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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   2092 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for May 24, 2023

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I'll keep this short and sweet. I'm very tempted to try and hop on the semaglutide train. It seems like folks here have had decent results. I have a few hesitations:

  • First, morally, I feel like I should be able to lose weight myself. With enough physical activity (playing soccer etc) I at one point was able to have an incredible body with awful eating habits. I've improved my eating habits dramatically but I know for sure that I still have unhealthy tendencies. I should be eating less and differently. I can cycle an imperial century and it's almost trivial, but actual weight loss has remained elusive.

  • Second, I feel like this gold rush will end in tears a la COVID vax. I'm ashamed I hopped on that train so early though I didn't have any side effects and rarely encounter any through medication anyway. What are the chances this all ends up being a huge mistake and I shave 5 years off of my life in exchange for losing a beer belly?

morally, i feel i should be able to lose weight myself

No! Bad! The decision to take a drug is a practical one with no moral implications. Similar statements include "morally, i feel i should be able to drive a bit longer without stopping at a rest area" or "morally, i feel i should be able to walk to the grocery store rather than drive."

give it a try. if it works you will know soon enough

What are the chances this all ends up being a huge mistake and I shave 5 years off of my life in exchange for losing a beer belly?

A beer belly will cost you about 1-3 years anyway going by the stats

I at one point was able to have an incredible body with awful eating habits. I've improved my eating habits dramatically but I know for sure that I still have unhealthy tendencies. I should be eating less and differently. I can cycle an imperial century and it's almost trivial, but actual weight loss has remained elusive.

metabolic mid life slow down. it is why so many people gain weight in middle age even despite not eating more.

I'm also tempted sometimes, but at the same time, if semaglutide only helps you be less hungry, I don't see the point for using it on myself. I'm pretty capable of simply denying my urges (for 6 out of 7 days, anyway) and avoiding eating much that way. Unless semaglutide also helps your metabolism or has effects other than making you less hungry, then I don't think I need it, I can just mostly do it on my own.

I'm pretty capable of simply denying my urges (for 6 out of 7 days, anyway) and avoiding eating much that way.

the idea is it makes it easier than having to force yourself to not eat . you simply lose the desire to want to eat as much

I've had the same "I can do it myself" mentality for years, and I did have intermittent successes before starting semaglutide. I can stick to a diet perfectly for roughly a month at a time and lose 10 lbs, the problem always comes when life gets stressful and suddenly my mental energy assigned to the diet starts to decline, if It's crunch time and I have an important presentation tomorrow, I can't also be really fucking hungry because I'm in a 1000cal/day deficit, I'll just throw the diet out the window for the stressful time period.

Semaglutide takes care of all that, and I don't need to have zero stress in order for me to stick to the diet, that now happens more or less effortlessly. I still need to have enough mental space to prep my diet foods at regular intervals so I don't eat out instead of eating my home-cooked stuff, but that's a much lower bar than tolerating hunger.

Can it be taken intermittently? Like, in your example scenario, can a person just live normally for roughly a month, but then take it for a week when life gets stressful... then cycle back off it?

The recommended dosing has you slowly ramp up the dose over like 2 months until you get to the truly effective amounts. I suspect that you would get very large gastro-intestinal side-effects if you just went from 0 to the effective dose. Semaglutide also has a very long half-life of a week, so if you're injecting 1.0mg/week steadily, to get the same blood concentration with a single injection you'd need 2.0mg. I think it would be a fairly bad idea, there's a good chance that the diarrhea and vomiting you'd get would wipe out any mental benefits from the lack of hunger.

yeah this is it. the drug takes care of the willpower element

Do you consider your current eating habits to be ingrained too deeply for you to change them without medication? My uncle used to be a jolly fat dude for decades until he flipped the switch and became a wiry endurance cyclist.

I think that part of the reason so many of us have difficulty with self-controlled weight loss is the rarity of examples like your uncle; that's an incredible story that can serve as a powerful "carrot" for many who know him. 90% of adulthoods are descents into overfed and underactive lives, so I imagine many people lack the evidence that such a transformation is even possible.

And one of the reasons why such stories are rare is because the whole world is biased against you. Even my aunt wasn't happy with him, because now he would eat different food at different times, would dress as a MAMIL and leave home at 7am on weekends. His career in sales also went through a crisis, as his existing customer relationships were based in no small part on shared love of food and drink, forcing him to rebuild his portfolio.

Exercise generally sucks for weight loss. thin people tend to eat less, that is were the thinness comes from, not the exercise. i remember i did 50 miles of hiking in a week, lost a pound, which was within the noise. i did 16 days of consecutive hiking, minimum of 2-3k elevation day each hike, scant weight loss. getting omicron soon after did it though, lost 7 pounds even though didn't feel that sick.

Yeah, exercise only works if you do lots of it every damn day. Appalachian trail through-hikers can get lean as fuck, but that's not 16 days of hiking, more like 160.

I've improved them gradually over the years. Portions have gotten smaller, I enjoy vegetables (especially grilled) etc.

But I can't quit occasionally having a decadent cheeseburger or getting multiple items at Taco Bell. It's not a stretch to say that 3-4 times a week I have a 1,000 calorie meal. Sometimes I'll counterbalance that with 1-3,000 calorie bike ride but then I'm pretty frickin hungry etc.

I don't eat breakfast or drink soda, but when I've done calorie counting I'm consistently above what I need to be at for true weight loss. I suppose part of it is that eating is second only to sex in terms of sublime pleasures that makes life worth living. If I have to eat salad every day I'd kinda rather just die.

Eating salad every day sounds great. I love carrot-and-radish salad, I don't get to eat it often enough. I get what you mean, though. The place I usually order takeout from makes some great beef quesadilla (I'm sure Mexicans would disagree, but it's head and shoulder above any other quesadillas I've had in Russia), but a single portion is 583 kcal, which means I have to plan around it if I want to have one for dinner while I'm still dieting.

If you're not having breakfast then shouldn't your meals be 1k+ calories each, every day? Or are you a tiny elderly woman?

I'll put it this way, it's the calories in part of the equation. I know that much. 2 big meals and two lattes hits that 2,400 mark. I just have taken all the low hanging fruit people typically think of and still love red meat and cheese, as a rule

Why not just wait? My plan is to wait 5 years and if there are still no side effects then I'll do it. I also have a BMI of 26 so I'm not a prime candidate.

I am pretty vaccine skeptical, but is there any real evidence that the vaccines did harm (except for not working very well after 2021)? It might still be too early, but it seems like all the stronger anti-vax predictions have fallen flat.

I am pretty vaccine skeptical, but is there any real evidence that the vaccines did harm (except for not working very well after 2021)? It might still be too early, but it seems like all the stronger anti-vax predictions have fallen flat.

not really. much of the evidence seems like cherry picking, scouring headlines for people dying who were vaccinated. funny how with Neely and DeSantis in the news, no one is posting about #suddendied anymore.

Yeah, it looks like the apparent increase in athlete deaths was limited to a short period of time after getting vaccinated. I still don't know if we have a definitive answer to what was going on there. Myocarditis caused by the vaccine seems like a likely explanation. The phenomenon could also be entirely fake.

In any case, the number of people affected was small. And since few young athletes are getting jabs any more, I doubt we'll see another bout of athlete deaths. 🤷‍♀️

It was still kinda insane to me how hard people were pushing vaccines for kids in 2022.

is there any real evidence that the vaccines did harm

My impression was that they did (very rarely) do real harm and were largely ineffective. My objection to having got it had much more to do with principle than practicality. I did the two Phizer doses and stopped there since I believe they slowed down folks' ability to generate natural immunity.

I think waiting is smart. Supply will be less restricted, there's better alternatives on the horizon. My BMI is closer to 27.5 and I'm just sort of over it and being impatient.

same here. the media and Biden waaay oversold the efficacy of vaccines at stopping covid.

Do you think the COVID vaccine will literally take 5 years off most people's lives? There have been semaglutide studies going up to like 24 months without adverse effects for weight loss, and weaker stuff in the same GLP-1 class like liraglutide has been used for years. We might find negative effects later on, but In general, stuff that doesn't have massive negative effects in the medium term won't suddenly get massive negative effects in the long term.

And regardless of this, if any negative effects happen in 30 years, I fully expect future AI medicine to make them completely trivial.

Semaglutide works really, really fucking well.

Do you think the COVID vaccine will literally take 5 years off most people's lives?

There have been cases of really long-term side effects like Prion diseases from transfusions and tissue donors. These can take decades to develop but very rare.

Do you think the COVID vaccine will literally take 5 years off most people's lives?

No, I really don't at all. Hyperbole and the worry that Semaglutide is if it's too good to be true....

There's just very few things in this world with unequal costs to their benefits. So yeah it's more superstition than anything else I suppose.

I mean, if you want large costs for the same benefits, there are plenty of effective weight loss drugs with a shit ton of unhealthy side effects, DNP and trenbolone will make you lose weight, they just might also kill you lol, their side effects are not subtle at all. Free lunches are rare in the world, but there's certainly lunches that are more expensive than others.

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