Written like someone who's never lost weight in their life. You don't lose weight by working out, unless you're at like 4+ hours per day. It only takes a couple minutes to eat more calories than a typical workout session burns.
What matters is convincing your entire body that you're not in danger of starvation. That it's not a dire emergency that you're expending more calories than you're consuming. That that millions of years of evolved emergency systems no longer are leading you in the direction you desire. And keeping your focus on that for every minute of the 6+ hours per day where your body is screaming that you need more food.
GLP-1 agonists very slightly help with that. Ok, they probably help more than slightly if the dosage is tuned carefully, but you do need to worry more about side effects at higher doses as well. Medication is no panacea, but the fact is that we evolved in a very different environment than the one in which we now live. Many people benefit from some help bringing our body's impulses into sync with our new environment.
If you'd really lost a significant amount of weight before, you'd know that exercise does not lead to weight loss. You wouldn't suggest it as a solution to anything.
Exercise is an important adjunct to weight loss. Just for the purposes of feeling good, you need your body's emergency response to the loss of caloric reserves to not include cutting muscle to lower your basal metabolic rate. The only way to do that is consistent exercise. It is critical to healthy loss of significant amounts of weight. But it isn't the cause.
So if you wanted to show off how superior you are to everyone with lives that require them to spend time on stuff other than losing weight, if you knew what you were talking about you'd say something like "imagine taking drugs instead of eating less." In addition to being cruel and mocking, your comment indicated a clear lack of understanding how the body even works.
I used to bike 30 miles a day and never lost weight. Cardio is good for pretty much one thing: building cardio.
To lose weight, you have to eat less. GLP-1 receptor agonists make your brain think that enough food is actually enough food, rather than "panic, I'm going to die if I don't eat more".
Some people take drugs and don't work out. Some people work out and don't take drugs. Some people take drugs TO work out. Some people work out THEN take drugs. Some people work out to AVOID taking drugs.
Who cares, everything's a drug anyways.
If there was a wetware interface to your brain that you could deploy code into and you wrote a patch for your own obesity, given that we're on HN in the first place, you'd likely think it was cool.
Deploying the instructions via organic chemistry? Lame! Dismiss it!
The whole thing just reminds me of Mr. Mandelbaum on Seinfeld having "worked out with Charles Atlas in the 50's" -- times change!
I take it you are talking about anabolic steroids.
Most people don't understand that a person will not simply gain huge amounts of muscle by taking them. It does allow more lean mass gain, but only if muscle are being stimulated to grow and extra calories are being consumed.
I'm talking about having the self-discipline to work out, which is the same self-discipline required for fasting. If you manage to work out, you can manage to not eat. All I hear is a bunch of excuses and trying to create lab drugs to work around this fundamental weakness of character. It won't work, because the same weakness will simply destroy you through some other thing you won't control for better outcomes.
