There appear to be a lot of people who derive a significant amount of their self-confidence and self-image from not being fat, and looking down on people who are. They seem to get pretty upset when people who they've been able to dismiss as fat become not fat, and hate that these drugs allow the users of them to take away that moral superiority -- various GLP1 subreddits are full of stories about them.
I'd never encountered anyone like that in real life, but they show up over and over again on any discussion of these drugs. It's very strange to me.
It exists in the same line of argumentation as being against student loan debt forgiveness because one had to pay off one's own loans, except about something that is even more determined by one's birth.
Some alleles give people a tendency to gain weight via a higher appetite, slower metabolism, addiction to substances (in this case food). But no matter your alleles, you still have to pick up your fork and start attacking those triple portions of nachos. Let's not forget that 1-2 generations ago, the percentage of obese people was much lower than today, but the proportions of the above-mentioned alleles are very unlikely to have changed in 30-50 years.
Perhaps food is more ultra-processed now. Micro-plastics. Gut flora disruption. Seed oils. 5G vaccines. Name a fad and there's a [whatever the antonym for panacea is] for why obesity rates are higher.
It's feels unfair that a single Halloween Oreo cookie is 70 calories. The caloric density of modern and delicious food is absolutely insane.
And so, aside from a rare treat, which mostly leaves me sad (because I only get to eat two), I eat things that aren't ultra-processed 5G seed oil based. And my weight remains controlled despite said 5G vaccines, seed oils, and gut flora disruption.
Ozympic seems like a net good if it helps people control their weight. It just always seems preposterous when people blame "ultra-processed food" as the root problem, rather than the over consumption of said food as the problem.
I wrote that someone has to pick up that fork to eat those nachos. However, processed food makes it easier to eat more calories than you need. Ice cream used to be a once-a-week treat. Now, you can buy a pint of a caloric bomb for 2.99 USD. I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, but as someone who exercises frequently and eats similar food when traveling, I can say with conviction that something is going on with the food sold in the US. For example, I often get pimples on my face after eating pork or beef in the US. I never get pimples when I eat pork or beef in Europe or South America.
I have more problems not getting fat when I'm in the US and I feel more bloated. The usual explanation, which has merit, is that portions are bigger in the US and people move less than in other countries. However, I eat 95% of my meals at home, cooked by me, and I exercise 1 or 2 times daily.
>It exists in the same line of argumentation as being against student loan debt forgiveness because one had to pay off one's own loans
No, it doesn't. There's no fixed national budget for weight loss. There's also not perverse incentives that come with subsidizing supply. It's not an economic question.
There are valid policy-based arguments to be had against student debt loan forgiveness, but the personal grievance of "why should they get a break when I paid off my debt?" is not one.
In order to forgive a debt, someone else has to assume the debt. Nobody cares about that in general. If, say, someone's parent assumes the student debt of their child, you are not going to hear a thing. But when it is government forgiveness the constituents of that government often feel they are being left the bag holder, which is where you start to see complaint.
If you lose weight on Ozempic, there is no evidence that someone else needs to assume the weight you lost, so it is not clear where you find a parallel.
The parallel is "I had to work hard to lose weight / maintain my low weight, why should they get a magic pill?" Unfairness can be perceived even when it only exists in a vague cosmic sense and has no bearing in material reality.
I think you forgot to mention the parallel? I guess, seemingly, that would be "I had to work hard to pay my student debt, why should they get to have their parents pay for it?" but that is not a sentiment that is common enough to speak of. Yeah, sure, I'm sure at least one person in history has had that thought before, but not the point of it being notable to talk about on HN. Most people who see another have their loans paid for think "Good for them". There must be something else?
The "I had to work hard to pay my student loan, and now I have to work hard to pay yours too?" sentiment is much more common and I could see that show up here, but it is not a parallel. That's a very different idea that has no parallel. I don't have to work off the weight you lost.
"being against student loan debt forgiveness because one had to pay off one's own loans"
> but that is not a sentiment that is common enough to speak of
It crops up every time the issue is discussed online. On places like Twitter, at least.
> I don't have to work off the weight you lost.
Again, this blend of envy, spite, and petty injustice crops up quite often. "Why did I have to exercise when they could afford a gastric bypass?"
You seem unfamiliar with how petty people can be online. There are plenty of people who get personally aggrieved when they think someone got a free lunch / might get a free lunch even when the lunch isn't paid by them / they were unfortunate enough to miss out on free lunch day.
> that is not a sentiment that is common enough to speak of
> It crops up every time the issue is discussed online. On places like Twitter, at least.
Only when it pertains to government forgiveness, because of the bag holding problem.
Nobody cares when it is an unrelated entity that is willing to become the bag holder (e.g. parents). In fact, it has become almost expected that entities like parents will become the bag holders when it comes to college debt.
The bag holding problem is something quite different, not a parallel.
> "Why did I have to exercise when they could afford a bypass?"
So it crops up quite often, but only when it comes to weight loss-related matters?
I am familiar with the common use, but it speaks to people in a lower class envying those in a higher class. Here we have people in the same class, just with different paths to get there. So, you must have a pet definition?
Regardless, I've never heard a "self-made" rich person complain "I had to work hard to get here. Why oh why wasn't I born rich like that Saudi prince?". They seem to only ever be proud that they were able to become rich. Again, I suppose it has probably happened once, but does not seem common enough to speak of.
It might be more common in terms of political power rather than wealth. Nixon, for example, hated the Ivy League-educated eastern establishment ruling elites that he displaced.
Probably not, though, given that you couldn't find an example of envy and decided to randomly reach for hatred instead for some reason. Again, I suppose it has probably happened once, but is clearly not common enough to speak of (you literally were unable to speak of it).
Here, a House Representative questioning student loan relief announced in August 2022. Not framed as an issue of others paying for the debtors, but rather "what relief do those who already paid off their debt receive?"
Valid question. Given that they are assuming the debt, what relief are they getting to pass it off onto the next bag holder? Anyone assuming the debt would ask the same question.
No, you keep finding diversions to avoid answer the question.
Let's face it: The question is unanswerable as there is no parallel and there never was.
Your never ending quest to try and find that which does not exist is commendable, and hilarious, but to think that it is answering some kind of question is nonsensical.
Here's an example of someone who's paid off their debt, is unhappy at the prospect of others getting relief, but not complaining about being the one to have to pick up the tax bill in order to deliver that relief:
> Student loan forgiveness rewards bad decision making
I took out a $160,000 student load a decade ago
I saved every penny I made to pay it back in full. I ended up paying over $300,000 on the loan
Now I'm getting punished because I was too responsible and paid back my loan too quickly?
I lived in a $500 a month rat and cockroach infested sun room in Boston for years to pay back this debt
If I would have instead ignored my debt and bought cars and useless luxury items I'd get a free $300,000 check?
I'm as a-political as it gets. I hate all politicians. But this is insanity and rewards the WORST behavior
It has been said over and over that it no doubt has happened, but is not common enough that anyone here would speak to it. Digging deep into the depths of what HN largely considers a trolling website to find some random nobody has ever heard of once saying what you want to hear is not indicative of anything.
I'm surprised you don't take your comedy show on the road. People would pay good money for the laughs you've brought us.
> but is not common enough that anyone here would talk about it
But I don't care about whether or not people on HN would talk about it. I'm saying that it exists. Ultimately it is a moral judgment about personal responsibility. You find it in attacks on "welfare queens" similarly. Yes, of course there is always the element of being an aggrieved taxpayer. But there is also the vague cosmic - puritanism? - critique of "why should they have it easy when I had it hard?" I'm glad that you uphold HN as a place that is above such sentiment. But here I agree with you! I do not take such critiques seriously. Yet they abound, and they are a clear parallel to people attacking Ozempic because they find it "too easy" for becoming or staying thin. And so, we come full circle.
> not indicative of anything.
This entire sub-discussion is about fallacious arguments, and it is a fallacious argument that I am saying it exists. Therefore it is entirely germane for me to bring up a trolling website to find an argument used by a random nobody, as it proves the existence of a narrative. Perhaps you may quibble that it is not a narrative that exists in abundance. Then we are simply arguing preponderance, because I have already established existence.
> But I don't care about whether or not people on HN would talk about it.
You certainly don't have to care, but that is the discussion taking place. It is a necessary precondition for this supposed parallel to exist.
If you're trying to tell us that you can't focus and are flailing around like one of those whacky blow up thingys down at the used car lot, have fun with that. It no doubt goes well with your comedy show.
> This entire sub-discussion is about fallacious arguments
Oh, I see, so you really are unable to focus. I get why you appear to be so confused now. It is not so much that you're confused in what you write, but that you're off in your own world. Well, that's pretty funny, at least.
> I'd never encountered anyone like that in real life,
How many people tell you their deepest asshole feelings right off the bat? They feel you out of you're in the same hate canoe and then they let loose. Doesn't mean they are not there.
A good point, but many people on these subreddits are apparently surrounded by "friends" and family like this who are happy to tell them how disappointed they are that they're "cheating" at losing weight.
Maybe some, there are also people who cheer for the capacity of humanity to figure out solutions that can benefits humanity. I view the perspective you describe as people externalizing their own insecurity. I do not view it as a critic towards people who have an excess of stored potential energy, but merely a signal that they haven't made peace with their own internal feelings about themselves. They need love, acceptance. They are on their own journey, everyone has the capacity to grow. Let's help everyone.
I have had to work very, very, very hard to not be obese. Runs in the family, and I am literally always hungry. A slice of pizza sets off a reaction in my brain like cigarettes used to, and I get a huge buzz. Anything sweet makes me crave something else sweet 10x more. I've had periods of being bigger and periods of being smaller, but I think most people who'd meet me didn't immediately peg me as fat -- I have literally 20 years of weight measurements showing me bouncing between being in great shape and being a little bigger, the same 15kgs being gained and lost over and over.
These drugs are a god-send for me, because I am no longer constantly thinking about food all the fucking time, and I can easily eat normal people portions without having to burn huge amounts of self control on it.
The idea that the drugs are not "fair" is very strange thinking.
I know people who are slim and have roughly similar sentiment about the drug.
Then again I also know people who'd happily deny stimulant medication to people with ADHD, because "it's not fair".
Crabs in a bucket, I'd say. It doesn't help that in general, our culture still operates on the assumption that being fat is one's own fault and entirely under control of an average person, except for "legitimate medical excuses" like type 1 diabetes, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. We've made progress on getting rid of such notions in case of depression, autism and ADHD, so maybe we'll do that with obesity too, in some distant future. Until then, people on Ozempic will hear plenty of "that's not fair", and "if you were a better person, you wouldn't need this".
EDIT: Maybe we'll get obesity to be seen more like smoking: something that's easy to walk into, but beyond average person's ability to walk out of without help.
>> I know people who are slim and have roughly similar sentiment about the drug.
It reveals that for some trim people, their underlying feelings all along have been a sense of personal value and positivity around the fact that they are trim and others fat.
They feel unhappy that other might be admitted to the trim club.
My attitude has nothing to do with your consumption. I have a negative opinion of the drug. I don't have a negative opinion of people who feel desperate enough to use it.
I mean, turn your thinking around, why is being thin so important to them that they would take a very powerful class of drug just to achieve it? Why then would they waste a minute of their time afterwards being worried about external opinions of how they achieved it?
What's actually important here? Their health and appearance or the opinions of their peers? Are they altering their appearance solely for the opinion of their peers?
> and "if you were a better person, you wouldn't need this".
I think you've accidentally encoded that precise understanding here.
I exploded in size as soon as I hit puberty and have never been able to take off the weight. I ate the same foods as my brother and we did roughly the same activities. Puberty was a night and day switch from scrawny kid to fat kid and it’s been a constant challenge since. My son is desperately trying to gain weight for a dirty bulk. He’ll put down a full pizza by himself in a night and has to force himself to keep eating more calories. When we go out to eat he picks meals based on what has the most calories. He’s still a rail and can’t keep on weight. And apart from lifting 2-3 times a week for roughly half an hour he’s completely sedentary so he’s no expending a tremendous amount of calories through other activity. For some people, staying thin is just their normal and not some diligent attention to what they consume.
These drugs are praised because they require zero effort, from people that already want to give none, than classical methods such as caloric restriction. There has always been a way out of obesity, it's just that people does not want to take it.
They do not require zero effort, and the people taking them to not already want to give no effort. Please reserve your moral judgments.
These drugs don't work without 'classical methods' such as caloric restriction.
> There has always been a way out of obesity, it's just that people does not want to take it.
Common trope, and absolute nonsense. It is the rare person who has been obese for most or all of their lives and prefers it that way or has never thought about or done anything to try and fix it. That is not how people show up at doctor's offices to ask about Ozempic. They show up in tears, at the end of their rope, or having completely given up.
Should we not help them just because you think it's "unfair" that you were genetically more gifted than they, perhaps? I doubt you'd agree with that.
This thread seems needlessly heated. How is it a moral judgement to say that some folks don't put in the effort to control calorie input? Losing weight sucks. It's worse the bigger you are. But they're not gaining weight by magic. They're consuming more calories than they burn. It is as simple as that (yes, yes, yes -- gut flora, metabolism disruption, vernal equinox, micro-plastics, etc. etc. There are plenty of variables that change the efficiency of the mechanism, but none that override the core mechanism.)
fwiw, Ozympic sounds great to me if people want to take it. Also great if they don't.
> How is it a moral judgement to say that some folks don't put in the effort to control calorie input?
The implication that anyone reading it walks away with is "... and it is because they don't care enough to try and/or are lazy." If that wasn't your intent, cool, but that is most often the implication.
My only point is that most folks who "don't put in the effort" have put in the effort, and have failed. Multiple times, over and over again.
Sure, some lazy folks exist. It is a tiny minority of those who are obese, though, most of whom have given up because they had tried and failed countless times, or have simply accepted that there is no hope for them (cue tears and depression).
I have been obese for more than a decade, during which I have made many failed attempts of losing weight.
Because of the many failures, I was pretty convinced that what you say is true and no matter what I do I cannot lose weight.
Nevertheless, eventually I have made one more attempt, which was successful, so after about ten months I have reached a weight of only 2/3 of the weight that I had previously.
Then, after learning thus how to control my weight, I have kept it constant for more than a decade, until today. Losing weight was a rather unpleasant experience, especially in the beginning, but then the improvements in my quality of life have been so noticeable that the effort has certainly been worthwhile.
Looking back at time when I was obese, I regret a lot that I did not lose weight earlier and I consider that my failed attempts of losing weight had been quite stupid, because I should have realized that I am not doing all that is necessary for success.
The final attempt that was successful started with a way to measure accurately my changes in weight from a day to another, to determine the effect of the changes in diet, and it required a complete change both in what I was eating and in how I was eating.
Now it is very obvious for me why all my early attempts were not successful, because they were doomed from the start, since I was not doing them in the right way. However at that time, I was not aware of this and I did not think enough about the manner in which I should handle this problem.
After my own experience, I find it very hard to believe in the theories that for many or most obese people there are objective reasons for them to be obese instead of the fact that they have just never been taught what to eat and how to eat in order to preserve their health (in a detailed, practical way, not with generalities like "do not eat too much").
Both my grandfather and my father had been obese and they both had diabetes in old age, so I certainly did not have any help from genetic inheritance. It is enough for me to eat during a single day like I was eating when I was obese, to gain enough weight that I would need at least a week to lose it again.
The only thing with which I agree is that for poor people who are obese it is extremely difficult to lose weight, because all their time is occupied with ensuring their subsistence, so it is hard for them to reserve time for things like cooking at home, learning about how to compose a healthy diet, doing some physical exercises and so on.
That is fantastic that that was true for you. I, too, have tried many times to lose weight, and I hadn’t given up. The closest I got was losing 55 lbs, which worked great, until I dislocated my shoulder and had to have surgery, which meant I couldn’t work out for a long time.
For many people, it is simply a lot easier to lose and maintain weight, even if it doesn’t feel that way at the time. If we were to perform the same actions, in the same way, my body may simply have a predilection to maintaining a higher weight. (This is a real phenomenon, bodies have “set weights,” this is how stalls happen, etc.)
Is it impossible? No, of course not. But is it much much harder for some than others? Absolutely.
Yes, if anyone eats fewer calories than they expend they will lose weight. That is how thermodynamics works.
But the level of difficulty with which that can happen varies greatly.
One of the main changes in my habits that was absolutely necessary in order to lose weight, then maintain it at the desired level, was that previously I was eating whenever I felt the need and until I felt completely satiated, while since then I make every day a plan with when to eat, what to eat and how much to eat and then I stick to the plan, I never eat anything more than previously planned and outside the planned meals I do not eat or drink anything else, e.g. snacks or juices, except for drinking water.
Obviously during all the time when I was losing weight and even some time after that I was feeling hungry all the time, so I had to make some efforts to not eat beyond what I had planned. Nevertheless, if you work or do anything else that occupies your attention, the feeling of hunger disappears for some time, even if it reappears after some hours.
So having to cope with hunger is unavoidable for this goal. However, eventually my body became accustomed with a much lower food intake and the hunger disappeared. Now, when I eat food that I cook myself, I may not eat again for an entire day without becoming hungry. I have experimented and I have eaten again some industrially-produced food, like I was eating in the past, and with that I have become hungry just a couple of hours after eating it, exactly like before losing weight, so I believe that switching to self cooking is also a necessary condition for avoiding hunger when eating little.
I don’t disagree with that. When I did keto for about 10 months, I was very similar. The challenge with this was, of course, maintaining it - I’m an extrovert, and being social often meant being around people at dinner, drinking, etc. Even if I abstained (which I did), you still felt a bit “out of place.”
As for hunger - you’re right. I was able to curb hunger simply by eating better. But I was never able to curb the “food noise” that was constantly in my head in a sustainable way.
Moreover, my body does really attempt to retain weight. Unless I’m absolutely perfect, I will gain weight fast and take it off extremely slowly. That is now how everybody’s body works. Many people struggle to put on weight. That is not the case for me.
I do not disagree that lifestyle changes matter, and that Ozempic is not sustainable without them.
> It is the rare person who has been obese for most or all of their lives and prefers it that way or has never thought about or done anything to try and fix it. That is not how people show up at doctor's offices to ask about Ozempic. They show up in tears, at the end of their rope, or having completely given up.
If this was the case, there would have been no drug shortage. Instead, everyone is showing up asking for it because it's the easiest way out. No diet, no effort, nothing. Just take the pill or do the shot, boom. I wonder if you are being serious or just so much deluded. There is no drugging out of thermodynamics.
Ignoring the many, many logical issues with your post for a moment: so what? Who cares if it no longer requires effort to be skinny? Why should it require effort to be skinny? And why do you care either way?
I'd never encountered anyone like that in real life, but they show up over and over again on any discussion of these drugs. It's very strange to me.