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> lost all weight i wanted with Wegovy
It’s not a scam. The trick is that you probably weren’t dieting aggressively enough before Wegovy. All diets and GLP inhibitors work on the same principle: Caloric restriction.
It is simply impossible to stay fat without eating enough calories. But that’s really really hard to do without help. I have friends and family on GLP and they regularly eat less than 800 calories per day. You can’t do that on your own, the willpower it would take is hard to imagine.
Conversely when I’m marathon training it’s almost impossible to eat enough calories to avoid losing weight. Eating itself becomes a huge chore. Run 10mi/day and I promise you’ll lose weight the old fashioned way.
I was fat as a kid and then lost it all in high school (and got too skinny). Maybe as a result of that it’s easy for me to not eat. I kinda don’t even realize I’m hungry. Had to start tracking calories to ensure I eat enough.
In what way is dieting a scam? You literally just eat less, and you will lose weight as long as you're on a calorie deficit.
As an American who lost 100+ pounds & kept it off for more than a decade ... this x1000. It is extraordinarily difficult to maintain a healthy diet in the US.
People talked about glp drugs moving the set point, I don't know of any research supporting that. It seems like stopping the drug usually adds the weight back. And they are not without risks. But obesity is worse.
You are spot on about American food products. They are calorie rich and nutrient poor. But the obesity problem has spread outside America now. I read one journal article suggesting the spread pattern was more like what you see with the introduction of an unrecognized dangerous chemical, or even a mildly contagious pathogen. Whether it is some odd gut biome pathogen, a weird food additive, or if the chemical is how we grow food itself, the problem isn't contained.
I think it's much more about people not really understanding how their bodies work. Losing the first few pounds on a diet is easy because it's water weight you drop as soon as you stop constantly eating sugar (soda, snacks, etc). Actually losing fat is much harder because it requires actual caloric reduction in your diet.
Many people starting diets have no idea how their body will lose weight and get disheartened when the second ten pound loss is way harder and takes longer than the first ten pounds. People will justify all sorts of things when they're desperate and disillusioned.
You get more hungry after exercise.
People also are bad at calorie counting because they forget about so many sources of calories (milk/sugar in coffee, snacks, etc).
Let's say you figure all that out - keeping to a consistent diet and exercise regime is hard without some structure to maintain it. Example: I was in super good shape when my gym was next to my office, and lots of coworkers would go work out with me.
All this before we get to the as-yet-not understood effects of ultra processed foods and microplastics.
The body positivity movement I would give next to 0 blame here. May as well blame wokeism.
Sure. The human body doesn't want a lot of things. The human body doesn't want to go to school, and yet we do. The human body doesn't want to go to work, and yet we do. The human body doesn't want to hold back farts in the office, and yet we do.
Many things require willpower. Life is not a gradient descent.
Myself and people I've helped all have better effect from a minimum of 30 min cardio every day, than prolonged cardio every other day or fewer. It might seem counterintuitive but the body is all about "use it or lose it" (and don't abuse it, I like to add) and it tries to optimize for the stresses it's commonly exposed to. So if you do a lot of cardio every other day combined with extreme IF but do cardio on rest days, it's probably not going to prioritize the breakdown of fat the same and might even "store" it for the tough work coming the next day.
So yes of course at the end of the day it is about calorie restriction, but fasting helps force your body into a state where it needs to break down stored calories -- ie. fat tissue.
Anyways, fasting isn’t a body hack like some people think. Just look at this article by Harvard health. At best the benefit is modest:
“intermittent fasting has a similar or even modest benefit over traditional calorie-restriction dieting for weight loss”
https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/can-intermitt...
One reason is because the body regulates which sources of energy it uses, and will actually compensate for using too much of one energy source. For example, you might burn more fat during intermittent fasting because that’s what’s available at the time, but when you’re not fasting your body will actually burn less fat to compensate.
This is also why doing fasted cardio isn’t a hack. You’ll just burn less fat later and it’ll mostly be a wash.
And cardio burns calories, sure, but have you tracked your caloric burn when exercising? You can't really do active cardio to burn more than you eat -- not without going into a deficit you have to earn back later. Ketosis isn't as fast as breaking down carbohydrates, so you're right, you don't want to do fasted cardio, usually, unless it's very restricted -- or you load up on carbs via a smoothie or something similar high-availability. I do brisk (~110 bpm average) 30 minute walks during the fasting window early in the morning, but that's about the limit.
So no, I don’t think a “similar or modest” improvement over traditional calorie restriction supports your point. That phrasing suggests they’re not even willing to commit to it being a modest improvement.
You also seem to have completely misunderstood my point. It’s not about ketosis breaking things down slowly. Like I tried to explain, your body has various substrates it can use for energy (fat, muscle), and if you try to “trick” it by forcing it to burn a disproportionate amount of one, it’ll try to make up for it later. So if you do fasted cardio you might be burning more fat during your cardio session, but your body will try to compensate by burning less fat later. So these tricks don’t work, fasted cardio doesn’t help you lose weight more than non-fasted cardio.
Frankly it sounds like you’re getting your information from misinformed right-wing influencers.
... how did you jump to that final conclusion? No wonder you seem to not be engaging in a good faith conversation here; you've been sitting on that prejudice all along.
A final piece of advice you're unlikely to heed, but I still feel compelled to share it: If you view reality through a broken lens, you'll see a twisted version of reality everywhere. I get my information from reading medical literature, not listening to influencers.
I'm moving on. Have a good day.
If you want to deny it then fine, but I’d have to be an idiot not to connect those dots.
I’d encourage you to step outside your bubble and actually read about these things because you’re definitely not reading medical literature. You’re being fed bro science, not real science.
Just want to throw this out there for you and everyone’s benefit. Regular physical activity helps you age gracefully and has a lot of physical and emotional benefits besides weight loss.
You are right that there are a lot of scams that complicate this fact as much as possible to get money from you.
But rest assured, if you calculate your TDEE (many simple calcs online), and food scale your calories (everything you eat) to a diet -500 under your TDEE, you will lose weight (or you are a perpetual motion machine).
Advising people about calorie restriction is the same as advising an alcoholic to just stop drinking. It's easy if you can do it but if you can you wouldn't have a problem to begin with. It is missing the problem entirely.
But yeah, no matter what it is going to require mental effort.
What works for me is to keep myself occupied, to insist on eating only things that I really want because of the taste, and to eat little at a time but more often.
My GP concurs and claims that restricting one's intake by having several small meals instead of one large one results in the stomach effectively shrinking so that over time you find yourself feeling full after a relatively small meal. When I am at home I use a smaller plate at dinner than the rest of my family so that I just can't pile as much on.
After nearly a decade of this the result is that I simply cannot eat the same amounts as I used without feeling uncomfortable, so I don't.
Just saying.
Neither gym not dieting are scams and simply can't be by their nature. People who say that either have some serious health condition (and obviously you can beat some things with will alone) or people who failed at realising that "dieting" is about their consumption habbits.
Most people I see with this problem convince themselves that they are on a diet while they continue with their eating habbits.
You "just" tricked you brain and made things easier for yourself. Good for you but calling gym and dieting a scam is just laughable.
The only consistent way to enter a caloric deficit is to diet, which is very hard for the obvious reasons
None of this will help much without the diet, but it's not useless.
Muscle and fat are metabolically active, which means they burn calories just to stay alive. If you lose fat, guess what? Your body doesn’t need as many calories to survive.
Another factor is the calories you burn not exercising. We burn calories all day, even when we’re not exercising but when people are dieting they tend to have lower energy so the don’t move around as much.
So yes, technically metabolical rate slows down but it’s not some conspiracy against you. It’s a direct result of losing fat.
That’s why some people lift weights while dieting to build muscle at the same time they’re losing fat. Personally, I haven’t had a huge issue with caloric restriction so I’m doing a more intense diet in the short term, then cooling off once I get to my goal weight and switching to more weigh lifting.
In fact exercise makes you crazy hungry, which sabotages tons of people's weight loss efforts.
It's better to lose weight, learn how your body and calories work, and then start implementing gym work.
I have known way too many people who regularly exercise but still cannot lose weight. The problem they have is that thry burn 500 calories exercising, and then go unknowingly eat 900 calories because they exercised.
Intermittent fasting is a great teacher in this regard.
You’re stuff about obese people and joints isn’t relevant to this discussion on hunger.
You burn more calories than you eat and you lose weight. It’s that simple. All these tricks people use like glp-1 inhibitors and keto all serve the same goal of caloric restriction. GLP-1 reduces appetite which reduces calories, keto removes food groups from your diet and decreases hunger which reduces calories.
I’ve been dieting recently and lost 20 pounds just by diligently tracking and restricting my calories. 10 pounds lost in just the past month. In that time I’ve eaten bowls of pasta, pizza, gone out drinking, etc. All I do is accurately track everything I eat (everything), and if I have a less-strict day (like going drinking), I just eat less the next day to make up for it.
It’s simple, but it requires some discipline. That’s the real reason people have trouble dieting.