> For years, i tried to lose weight with gym and dieting. I failed, and now i know i probably never had a chance to, it was a scam all along.
> 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.
Idk man, I find it pretty easy to eat any amount of calories. I actually gained weight when burning around 1500kcal/day on a bike during one month - way more than running 10mi/day would burn.
That you find it difficult to eat enough during marathon training means your body is at least decent at regulating itself. For some people it's very easy (my gf stays at her very lean weight even when injured and doing 0 sports and then still stays there when burning 1000kcal/day) while for some it's very hard without help (my experience above).
Yeah totally. Eating less than you feel like is hard and GLP is great for that.
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.
One thing I am wondering about is that if months on GLP drugs is going to help with self-regulation. Maybe if you force yourself to eat less for a prolonged time (2-3 years) with the help of drugs then the body internalizes eating less as the norm.
We will see in a few years I guess. I am hoping for at least weak effect like that.
I know people who had that experience. They describe it as a total reset of their relationship with food. Even when pausing GLP after just a few months.
Americans believe diet and exercise "doesn't work". The reasons are twofold: on one hand, this is coming from the fat acceptance / body positivity movement, which needs people to believe that diet and exercise are futile, and being fat is just a fact of life, like being tall or short. They want people to believe that being fat is a disability, or even an attribute of diversity that we ought to accept and celebrate. On the other hand, American food products make it unnecessarily hard to consistently meet your caloric deficit, which makes people wrongly conclude that diet and exercise just doesn't work.
> On the other hand, American food products make it unnecessarily hard to consistently meet your caloric deficit, which makes people wrongly conclude that diet and exercise just doesn't work.
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.
This comes up a lot, and exercise and diet surely do work. But the notion of set points is also real and well studied. Once you become overweight and especially obese, your body does all sorts of crazy things to try and maintain that weight. Modulating the metabolism, sleepiness, energy levels etc. The percentage of people who have been obese and returned permanently to a healthy weight through diet and exercise is small enough that if it were a drug, people wouldn't even try it.
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.
> on one hand, this is coming from the fat acceptance / body positivity movement, which needs people to believe that diet and exercise are futile
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.
Also: the human body does not want to lose weight.
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.
>Also: the human body does not want to lose weight.
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.
I have yet to meet a single person that doesn't lose weight steadily but surely down to a healthy level by even just _attempting_ 16/8 intermittent fasting combined with at least 30 minutes of cardio every day -- even a brisk walk will do as long as it makes you warm and sweat. Even if you miss some days with cardio and only manage 12/12 with intermittent fasting some days, it's literally impossible for the body to gain weight this way. I'm sure there's one medical outlier among ten thousand or something, but in my 39 years I've never met a single one. Cardio is tougher the more you weigh, and intermittent fasting restricts carbs naturally.
I tried 20/4 with 90 minutes every other day. It got me from obese to merely overweight, but stuck there. My doc told me to stop with the IF, that while it worked, it wasn't ideal nutritionally, and had me eat healthy meals three times a day with a high protein snack. Weight still isn't quite into my healthy range, but I feel way better and all my numbers are better.
20/4 is way too extreme, and I'd never recommend it. In that case one would probably have better luck with fasting one or two days a week, but that would have to be under supervision of a professional. The reason 16/8 has become the "baseline" for IF is that it's enough time for 3 proper meals a day, and maybe even a snack in between if you're active. It's what works the best for most people, but of course outliers always exist. Some might be able to do more or less.
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.
Yeah 16/8 isn't even an effort because I like my breakfast late. But I'm double fast twitch so my chosen form of cardio is weights. I keep it above 90% max for about 90min three times weekly, but I need the off days for recovery. Happy where I am, numbers are good, wife likes how I look, good enough for me. I put on both fat and muscle easy so being 5% above max healthy weight while eating right amd lifting probably isn't that far out of whack.
It’s not about fasting or even cardio, it’s about caloric restriction. Fasting reduces the calories you eat, and cardio increases the calories you burn.
Fasting also leads to breaking down fat via lipolysis during ketogenesis. Burning calories via exercise, including cardio, primarily stops you from _gaining_ weight.
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.
You’re not wrong about breaking down fat via lipolysis but you’re wrong about the overall picture. Also, not sure what you mean by cardio stopping you from gaining weight. Cardio burns calories and you need to burn calories to lose fat.
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”
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.
Reducing the window for eating to 8 hours reduces total caloric intake naturally. I never said it was a "hack". Your linked article explains precisely why intermittent fasting is effective under the heading "The state of ketosis"; when it says "has a similar or even modest benefit over traditional calorie-restriction", that supports what I've been talking about, surely.
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.
We both know you’re trying to frame it as a hack. There’s no point in emphasizing fasting as much as you did if you didn’t think it was a significant improvement over traditional calorie restriction.
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.
> 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.
No I’m connecting the dots. A couple days ago you got downvoted for saying Elon Musk is getting us to mars and that he’s a great man. Now you’re arguing about fasting and keto.
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.
Your body is a machine that burns calories. Give it less calories and it will burn its calorie stores.
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).
Yeah but it's meaningless.
The struggle with losing weight comes from difficult to overcome hunger pangs.
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.
The good thing about calorie counting is that you can dial in the speed at which you want to lose weight. And then it becomes more about discipline than pushing through hunger.
But yeah, no matter what it is going to require mental effort.
Confidently incorrect. Body builds what it thinks it needs. Lifting weights? It will think you need muscles. Living sedentarily? It will think you are conserving evergy and you need fat reserves. Running daily? It will think all the needs are met and you need cognitive strength.
In my case it seems that the problem is a combination of stomach capacity and the desire to taste all those lovely things.
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.
>Wegovy (semaglutide) injection 2.4 mg is an injectable prescription medicine used __with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity__
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 main effect of diet is that more muscle can slightly increase your BMR, and the other health benefits of being in shape. It does also increase calorie loss from activity at the margins, even if it's a pretty small effect. (maybe 100-200 more per day etc in my experience.)
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.
I would like to add that exercise also helps you to influence where you lose weight. Your body will often choose to lose muscle mass when you are running a calorie deficit. If you lift weights you are stimulating muscle growth which helps to shift your body to lose weight through fat loss.
That's certainly part of it (and people should absolutely exercise, regardless of their weight/metabolic/body fat goals, to be clear) but my understanding is that your immune system also reduces its activity level after increasing your level of physical activity, reducing caloric expenditures, as do a few other bodily systems
I can't imaging losing weight consistently without exercise. Diet is most important. However even for the most obsessed of us counting calories is difficult to get right all of the time. Muscle mass consumes calories and exercise creates a deficit. Both provide margin that help account for calorie counting mistakes. I find that exercise forms a virtuous cycle in dieting. If I go on a 500 calorie bike ride that's 500 more calories I can eat that day.
That's not quite what I am saying. You need to learn about calories and build a proper intuition about them before really getting into exercising. Otherwise you end up easily out eating what you burn.
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.
You need to learn how to handle hunger. To control your own urges. Once you do, dieting becomes easy, the only part that sucks is the low energy and irritability.
Intermittent fasting is a great teacher in this regard.
While you are running or just in general? The former makes sense, but the latter is weird. Telling an obese person to run also makes orthopedic doctors cringe. Swimming or strength training are a lot safer for their joints. I personally find regular running makes me super hungry for anything and everything. Making sure what is at hand is healthy is critical for me.
None of what you described is a scam. Time and again, I’ve found the people who are critical of dieting aren’t doing it right… Which is hard for me to wrap my head around since weight loss boils down to one factor, caloric restriction.
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.
My experience aligns with yours. Words like "discipline" come off as moralistic. I know very disciplined people who struggle to lose weight. As someone who lost 40 lbs through long term fixation on calorie counting and exercise, I find it confusing. However when I look in the mirror and consider what I do to maintain my weight I realize that I'm the outlier. It is unrealistic to expect others to adopt my odd lifestyle.
The one time in my adult life I was in my healthy weight range. I got there that way. The maintenance consumed all my waking thoughts and energy. I decided that slightly overweight with a life was better. Staying just slightly overweight is easy for me with a few hours a week of exercise and excluding foods that I find addicting entirely. For me that is baked goods, grains, nuts, and dairy. So the staples of the western diet.
