The truth is that we designed a system in which a majority of people cannot thrive and in which a lot of people end up developing problems like obesity or being labeled as ADHD. Now the same system designed a cure, one that you have to pay for and take for years if not for life, just so that you can rewire your perfectly normal brain to fit in the very imperfect mold of what the system needs
Taking antidepressant won't fix your depressing environment
Taking sleeping pills won't fix your sleep depriving routine
Taking ozempic won't fix your stressful job that materialized into an compulsive eating
The extreme vast majority of people have perfectly normal bodies/hormones/&c. but are evolving in unhealthy environments, you're merely fixing the last link of the chain, if you stop there, like a lot of people do when they're being advertised magic pills, you're setting up yourself for failure. The fact that all of these lifestyle disease increased 100 folds in the last 50 years should be a clear sign that the problem isn't the human body/brain, but whatever the fuck we're collectively agreeing to take part in.
Also the fact that plato was wrong about one piece of progress 2000 years ago doesn't mean every new thing since then was a net positive for humanity. You could have used the same argument for decades about asbestos, leaded paint, leaded gas, freon, &c. and yet here we are...
know what makes it easier to fix/change your environment? when you aren't obese and everything in life is so much harder.
Guess what? you can both take ozempic AND fix the problems that caused the need to self-medicate with food (for example). In fact, I would be willing to bet that we see research coming out in the next couple years that shows people who lose weight with GLP-1's then go on to make better lifestyle choices because they confer many benefits that are much more obvious and attainable when you aren't obese and just fighting to get around in daily life.
It's a two-way issue - having some problems result in you being obese, but being obese also creates problems, makes them worse, and harder to address. Mental health issues for example can both cause obesity and be caused by obesity - if you aren't obese anymore then your mental health improves and you can then go onto address other issues you might not have been able to otherwise.
Lastly, you talk about "the system" as if that's not a two way relationship. People who have unhealthy habits they have trouble controlling create demand for services and products that are unhealthy - but if you have less people with unhealthy habits then that demand reduces and so do those unhealthy supplies.
I went from about 265lbs down to 160lbs at my lowest. I crashed it as quickly as I could over the course of about 4-5 months, because that’s how my brain works. Single goals with a hard metric to optimize.
During that I forced myself to start walking. 6k steps a day to begin with, ramping up to 20k steps a day at my peak. Not optional and no exceptions for any reasons. If it was 11:30pm and I was at 9k for the day, I got out of bed and walked until I hit my 20k goal.
Very difficult at first but eventually it just became a new habit. Having a dog that demands at least 5 miles of walks a day helped a lot!
After I dropped the weight I knew my strength was now an issue. Zero way to drop over 100lbs that quickly without losing muscle mass. So I started going to the gym towards the last couple months of that. I literally just sat in the hottub or did some really lazy laps in the pool since I enjoy that. The point was forcing myself to go on my scheduled “gym days”.
After I got out of severe calorie deficit territory I got a personal trainer twice a week to force myself to go with some social and financial pressure, and slowly learned how to do weight training. This was terrifying to me due to social anxiety, so I left it as my last item to work on.
I’m now back to 200lbs or so, but with an estimated 12% body fat composition. Roughly where I want to be, and just short of some “fun” strength goals like hitting a certain bench or squat target and staying there.
So far after over a year of being largely off the GLP-1s these habits have stuck. They still are not easy, but knowing how much impact they have just on my mental health when I am consistent with them keeps it going. Plus I made a few new unexpected friends along the way who give light social pressure to keep the gains coming.
My path is certainly not for everyone, but there would have been zero way for me to accomplish it and stick to it without the weight loss drugs. I’m now 44 years old, and a few of my friends have commented that this is the most unexpected thing they have seen me accomplish - and I like to think I’ve accomplished quite a bit throughout my life so far. A complete 180 from how I approached my physical health in the past, and the drugs gave me the performance enhancement for my diet that I needed to get over the hump.
> The truth is that we designed a system in which a majority of people cannot thrive and in which a lot of people end up developing problems like obesity or being labeled as ADHD.
We designed — if you can call this "design" — a system where most people are not the literal property of their feudal lords and most of them do not need to worry about literally starving to death.
Our genomes don't know we're not at constant risk of starving, they're not universally adapted to abundance. Heck, our genes are barely adapted to milk[0] or cooked food[1].
We don't know if our forebears had ADHD, but this not because they didn't, it's because approximately nobody in psychology wants to diagnose someone who isn't in the room with them — there's plenty of historical figures whose behaviour is compatible with such a diagnosis, which is a much weaker claim. Personally, I am suspicious of evolutionary psychology as being at risk of decorating "just-so" stories with just enough rigour to seem respectable, but even then one does need to make claims that at least add up, such as the ones behind this claim that it may have been an adaptation 50k years back: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-curiosities/20...
> The fact that all of these lifestyle disease increased 100 folds in the last 50 years should be a clear sign that the problem isn't the human body/brain, but whatever the fuck we're collectively agreeing to take part in.
> You could have used the same argument for decades about asbestos, leaded paint, leaded gas, freon, &c. and yet here we are...
Mm. And despite all those errors, where we are is "living longer and healthier lives in greater comfort… unless you're American for some reason, you guys should look at what all the rest of us have been doing and copy us". Even a few of those examples, like asbestos, were direct improvements over the previous status quo of "perhaps my house/factory will burn down with me in it".
> and most of them do not need to worry about literally starving to death.
Yes, now the main causes of death are literal sloth and gluttony.
> living longer and healthier lives
Healthier ? 50% of people are basically disabled by the age of 40 because of obesity
You're conflating life expectancy at birth vs life expectancy, don't forget health-span expectancy either. The US life expectancy is going down, health span is going down in most of the west too:
Anyways, if your argument is that we should be glad that 70% of people are overweight/obese because people died earlier 300 years ago idk how many people you will convince...
Saying of employment and big companies "oh no totes the same as feudalism" from such superficial similarities is historically laughable. It's like saying that the Romans and the USA and Mussolini are all "the same thing" because of the iconography of the fasces.
> Yes, now the main causes of death are literal sloth and gluttony.
> You're conflating life expectancy at birth vs life expectancy, don't forget health-span expectancy either. The US life expectancy is going down, health span is going down in most of the west too:
Burden of disease
Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) per 100,000 individuals from all causes. DALYs measure the total burden of disease – both from years of life lost due to premature death and years lived with a disability. One DALY equals one lost year of healthy life.
Burden of disease goes down until the pandemic, only then goes up.
Even with pandemic making things worse, the USA was back at 1992 levels of health.
Specifically life expectancy: even in the USA, what you're seeing is the impact of the covid pandemic.
> Anyways, if your argument is that we should be glad that 70% of people are overweight/obese because people died earlier 300 years ago idk how many people you will convince...
And in any case, your previous argument was "Taking ozempic won't fix your stressful job that materialized into an compulsive eating", to which my snappy retort is: well, nothing else did that either, did it?
My real argument is: if you don't like the obesity epidemic, why are you opposed to people taking the magic weight loss treatment that actually works, and apparently has a whole bunch of surprising positive side effects such as the headline of this news story?
It's the solution, and you're complaining about the problem that it fixes as if it also causes it. Thinking of the asbestos example earlier, what you're arguing here is like saying "all fire-retardants must be bad because people are on fire a lot".
Taking antidepressant won't fix your depressing environment
Taking sleeping pills won't fix your sleep depriving routine
Taking ozempic won't fix your stressful job that materialized into an compulsive eating
The extreme vast majority of people have perfectly normal bodies/hormones/&c. but are evolving in unhealthy environments, you're merely fixing the last link of the chain, if you stop there, like a lot of people do when they're being advertised magic pills, you're setting up yourself for failure. The fact that all of these lifestyle disease increased 100 folds in the last 50 years should be a clear sign that the problem isn't the human body/brain, but whatever the fuck we're collectively agreeing to take part in.
Also the fact that plato was wrong about one piece of progress 2000 years ago doesn't mean every new thing since then was a net positive for humanity. You could have used the same argument for decades about asbestos, leaded paint, leaded gas, freon, &c. and yet here we are...