I feel like I go through cycles of:

Day 1: no change

Day 2: can go whole day without eating, a bit nauseous

Day 3-5: feeling bloated, food doesn’t digest fast, not eating much, biggest weight loss

Day 6-7: Slowly getting back to eating reasonable portions

Ironically- not eating- is what solved this issue for me. I imagine it is what people on GLP-1 feel like all the time.

I spent a long time food fixated, frequently nagged by hunger, until I started practicing going without. Now I can go 2-3 days without eating and have to force myself to eat something.

I encourage most people to try going 2-3 days without food and seeing how it changes their relationship to it.

Those drugs let people experience intermittent fasting and fasting by reducing hunger and snacking.

The danger of suppressing hunger signals is that hunger could've been a important que for nutritional needs.

Muscle loss is severe danger of gpl-1, And muscle size is tied to longevity.

So although promising it's not without danger. And there are other paradigms but those are not yet explored yet the underlying mechanisms work the same.

Edit: Let's keep HN a place where discussion can be held without just kneejerk down voting.

Edit2: great discussion thanks all.

This is an age old problem in the obesity treatment and research community. It never seems to go away. It's come up with bariatric surgery, with other methods, and now GPL1- agonists.

The issue for me is that "telling people to eat less" is sort of a strawman in some ways. It doesn't work.

What does work, however, at least according to evidence I've seen, is giving people strategies for losing weight, therapy, support, and so forth. It doesn't work for everyone but it does for some.

I would rather people try that first as it can be self-sustaining and doesn't require medication.

I'm not opposed to the medication or people using it, in fact I think it's a good thing, but it seems a little dangerous to me to create a culture where people are just told "take this pill, pay lots of money for it, because nothing else will work" which is not actually true. I don't think we're at that point but it's easy for me to imagine.

Almost certainly at the weight loss dosages people are taking now, but semaglutide (at least) can be tuned up and down for effect. Time will tell what kind of dosage is required for these non-weight-loss benefits.

That said, I think it's more important to focus on how this drug works -- it works in the brain and in specific areas of the brain that we now know are important for weight loss/addiction/inflammation(?) (because of these emergent miracle drug effect). It doesn't seem outside the realm of possibility that drug companies will be able to target these systems with more finesse in the future as opposed to superdosing engineered stable GLP-1 molecules that flood the system.

It is the future understanding of what this drug does that is the real promise for all people -- we are just in the early stages of understanding what we've found.

But that puts us back in the "telling people to exercise doesn't cause them to actually do it" at the public health level. For you yourself, you can simply live a less risky, healthier life. For all yous, probably we need something like a once-weekly pill or injection that doesn't require drastic habit changes. For all of society on a forever timescale, of course, we can ignore the fact that adults won't change their ways and focus on instilling lifelong athlete habits in kids. Doesn't seem to be the direction we're going in, though.