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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   29470 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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"Which is more important in an internal combustion engine? Oxygen or the flammable substance?"

It's diet and exercise. You have to have both. Together.

These pills won't make people healthier. They will make people feel better about themselves. They aren't weight loss drugs, they're NextGen antidepressants. Metabolic syndrome often does not present as visible obesity. Major stomach and liver issues can go undetected for years. People will start taking these drugs and remain at a lower body weight. Then, one day, they die suddenly and any autopsy performed with reveal superfluous amounts of visceral fat, a leaking stomach, and a liver close to non-function.

Physical fitness is, among many other things, an information feedback loop. If you are in bad shape, you have been making poor health decisions. Sometimes, this can be unavoidable (late nights during crunch time at work or school, what have you). But, mostly, it's a clear indication that you're making poor, poor choices. Using something that covers up the effects of these choices does nothing to alter that decision process. I'd wager that habitual users of Wegovy etc. probably will also habitually (ab)use other substances - alcohol, narcotics, sugar, social media. This is not a road to health.

Nobody is claiming that the pills make people healthier directly.

If you are in bad shape, you have been making poor health decisions.

You are of course, correct. That's the genius of semaglutide - it's a pill that doesn't improve your health, it's a pill that improves your decisions, that leads to measurable changes in behavior that lead in turn to better health.

Then, one day, they die suddenly and any autopsy performed with reveal superfluous amounts of visceral fat, a leaking stomach, and a liver close to non-function.

On what you base this prediction?

Not OP, but I won't be surprised if these new weight loss drugs are trumpeted for a couple of years, then we find complications of some sort with them (skinny-but-unhealthy sounds plausible) and have to memory hole them like the last half dozen wonder solutions we've been sold: Fen-phen and Ephedra both seemed promising in their times but had high incidences of adverse effects showing up later.

It's diet and exercise. You have to have both. Together.

You really don't, at least for weight loss. You can lose weight from diet alone by simply eating X fewer calories. You can't really lose weight from exercise alone unless you're exercising at pro athlete/olympian levels, exercise just doesn't really burn all that many calories.

exercise just doesn't really burn all that many calories.

It does burn calories, sometimes lots of calories. The problem is that your hunger levels increase to compensate for the calories you burn.

I know people constantly insist on this, but running 50 miles per week is actually a lot of calories and isn't even half of what pros are doing. When I ramp up from my typical 40 mile/week schedule to 70+ miles per week during marathon training cycles, I will either lose weight or make a deliberate choice to eat more simple carbs and keep weight. This is even easier in cycling, where long rides are easier to pull off consistently than long runs. Unsurprisingly, the extra ~600-1000 calories per day from exercise makes it much easier to maintain homeostatic calorie intake than what sedentary people would eat; I know this because maintaining my weight required much more conscious choices before I picked up endurance sports.

Exercise presumably helps make diets sustainable. If you want to cut a deficit of say 500 calories per day then cutting out a snack and exercise is one way to tackle it.

I'd wager that habitual users of Wegovy etc. probably will also habitually (ab)use other substances - alcohol, narcotics, sugar, social media. This is not a road to health.

Ozempic reduces alcohol cravings as well, so at least that will also be less of an issue:

https://neurosciencenews.com/ozempic-alcohol-addiction-23422/

Don't take any of those class of drugs. They really fuck with your head.

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