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Oh, she's taking it willingly. I didn't even suggest it or bring it up - she did that herself. I'm being just a little bitter when I call it a magical potion - I fully expect it to work.
It's just... one of those things that makes me grind my teeth a little. You'd rather pay 500 dollars a month for a weight-loss drug when you could just... organize your life better?
(To be clear, I don't know exactly how much she spent on her prescription - I'm going off by what a friend of mine pays for his prescription.)
Paying 500 dollars a month for a drug that stops you from feeling intense shame and also improves your health, energy, longevity etc. is supposed to not qualify under "organizing your life better"?
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Imagine someone saying to a homeless person “you’d rather wait for the city to give you a tiny home in three years when you could just… organize your life better?” We fatties didn’t choose phantom hunger and akrasic mindsets. Obesity is as NP-hard a problem as chronic homelessness, and we probably share some neural miswiring with those unfortunate folks.
CICO works, indisputably, for anyone who can control their arms and legs against the will to consume.
I grew up obese, by the medical definition of the term. Lost over seventy pounds via CICO, and kept it off. So spare me the 'Oh, you've never been fat, you just don't know.'
I have been fat. Double-chin, no jaw-line, pear-shape. By all rights, I still am obese by strict BMI measurements, and believe you me, I'm constantly going over what would be needed to loose weight even further.
Please understand the PoV I'm coming from, because I've been there. When I say 'organize your life better', it's because I did exactly that, and I have difficulty putting myself in some sort of special, super-human category that can somehow overcome your phantom hunger, akrasic mindsets, and neural miswirings.
Sure, so maybe there's multiple reasons for why people get fat and your having been fat doesn't necessarily give you insight into the difficulties of every fat person?
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Very well put. If it was as simple as "just stop eating, bro" then there would be almost nobody who is fat. Fat people aren't stupid - they know damn well that not eating will fix their problem, it's just really hard to accomplish that by sheer willpower. We know (because Grant_us_eyes told us) that his mom has tried many other things and run up against the limits of her willpower. So the choice here is "try this medicine as a tool to help" or "keep on going as things are", not between "try this medicine" and "lose weight without medicine". It's silly to complain that she's making use of a tool to help her in an area she struggles with.
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It does seem to me a lot of people suffer quite a bit from hunger. Personally, for some odd reason it takes about 4-6x longer for me to actually be hungry than is the case for a normal person.
Also, there's considerable evidence that junk food messes with satiety and makes people permanently hungrier. Ozempic, maybe fasting/diet change resets this.
I suffer from cravings. I can start wanting food, and despite a running monologue in my car about how not hungry and already full I objectively feel, I find myself ordering food in a drive-through or finding food at my destination.
It’s phantom hunger, as pervasive and obsessive as the phantom pains of fibromyalgia sufferers or the painful sensations of a phantom limb.
Currently the science says this can be treated with GLP-1. I dutifully took Ritalin in my youth for ADHD on shakier science saying it would medicate away my distractibility, so I have absolutely no qualms about medicating away my phantom hunger. Except the cost.
A few people have had luck with switching to a meat heavy low carb diet, fwiw. https://youtube.com/watch?v=mHr51XqJtwE
this woman had a serious weight problem (up to 360 lbs), started doing carnivore diet and over 1.5 years dropped to ~220 with that an exercise.
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My husband is having success with Ozempic, after many years of being varying levels of obese. For our first several years together, he was convinced that all diets were either "woo" (ineffective) or "starve yourself" (intolerable). Eventually he decided to try keeping track of his caloric intake and realized that he could lose weight if he kept his daily average to 3000 and exercised vigorously every day, though having a demanding desk job tended to interfere with the latter goal. Cutting the daily intake down below 2500 calories was apparently not feasible until Ozempic chemically altered his appetite.
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