public transport, cities are designed.

I walk 4km to work when its nice out here in Europe. Could I do that in the USA?

I had a business trip to Germany (from the US) and found it enlightening. We all went out to eat after work one night and a couple of the local Germans had to walk 20 minutes from the restaurant to the train station to go home and didn't think anything of it. It wasn't a big deal to walk, but you'd never do that here in the US - or at least in Michigan where we have no real public transportation.

My small Swedish town of 50k has buses going everywhere every 10min. An American town of 50k is a village where there is maybe 1 bus line.

I mean, why on earth would they think anything of it?

People usually lie or have no idea how many calories they consume.

Eating three meals a day is a very very very recent thing if you account for human history, or even modern human history

Yea I can down a familiy pizza if its all I eat for the day.

Also, the rise of zero/light drinks have actually helped.

The obesity problem is a lot lower in Germany compared to the US. As all things I am sure it’s a combination of factors.

I don’t think it’s fair to call purely a processed food problem but I am sure it does not help.

I compare it to my childhood which was a while ago but not that far and I would go out in the middle of the day with instructions to come back home before dark. I would be running all over town on my bicycle. Now parents in the US are obsessing over travel sports and keeping booked calendars for their kids. Both parents will be working. There is nobody around put a meal together.

Most people don’t announce when they’re taking a new medication.

GLP-1 drugs are popular in Germany, too. Not quite to the level of some other countries but a quick search shows about 1 in 12 individuals in Germany.

Note that the US number quoted above was for households not individuals, so the numbers of households in Germany with at least one member on a GLP-1 is higher. This isn’t a uniquely American phenomenon, despite attempts to turn this into another America-bad comment thread.

> It's insane to me that so many people need these to get off the processed foods killing them in the US.

GLP-1 drugs don’t make people stop eating processed food. They reduce food intake and cravings. It’s still up to the user to make healthy choices about what to eat.

Also it’s been about a decade since I visited family friends in Germany but there was plenty of processed food to be had when I was there, too.

I had the same question and did some back of the envelope math. The data I have seen says the average American eats 400-700 excess daily calories, and 3600 daily calories total. That means 10-20% excess per person. If everyone started eating the right amount overnight, grocery spend would drop 10-20%.

But since it's 16% on these drugs, and figure since they are Losing Weight (not maintaining), safe to say those 16% of Americans are eating 20-30% less... 20-30% times 16% = 3-5% decrease in spend.

So it tracks, roughly. And we are not at the bottom yet.

Even if we assumed that average food cost/Cal is a meaningful concept, the reduction would be much higher.

[0] https://www.ummhealth.org/health-library/eating-the-right-nu...

Whatever the figures are, what's interesting to me is the growing secular impact on an entire sector of the economy (the most stable and inelastic sector). If eating right means spending 5% less, extrapolating that across the entire sector, not just for the 16% using GLPs today, could be catastrophic

I suspect ultimately though supply will meet demand and prices may even rise for the food people are still eating

You're falsely assuming a 1:1 ratio between calories and cost. Unfortunately the big problem with ultra processed food is that calorie rich but nutrient deficient food is way cheaper than the less processed foods. Cutting out the cheapest items is going to reduce spending less.

Not falsely. Back of the envelope. If you want to improve the model go right ahead, but I was upfront with its limitations. What do your figures look like? and put them here for criticism.

I hear this a lot but I really don't see good evidence for it. And people keep peddling stereotypes about "fast food" consumption after QSRs saw much larger price increases than grocery stores. For that matter, the UPFs are where I see people most commonly reach for overpriced name brands over the generics.

It's perfectly fine for people to do rough estimates to understand a situation, especially in informal discussions. It not a dissertation for a Ph.D. or formal position paper.

How much is a bag of Doritos? Compare it with a bag of white rice, dry lentils, raw potatoes - processed is often more expensive.

The overall weight loss seems to be because the spending decreases most heavily in calorie dense foods like savory snacks; yogurt and fresh fruit spending goes up a bit.

Probably not. Americans (households, grocery stores, and restaurants) throw away an insane amount of food.

I would not assume this. Most people remain on GLP-1 agonists after they reach their goal weight, as without it cravings return and weight starts coming back on. I would guess a substantial fraction of people on the drugs are on a maintenance dose

1lb of fat is roughly 3500 calories. Given 500 calories a day of excess, that would lead to 1lb of fat gain per week. 52 pound average gain per year?

Take one person, say they eat 2000 calories to maintain bodyweight. If they start eating 2500 calories a day, they won’t gain 1lb of fat a week forever. As they gain fat, their body naturally burns more calories due to the increased body weight, and eventually a stable weight (higher than their original weight) will be reached.

So yeah if you’re eating 500 calories above your metabolic weight, you’ll theoretically gain weight forever. But in this case your metabolic rate is rising over time, so you would be eating more and more calories per day.

By the way... if humans had to count calories to not accidentally starve or die from overeating, we would not have made it long enough as a species to invent a scientific way to do that. Even the diets of obese or overweight individuals are being naturally regulated, because anyone could physically eat even more.

It is incredible to think this precise balance could be maintained by anything other than a closed loop of biological control. How would the wheat on a medieval farm know how much to grow each season? If it was off by 1% consistently, everyone would have died... unless they had a mechanism for satiation.

How do you think our microbial ancestors maintained internal salinity, through the limited availability of salt in the ancient ocean?

It ends up being the opposite. Rather than the body having a satiation response, it controls the metabolism.

If you've ever fasted, you've experienced this. You just don't have the energy to do much other than sit around when you are hungry.

Ancient societies realized this, it's why they'd give out calorie dense meals to their farm labor. For a serf in England, harvest time was often met with a very calorie dense meal. For roman soldiers, they had a diet of meats and cheeses.

I'd also point out that you don't need to have exactly 100% daily calorie intake. You can go a week with just 99% and catch up with 101% the next week just fine.

There exists something called a "feedback loop", something common in biology. You would probably find it interesting, you should look it up.

Basically, it means that if you try to chronically eat, say, 1% more calories than are burned, your body will try to burn more calories to compensate.

I'm not sure I grasp the rest of your comment, could you try again to explain? The wheat farm your ancestors worked did not provide the excess of cheap calories available to the present day American.

Your error is claiming some "precise cycle of starvation" is necessary to explain obesity via increased caloric availability.

>If it was off by 1% consistently, everyone would have died...

You do realize that starvation was a massive killer in the past. Everyone didn't die, but the young, the old, and the weak sure did.

Yeah, managing a system within 0.5% is subtle.

Especially when biologically and psychologically the pressure is towards over consuming rather than under. If you consistently eat a deficit you will very obviously feel hungry. If you consistently eat a small excess the effects that would lead you to regulate are much more... subtle.

Counting calories precisely was invented by the processed food industry.

I doubt that $ spend on the top end of caloric intake scales linearly with # of calories because of high caloric density foods.

If I spend $500 a month on groceries, lets say I need $400 to keep me alive and hygienic and the last $100 are going to be the candy and sodas that make me fat. So to give an example, reducing the caloric intake by 50% could be achieved by reducing spend by only 5% if there's very caloric foods making me fat.

This can't possibly be true. A caloric surplus of 500cal/day adds a pound of weight per week. That'd mean in a decade of life the _average_ American would add an additional 260 pounds. In 4 decades Americans would add half a ton to their waistline, on average.

That'd mean at then end of their life the average American would die weighing over 2 tons

Additionally the fatter you are the more calories you use at rest. So there's a point where if you consistently eat too much you'll stop gaining weight.

The biggest source of error here will be the calories in the garbage bin though. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of this is stored in the waste disposal, not the waist disposal.

Once you're 140kg, a sedentary lifestyle requires you to take something like 800 more calories as the same person with the same lifestyle at 70kg, to each maintain your weight.

So excess eating of 500 calories over what a normal bodyweight (say 70kg) needs to maintain, leads to fat people (say 110kg) who at some point stop gaining weight and stay at that fat level (of say 110kg).

And yet Europeans in this discussion are going out of their way to play the America Fat game without acknowledging how much fatter Europeans are than Asians.

That feels like a 2000+ change though.

Indeed, I do not announce it even to many people in my own circle of friends and family. Plenty of people (as you can clearly see just in this discussion) see the issue as one of morality and the get very judgy. If you use medication to help yourself become healthier, you have cheated.

Sometimes I wonder how much comes down to religion. After all, isn't gluttony one of the deadly sins?

Ergo its opposite is a missed branding opportunity for the religiously inclined: 'Ozempic: bring yourself closer to God'

I’m on tirzepatide but not for obesity. It completely cures my life long IBS. These are miracle drugs imo and should be as cheap and widely available as possible.

While I am in that part, I realize that having a fairly balanced feeling of hunger is just as much of a privilege as needing glasses to see is a disadvantage. Certainly some people just say fuck it and ballon to 200kg but a lot are just unhappy at 90kg in what should be a 65kg body being hungry every day and still overweight.

Yes if they ate only carrots and Brokkoli they would probably solve their weight problem but it is a hard ask to make in a world that looks like ours. Makes alcoholism look like child’s play since you cannot just abstain from food

Why create a new account just to litigate how statistically relevant the grandparent comment's anecdote is?

And as pointed out elsewhere in this thread, needs to be taken forever as the vast majority of patients regain most or all of the weight they lose after taking GLP-1s.

>Why create a new account just to litigate how statistically relevant the grandparent comment's anecdote is?

Red herring. My account was not created today, I’ve participated in numerous other threads prior to this one, and it’s irrelevant to the content of my comment.

Oh well. I'll be taking my omeprazole medication for the rest of my life, too. Sometimes the body has a chronic issue that needs lifetime management, frequently with medication. Only with GLP1 does this suddenly seem like a moral issue for some.

I imagine the perceived gap here is that “those” people understand thermodynamics and the failure to grasp is entirely in your hands.

The solipsistic idea that because your brain has the ability to do X means that everyone must work the exact same way, therefore if my brain is able to do something everyone else must too. If I can sit down and focus, ADHD must just be lazy and choosing not to. If my feelings of hunger are mild and easy to moderate, overweight people must just be weak willed and gluttonous.

To frame this as trying to argue for basic thermodynamics is such a strawman that my pet crow flew out the window in fear. If you think fat people are lazy and refuse to use willpower, and using a drug is a lazy substitute for mental willpower, then say so and have an honest discussion.

There are some flaws with this argument, but I keep it in mind when I feel like others are "cheating" by getting a good trait that I was born with. We should not insist on people getting things the hard way.

  > such a high impact overall

I don't think that I told anyone in my friend circle, so if you were my friend, you would not know.

4 kg down in 2 months, effortlessly, plus many metabolic parameters improved. My blood results are now similar to what I had when I was half that age.

What is more interesting is the general feeling of being better. Something subtle shifted in my overall bodily feeling, in a positive direction. I am more optimistic, sleep better, I like to go to the gym more. They opened a brand new gym right next to where I live and I didn't omit a single day since January 2, because I enjoy it.

It's my understanding in the EU that it's generally harder to get. Generic GPL-1s in the US are pretty easy to get shipped direct with very little doctor interaction.

hah, they're not using them to get off of processed foods... they're using them to reduce the impact of processed foods

> to get off the processed foods killing them

so this isn't really happening, they're not getting off of processed foods, they're just consuming less food overall

The Added Sugars (that's how they are listed on labels in the US) are _insanely_ and insidiously pervasive in US food. it's truly nefarious.

Wait for swimsuit season and I have a feeling your even active friends might start without telling anyone.

Myself I count calories (1500 to 1800 a day for middle aged dude) and lol drive to do my daily five mile walks on a rail trail.

Foods here if ur lazy and just buy whatever indeed are lasted with preservatives but you can put some effort into ur health to maintain a European look :)

It also gives what seems like very low numbers across the board.

https://www.healthline.com/health/average-steps-per-day#occu...

I'm someone whose weight easily oscillates by 2kg (1kg up/down from my average trend line), and it took a while to accept only the trend line over several weeks matters.

I was in Europe in April for ten days and same amount of time in December. As noted I weigh myself daily and each time I came back i was 169 pounds and maintained my weight to under 175 for awhile the 1st time and not so long 2nd time (Christmas).

> Within six months of starting a GLP-1 medication, households reduce grocery spending by an average of 5.3%.

But most people on the internet that I speak to that are on them have had specifically negative encounters from people learning - lots of moralizing, lots of denigration. A whole lot of them now specifically don't bring it up unless explicitly asked.

I gained a lot of weight during puberty, coupled with a less healthy diet in my youth. I suspect many folks are in the same boat - by the time they realize they need to eat/exercise, it's too late. Their metabolic system has been compromised by either diet, hormones, genetics, whatever.

In four months on a GLP-1, I've dropped about 18kg and since I coupled resistance training, I've increased on various strength parameters. The sudden reduction in weight has benefited my activity level substantially. There tends to be two classes of folks - those who need to stay on this drug forever and those who don't - I'm hoping in the end I fall into the don't, but I'm going to let the data from my continuous glucose monitor decide that.

I highly recommend the book "Ozempic Revolution" if you're considering the pros/cons of this path.

I do want to be clear to anyone reading: there is no "too late". One's system does not become somehow damaged at some cliff of weight and eating habits. It doesn't become irreparably meaningfully physically more difficult to lose weight. What can happen is a shift in many systems that effectively make one feel hungry all the time and psychologically react very strongly to those hunger cues, which makes people eat more. Outside rare circumstances, if you eat less, you will lose weight. I do have a lot of compassion for the psychological side of things being extremely difficult, though.

And how did surpressing your hunger via GLP-1 drugs (a pure change to a more healthy diet for you) lead to big changes, if you apparently already had such a healthy diet.

Seems to me your diet was unhealthy for a decade and now isn't.

The imbalance of fat to muscle leads to insulin resistance. Insulin resistance gets in the way of weight loss. After a long time of trying other means, I decided to directly tackle the insulin resistance problem. And it's been the only thing that's worked.

Sustaining that healthy diet is harder insulin resistance, agreed!

But you said you ate healthy for a decade. To me that's not eating obesity-maintenance level amounts of otherwise healthy foods, but rather eating healthy foods at a normal (say 2500 kcal daily) amount.

In other words, under your statement the behavioral impact of insulin resistance was already overcome, you were eating properly, and still didn't lose weight. And that's just not conform the science, which states that you lose weight even with high insulin resistance, as long as you're eating healthy (i.e. in a caloric deficit vis-a-vis obesity level maintenance).

In his own words, what he noted as being the main contributor to his obesity was the moment to moment urges to just eat something (I empathize with that a lot - I'm also obese). Losing that desire made sticking to good portions and fixed calorie intake windows much easier. He has lost ~50kg of weight in the last year and now walks and bicycles around everywhere for hours every day.

I wish you luck!

If you understood how super stimulants work, then you wouldn't have found it "insane."

I think many Germans will start using these drugs once they become cheaper