I'm not sure why this is being framed as an Ozempic story, when if anything it seems like it's more of a cautionary tale on not taking on $1.5 billion dollars of debt to buy back shares near all-time highs and crippling your company for over a decade before ultimately forcing it to file for bk.
Its stock tumbled ever since those highs and likely wouldn't have ever recovered had Oprah not bought and pumped it. To this day they still carry over a billion dollars in debt.
In fairness to the WW board of the last couple of years, they did make a of reasonable pivot to try to rectify the ship (like buying a telehealth service which prescribed Ozempic), but ultimately it seems like this buyback from 13 years ago created a burden that just made them unable to weather the storm gracefully.
Management are rich so they obviously are financial and business geniuses, so it can't have been mismanagement - they must be some external factor to blame.
Ozempic seems like a pretty good fall guy for this one.
Don't forget the companies where Private Equity swoops in and takes all their money.
We seem to be squarely in the "loot all the well known brands, take whatever is not nailed down, and leave their carcasses by the side of the road" stage of Capitalism.
> I'm not sure why this is being framed as an Ozempic story
I am. Because just like how I've always got someone else to blame for why I never cleaned my room, executives can always find someone else to blame for why the business they are running went to shit.
And the press loves to run with a good just-so story that paints some indefatigable foreign villain as the cause of a company's demise, instead of boring, banal mismanagement.
It's like a tax free dividend. Dividends are taxable but if a company uses the cash they would have spent on a dividend on a buy back there's no taxable event for the investors. Those investors who want the cash can sell and pay the tax and the rest enjoy the higher share price
If you have more money than you're able to make good use of improving the company (r&d, acquisitions, new locations, whatever), you can give it back to investors. Which can be either a dividend or a buyback, and in theory (ie, ignoring pesky details like taxes) those are supposed to be equivalent.
Stock buybacks are substantially equivalent to dividends. You issue a dividend when you have nothing to invest in that will develop shareholder value. Buybacks work the same way. You have a stock of capital, or a great borrowing opportunity, and nothing to do with it.
Most companies always have another idea to do a new thing, that might induce growth. WW did not. WW has been in trouble for decades, because their business model pre-supposes consumers are too stupid to use a search engine. (Does "weight watchers" work? No. No it doesn't.)
The debt-for-buyback swap is a symptom, not a cause. Management had nowhere to go, no vision for growth, and when you are out of ideas and you are offered an attractive loan, you do a buyback.
The easy way to see it is if all shareholders reinvest dividends, it's the same as a share buyback, only with the broker buying shares on your behalf rather than the company, and your ownership of the company includes a bonus fractional share.
Dividends are also a bit of an accounting game. You can pay yourself a "dividend" whenever you want buy selling shares. This is only 95% true, but if your share in a company just entitled you to 65 cents, the share is probably worth about 65 cents less since the money came from somewhere.
Because revenue took a very sharp decline when ozempic was approved.... which caused it to not be able to service debt. The company is worth zero. It was worth zero the minute the GLP-1s became viable. Whether it was financed with debt or equity matters not.
I lost 50 lbs or so on Mounjaro by the time I reached the maximum dosage. Then, a confluence of supply-chain issues and coverage issues eliminated ALL of it, and within a few short months I had regained all the weight. I finally got coverage again, and supply again (via Zepbound) and began slowly increasing my dosage again.
I'm now at the maximum dose and I've lost exactly 0 pounds from the peak.
So, a warning: Use of this drug seems to be a one-and-done. If you can't keep the weight down after you bottom out and after they take you off the drug, it MAY NOT work again.
The new program does, but hell man, a toddler who doesn't sleep through the night (ever... No family help, either) and who demands 100% attention when he's not at daycare is a massive, massive hit to your free time/motivation/energy/stress. He's wonderful but I'm absolutely fucking miserable right now.
Of all the information I've seen about Semaglutides the only people I've seen it keep the weight off are:
1. High end personal trainers clients, for which semaglutide was used in conjunction with the trainer's workout regiment and diet.
2. Body builders and models, for which semaglutides simply replaced caffine/adderall/ephedrine.
The drugs can't induce the lifestyle change needed to keep the weight off (nor will it give you the motivation to go to the gym and build muscle). I'm thinking for now, it's a race to see how cheap these drugs can get and ensuring they have no side effects from very long term use. Overall I think the drugs are a net good and I'm interested for seeing the effects for myself, but I'm in good shape and $500/mo is still steep.
Have to say I basically take the opposite on everything you say here. I know quite a few people who aren't super active (myself included) who took it and went off and kept the weight off.
And they actually do induce lifestyle changes, which is the fascinating part. Not for everyone, but the impulse control changes are dramatic. I had a friend credit him going to therapy for the first time in his life and reading for the first time since high school to it which was crazy, but makes sense because it also helped him quit smoking weed so he had a lot more time.
This is definitely true. I was on some for a little bit and it absolutely killed my taste for beer. Luckily I'm not dependent on alcohol so that wasn't a problem. But now that you mention it I wonder how effective it would be at helping an alcoholic wean themself off it.
That said, I didn't have as much problem with spirits and cocktails since they don't have as much volume and generally aren't as filling. There might be a danger of turning a beer drinker into a hard liquor drinker.
I took Semaglutide for 6 months. Before Semaglutide I'd want to have a beer just about every day, but I'd only drink a few times a week. Once I started Semaglutide I completely lost the desire to drink alcohol.
The same was true for food. I thought about food all the time. But once Semaglutide started I just didn't think of food. I had to remember to eat.
Semaglutide in my experience really helps to eliminate addictive behavior in general, I believe. At least oral addictions (I'm not sure if it would help with e.g. gambling addiction).
I never understood why skinny people believed that fat people have no impulse control until I took the medication. Once I had that impulse control it was so much easier to make long-term decisions.
Your body has other mechanisms to make you remember you need 1, like for water intake or breathing. Those mechanisms starts as soon as anyone birth and doesn’t need your intervention to become a need. 2, 3 and 4 however become needs as you decide (consciously or not) it is. Same with heroin, social media or basically any other think we call "addiction".
Food obviously is a bit confusing as our omnivorous and resilient condition let us satisfy it in many ways : you don’t really need green vegetables, meat, sugar, beans, fish, nuts, muschroom, roots etc… to survive but stopping them all together will kill you. Some subset (of quality/quantity) keeps you in a better condition than others.
Appart that condition effects, the way you that specific subset as a need has more to do with habits.
If the general principle were "things to enjoy life", you'd probably want to look at examples like
1. Finding love
2. Raising children
3. Helping others
4. Strengthening your body
5. Learning about the world
6. Participating in sports
7. Music (playing and listening)
8. Art (creating and appreciating)
Does it make people less inclined to seek those things or mute their enjoyment? Things like recreational drugs (alcohol, marijuana, and tobacco included), gambling, and (excess or poor) food sound to me like "self-destructive behaviors" for many people, which generally are things that make life less enjoyable, and the people participating in them know that (but nonetheless struggle to stop).
On the one hand, i'm really happy for my friends and loved ones who have always struggled with weight find a solution that works for them.
On the other hand, i went through a non-drug assisted weight loss journey and improved countless things about my lifestyle besides just the number on the scale.
I worry this solution being available will just increase the number of sedentary people (which is also really bad for your health) and create a whole new set of people dependent on the pharma industry to be able to live their lives how they want
I'm on Zepbound (more effective than Ozempic for pure weight loss), and I'm the most active that I've been in 15+ years. Losing the weight gave me so much more energy, and made is significantly easier to work out properly. I lift weights three times a week and go on walks that are twice as long as when I started. There are also a ton of positive mental side effects. It's hard to describe the kind of hope I have after trying and failing for so long to keep my weight in check. Everything is just easier, which is not something I anticipated when I started.
I've never had any problems with my weight until the last year or so; guess I'm getting old? Currently ~106kg at about 2m, which puts my BMI just in the "overweight" category (imperfect measure, but still). Basically, I have what you'd call a "beer belly", which is very new for me. I don't like it.
Reading between the lines, I have the impression that you were fairly strongly overweight ("obese") and struggled with more serous weight issues throughout your life?
I share the concern of the previous poster not so much for people like you, where "lose weight to a manageable level ASAP" is generally a good thing, but for people like me who are "a bit fatter than they'd like" but not necessarily "obese". If you'd meet me, you wouldn't necessarily call me "fat".
Previously I would just eat whatever (not super unhealthy, but also not really healthy) and not really exercise beyond my stubborn insistence on walking or cycling everywhere.
I don't see weight loss rugs as a net positive for me. I made some positive changes to fix this, and if I were to take Ozempic I'd just revert back to my lazy git self, and not get all the benefits that a better diet and exercise give me.
People really want these things - exercise, weight - to be important moral objectives for others, when they're not that important in the grand scheme of things. Now you'll just have to find another easy visual marker for ranking people by moral superiority.
You think exercise is "not that important in the grand scheme of things"? I urge you to do a bit of research on the topic, if you care about living a long and healthy life.
Obesity is literally the major cause of ill health. Cancer, dementia, heart disease, diabetes, and strokes are all extremely unpleasant and are all credibly linked to excess weight.
The food industry is a lot like the tobacco industry. Everyone is aware of marketing around health and fitness. But the marketing and social programming that keeps people eating - ad campaigns, portion sizes, food consumption traditions that are billed as "family" events, even things like giant popcorn buckets in cinemas, or the idea that sweet things are "naughty" but also rewarding - gets a pass because it flies under the radar.
It's literally a double bind. Everyone gets two contradictory messages about food, starting from early childhood. And they cannot be reconciled.
So no. It is not about personal morality or shaming people for the sake of it.
Medically, economically, and personally, it really is that important.
Realistically speaking it correlates extremely well with self control. Not perfect and I'm not talking about a few extra pounds. But morbid obesity? Yeah pretty much always ..
>People really want these things - exercise, weight - to be important moral objectives for others
because they are. The visual changes are superficial. Exercise is important because it holistically moves people to a healthier and active lifestyle. It literally changes your mental state.
Ozempic is to weight loss what pain killers are to pain or sleeping pills are to insomnia, something that numbs a symptom (hunger in this case), without any impact on the underlying behavioral reasons that led towards the kind of lifestyle that promoted obesity.
It’s not about what’s easy. This is what the OP is talking about. Anyone who is in shape over a certain age pretty much has to wake up and choose the hard thing most days. Whether it’s bunions, old (or recent) injuries, GI problems, arthritis, inflammation—movement is good for all of these things. I know this from personal experience. If I stop moving for a few weeks it is very painful to get back into the groove. I’m currently dealing with some kind of lower GI problem that is affecting my energy and causing a lot of discomfort. I have foot problems, a messed up rotator cuff, etc.
But if you just keep showing up and putting in the effort (and most of all, not comparing yourself to anyone else, even your past self), the results will come.
Here’s a fun thought exercise - replace Ozempic/weight loss with any number of drug/mental health condition pairs.
I also hope there’s no long term worse side effects, but I agree with pjc50 in that most of the negative reaction is actually about feeling morally superior.
I agree, it's moralizing. The dependence on pharma is a real concern, particularly in a country (US obv) where they've got us all by the balls, but it's no less/more a problem here than for any other ailment requiring maintenance meds. We're still learning how the American diet and other environmental factors can literally change peoples' metabolism and it makes complete sense to me to treat the symptoms if we have the means to do so.
I'd very much rather have the chance at being more active by losing weight via GLP-1 class drugs than really having to fight two uphill battles at once. I think we're overall going to be seeing more positives than negatives coming out of this.
How much did you lose? What is your current food noise?
I really like Mark Lewis's take on YouTube - he's someone who is very fit in general but an injury threw him off and before he knew it, he had gained double digit kilos. This is someone who is motivated but also deals with high food noise.
I deal with low food noise. I am relatively active. I got up to <overweight> pounds slowly and over 8 months was able to lose 40. Even so, I had just one bad month at work and gained 7 pounds without significantly dropping my activity. Just a few meals out and not tracking my calories and I fell off of maintenance quickly. If I resistance train my ability to keep control of my calories falls off quickly because I just get too hungry.
I'd love just a maintenance level just because distraction-level hunger sucks.
>Just a few meals out and not tracking my calories and I fell off of maintenance quickly.
This is the big thing: it's amazing how little you can fall out of line and gain weight. A couple hundred calories a day and you're adding weight, every week. It really does take discipline.
I started on Zepbound March 1. The food noise is gone. I'm no longer distracted by intrusive thoughts around food/hunger, which after a lifetime of enduring such, is wonderful.
The strongest behavioral effect is that I no longer snack at all, a lifetime habit pre-March. That's resulted in ongoing weight reduction, ~9kg so far.
That, in turn, has encouraged me to increase my activity levels a lot. Offered as an anecdatum in which this drug is driving me away from the sedentary tarpit, rather than towards it. YMMV, of course.
You don't have to be "of two minds" about it, you can just let people do whatever they want. If you want to feel superior for losing weight without drugs, you can do too.
Most programs that rely on GLP-1 meds also stress that lifestyle changes are needed to not only really lose weight, but also to keep that weight change once you stop taking the medication (or go to a maintenance dosage).
I'm taking the meds right now - what the medication allows me to understand is that without changing your sleep, exercise and diet, I simply won't be very successful even while on the meds.
There's a clear parallel between that observation and AI. Instead of taking shortcuts to bypass activity that will improve our bodies, it will be the same thing but with our minds.
Yes, this is exactly why the pharma industry unironically refers to GLP-1 as a "miracle drug." The miracle is that it's expensive, it works, and people don't need to change their behavior. And as soon as you stop taking it, it stops working. It's perfect (for capitalism).
I call bs... the utterly terrible customer experience is what lost them their customers. And constant changing of plans which became less and less effective... all of their 10$ a month customers don't suddenly have the budget to spend 1000$ a month on ozempic.
> ... the past two years have been a fun experiment in semi-free-market medicine. I don’t mean the patent violations - it’s no surprise that you can sell drugs cheap if you violate the patent - I mean everything else. For the past three years, ~2 million people have taken complex peptides provided direct-to-consumer by a less-regulated supply chain, with barely a fig leaf of medical oversight, and it went great. There were no more side effects than any other medication. People who wanted to lose weight lost weight. And patients had a more convenient time than if they’d had to wait for the official supply chain to meet demand, get a real doctor, spend thousands of dollars on doctors’ visits, apply for insurance coverage, and go to a pharmacy every few weeks to pick up their next prescription.
What's wild to me is the amount of effort and resources that have gone into weight loss around exercise and diet only for us to discover it is a hormone and brain chemistry issue around the gut and reward centers (GLP-1s). Shades of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02Or-Hx3yqc
It's the other way round: people love being judgemental about the diet and exercise habits of others, since it used to be a difficult-to-fake social signal, and apparent weight and fitness is an easy metric for that.
See also: white people being judgemental about people with darker coloured skins, to the extent that they may sometimes invest in skin lightening, meanwhile white people are investing in artificially darkening their skin with tans (because it's a symbol of conspicuous consumption, the ability to go to sunny places).
After a lifetime of being told it was a personal failing and expect a pill to fix our problems it turns out that what was we needed after all.
I had uncontrollable weight gain, a comorbidity of ME/CFS. GLP-1 agonists has helped a lot with both. I eat a strict diet and exercise as often as I can, which is less often than I’d like due to PEM. I think it’s likely that much of uncontrollable weight gain is due to autoimmune issues and GLP-1As do seem to help with that.
I started GLP-1As as soon as mainstream adoption started and so I could get safety data to help figure out dosing. I had already benefited from extended water fasts but it was rather challenging to keep doing that.
I'd be worried about declaring victory too soon. I hope we don't discover any serious long term side effects but it does seem like it's rare to get a free lunch when trying to change our bodies
GLP-1s have been around for decades. As far as medications go, that’s plenty long for “long-term” side effects to show up. Not saying it’s not possible, but it’s also not likely at this point.
I never saw so much hand-wringing and pearl clutching when we started injecting botulism toxin into our faces to make them smoother.
Why are we so dead set on making sure overweight people struggle to put off the weight? Why can't it be easy for them?
I don't mock alcoholics for not being able to control themselves around alcohol. But we are determined to mock overweight people. Despite alcoholics having an easier time dealing with their vice.
Think about it, every other vice is controllable by simply avoiding the thing. Except for food. We must eat. It is a requirement. Having an issue with food is something you must deal with. You have to deal with the underlying issue. It requires true discipline. And it requires you to maintain that discipline 24/7. We don't ask that of any other vice.
Mostly it’s an issue of abundance in calories. Historically most people have worked such physical jobs in environments with limited food supply. In that environment it’s way harder to get obese, regardless of genetics or gut biome.
This is the same logic a lot of vegans use. Food is unlimited nowadays, so it doesn't make sense to indulge in the most resource intensive foods(meats) because it isn't feast or famine anymore.
Nothing we do nowadays is "natural" or "the way our ancestors did it" so its weird how folks cling onto "caveman diet" like it's some amazing thing. It's just excess consumption and a status symbol.
Prehistorically we straight up starved a lot of the time. Being able to get fat when in a time of abundance was an evolutionary advantage, we'd need that for the lean times. The fact that we are never in lean times is the problem, we're simply doing what our body was built to do.
It is a bit more complicated though. Plenty of people have lost weight sustainably with diet and exercising. It just doesn't seem to work with everyone.
Diet and exercise methods don't[1] work for most people, for loss and especially for healthy weight maintenance.
With extreme levels of direct, personal involvement by multiple professionals (which is what rich people / celebrities have historically used, and variations of which have been studied by researchers) the efficacy level reaches "sort-of OK, but still not great". That's crazy-expensive, though, so not a realistic solution for the masses, plus the results are still pretty lackluster despite the cost.
[1] Could, hypothetically, yes "CICO", technically anyone could lose weight, but they in fact do not work when applied in the real world, statistically speaking.
True, but some people might have favorable gut flora others do not (there was evidence of this with fecal transplants, with recipients acquiring the metabolic profile of the donor). The meta issue is that the human body and its interaction with gut flora and other systems are still somewhat unknown, and we are still simple monkeys using hammers on inputs of the body.
Why do we need GLP-1s? Is it because of Western diet? Misfiring reward centers (GLP-1s also appear to quell addictive behavior around alcohol and hard drugs)? Broad antibiotic usage along with more sterile living environments causing misbalanced gut flora (not producing sufficient quantities of natural GLP-1)? The most exciting phrase in science is not "Eureka!" but "That’s funny...".
I thought the long term solution was gene therapy for GLP-1 consumers, but now believe it's going to be probiotics that encourage gut flora that excretes sufficient quantities of GLP-1 for the desired metabolic outcome (based on most recent evidence and findings). If feasible, this is exciting because it is much harder to gate this therapy via the medical industrial complex (primarily insurance, pharma, PBMs, etc).
Without a very precise definition of "work", these discussions quickly degrade to near uselessness.
There is a very large difference between "telling patients to exercise more and eat less doesn't result in long term weight loss" and "exercising more and eating less doesn't result in long term weight loss"
The former is true, and the latter is not.
I agree that from a clinical perspective the former definition is more relevant than the latter.
The way Ozempic works is basically by controlling desire so you eat less - it's the eating less (less calories consumed) that makes you lose weight. As you lose weight you will also be able to exercise more easily, which again will help to lose weight (more calories burnt).
At the end of the day it is just about diet and exercise - not eating more calories per day than you are burning via exercise.
> Plenty of people have lost weight sustainably with diet and exercising. It just doesn't seem to work with everyone.
The problem is, staying healthy is a matter of privilege.
You need to be able to afford to eat healthy (ultra-processed industrial food that's loaded with sugar is often much cheaper than quality produce), even if you have money, a decent chunk of Americans live in areas that are classified as "food deserts" [1], even if you are not in a food desert you still need to be able and have time to get to a store selling quality food, and you need someone with time available to cook healthy meals out of that. It used to be easier back in the time where one income was enough to feed a whole family and the women stayed as housewifes to actually do that, but these times are (thankfully) long gone.
Exercising suffers from similar "problems of privilege". Either you got the money and time to spare to go to a gym, or you got the money and space in your home to install your own gym... or you need actually safe roads where you can walk, jog or bike, and most of the US is so utterly car-dependent that it is outright unsafe to walk.
And on top of that you got the whole "living while Black" issue, with egregious instances like a pregnant Black woman arrested for walking her dog [2] - it's no surprise that the Black and Indigenous population has noticeably higher rates of diabetes [3] or oral health issues [4].
And on top of that, you got the whole issue with educating children about healthy foods, their parents being too poor to afford healthy foods, and that setting up these children for childhood obesity which perpetuates into adulthood. A lot of that is closely correlated with ethnicity and wealth as well.
It's a systemic issue, an insanely complex one at that, with no easy solution to be found - and certainly not a failure of any individual to stay healthy.
I think I get what you're saying, but surely the same could be said about all self-control issues. Exercise and diet is "all" it takes to lose weight, but the question is whether you have the self-control to do that yourself.
Self control and will power are loaded terms for chemical and electrical operations of the brain; executive function is an improvement. Regardless, it isn't magic or special, just wetware ops. Bugs in the human hardware or software? We patch the human, if we can and if they wish.
Man, my diet suppressing hormones must be in the same place as my runner's high because when I get home from a long run the thing I want to do most is have a snack.
Yeah I cut down to one meal a day and after a year I just CANNOT eat as much as I used to. The result is permanent as far as I can tell. Or at least it will take me a year of going back to old habits to make my stomach big enough again
If it were just a "hormone and brain chemistry issue" there wouldn't be huge differences across populations that can't be attributed to only genetic factors.
> Rates of overweight and obesity increased at the global and regional levels, and in all nations, between 1990 and 2021. In 2021, an estimated 1·00 billion (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 0·989–1·01) adult males and 1·11 billion (1·10–1·12) adult females had overweight and obesity. China had the largest population of adults with overweight and obesity (402 million [397–407] individuals), followed by India (180 million [167–194]) and the USA (172 million [169–174]). The highest age-standardised prevalence of overweight and obesity was observed in countries in Oceania and north Africa and the Middle East, with many of these countries reporting prevalence of more than 80% in adults. Compared with 1990, the global prevalence of obesity had increased by 155·1% (149·8–160·3) in males and 104·9% (95% UI 100·9–108·8) in females. The most rapid rise in obesity prevalence was observed in the north Africa and the Middle East super-region, where age-standardised prevalence rates in males more than tripled and in females more than doubled. Assuming the continuation of historical trends, by 2050, we forecast that the total number of adults living with overweight and obesity will reach 3·80 billion (95% UI 3·39–4·04), over half of the likely global adult population at that time. While China, India, and the USA will continue to constitute a large proportion of the global population with overweight and obesity, the number in the sub-Saharan Africa super-region is forecasted to increase by 254·8% (234·4–269·5). In Nigeria specifically, the number of adults with overweight and obesity is forecasted to rise to 141 million (121–162) by 2050, making it the country with the fourth-largest population with overweight and obesity.
This is dumb. It's like saying that weight loss is not a matter diet and exercise, but an anatomical issue of the stomach, that needs to be fixed with bariatric surgery.
No. Ozempic is a form of chemically-induced diet. Less invasive than bariatric surgery, but still just a hack to force you to consistently eat less. You can achieve the same by hiring a guy who follows you 24/7, and punches you in the face whenever you start eating too much.
Readit News
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/weight-watchers-ann...
Its stock tumbled ever since those highs and likely wouldn't have ever recovered had Oprah not bought and pumped it. To this day they still carry over a billion dollars in debt.
In fairness to the WW board of the last couple of years, they did make a of reasonable pivot to try to rectify the ship (like buying a telehealth service which prescribed Ozempic), but ultimately it seems like this buyback from 13 years ago created a burden that just made them unable to weather the storm gracefully.
Ozempic seems like a pretty good fall guy for this one.
We seem to be squarely in the "loot all the well known brands, take whatever is not nailed down, and leave their carcasses by the side of the road" stage of Capitalism.
> To this day they still carry over a billion dollars in debt.
Bankruptcy sounds like the only option, but the initial borrowing sounds like incredible mismanagement.
I am. Because just like how I've always got someone else to blame for why I never cleaned my room, executives can always find someone else to blame for why the business they are running went to shit.
And the press loves to run with a good just-so story that paints some indefatigable foreign villain as the cause of a company's demise, instead of boring, banal mismanagement.
Dead Comment
Because of inflation and market growth, a company that isn't shrinking should usually be sorta close to an all-time high.
If you have more money than you're able to make good use of improving the company (r&d, acquisitions, new locations, whatever), you can give it back to investors. Which can be either a dividend or a buyback, and in theory (ie, ignoring pesky details like taxes) those are supposed to be equivalent.
- pay your workers a good bonus?
- invest the money in the market?
- lower prices?
they used to be illegal because its a form of stock price manipulation** https://www.forbes.com/sites/aalsin/2017/02/28/shareholders-...
Look at all the comments discussing the drug instead of the company. If there is a topic people are interested in, stuff it in the headline.
Most companies always have another idea to do a new thing, that might induce growth. WW did not. WW has been in trouble for decades, because their business model pre-supposes consumers are too stupid to use a search engine. (Does "weight watchers" work? No. No it doesn't.)
The debt-for-buyback swap is a symptom, not a cause. Management had nowhere to go, no vision for growth, and when you are out of ideas and you are offered an attractive loan, you do a buyback.
There's a whole theory on this:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/d/dividendirrelevance.asp
The easy way to see it is if all shareholders reinvest dividends, it's the same as a share buyback, only with the broker buying shares on your behalf rather than the company, and your ownership of the company includes a bonus fractional share.
Dividends are also a bit of an accounting game. You can pay yourself a "dividend" whenever you want buy selling shares. This is only 95% true, but if your share in a company just entitled you to 65 cents, the share is probably worth about 65 cents less since the money came from somewhere.
The latter was the the end of several large German companies.
I lost 50 lbs or so on Mounjaro by the time I reached the maximum dosage. Then, a confluence of supply-chain issues and coverage issues eliminated ALL of it, and within a few short months I had regained all the weight. I finally got coverage again, and supply again (via Zepbound) and began slowly increasing my dosage again.
I'm now at the maximum dose and I've lost exactly 0 pounds from the peak.
So, a warning: Use of this drug seems to be a one-and-done. If you can't keep the weight down after you bottom out and after they take you off the drug, it MAY NOT work again.
1. High end personal trainers clients, for which semaglutide was used in conjunction with the trainer's workout regiment and diet.
2. Body builders and models, for which semaglutides simply replaced caffine/adderall/ephedrine.
The drugs can't induce the lifestyle change needed to keep the weight off (nor will it give you the motivation to go to the gym and build muscle). I'm thinking for now, it's a race to see how cheap these drugs can get and ensuring they have no side effects from very long term use. Overall I think the drugs are a net good and I'm interested for seeing the effects for myself, but I'm in good shape and $500/mo is still steep.
And they actually do induce lifestyle changes, which is the fascinating part. Not for everyone, but the impulse control changes are dramatic. I had a friend credit him going to therapy for the first time in his life and reading for the first time since high school to it which was crazy, but makes sense because it also helped him quit smoking weed so he had a lot more time.
Deleted Comment
Just wanted to share that observation.
That said, I didn't have as much problem with spirits and cocktails since they don't have as much volume and generally aren't as filling. There might be a danger of turning a beer drinker into a hard liquor drinker.
The same was true for food. I thought about food all the time. But once Semaglutide started I just didn't think of food. I had to remember to eat.
Semaglutide in my experience really helps to eliminate addictive behavior in general, I believe. At least oral addictions (I'm not sure if it would help with e.g. gambling addiction).
I never understood why skinny people believed that fat people have no impulse control until I took the medication. Once I had that impulse control it was so much easier to make long-term decisions.
1. food
2. alcohol
3. gambling
4. smoking
last three are extreme cases but general principle should still apply.
Your body has other mechanisms to make you remember you need 1, like for water intake or breathing. Those mechanisms starts as soon as anyone birth and doesn’t need your intervention to become a need. 2, 3 and 4 however become needs as you decide (consciously or not) it is. Same with heroin, social media or basically any other think we call "addiction".
Food obviously is a bit confusing as our omnivorous and resilient condition let us satisfy it in many ways : you don’t really need green vegetables, meat, sugar, beans, fish, nuts, muschroom, roots etc… to survive but stopping them all together will kill you. Some subset (of quality/quantity) keeps you in a better condition than others.
Appart that condition effects, the way you that specific subset as a need has more to do with habits.
1. Finding love
2. Raising children
3. Helping others
4. Strengthening your body
5. Learning about the world
6. Participating in sports
7. Music (playing and listening)
8. Art (creating and appreciating)
Does it make people less inclined to seek those things or mute their enjoyment? Things like recreational drugs (alcohol, marijuana, and tobacco included), gambling, and (excess or poor) food sound to me like "self-destructive behaviors" for many people, which generally are things that make life less enjoyable, and the people participating in them know that (but nonetheless struggle to stop).
On the one hand, i'm really happy for my friends and loved ones who have always struggled with weight find a solution that works for them.
On the other hand, i went through a non-drug assisted weight loss journey and improved countless things about my lifestyle besides just the number on the scale.
I worry this solution being available will just increase the number of sedentary people (which is also really bad for your health) and create a whole new set of people dependent on the pharma industry to be able to live their lives how they want
Reading between the lines, I have the impression that you were fairly strongly overweight ("obese") and struggled with more serous weight issues throughout your life?
I share the concern of the previous poster not so much for people like you, where "lose weight to a manageable level ASAP" is generally a good thing, but for people like me who are "a bit fatter than they'd like" but not necessarily "obese". If you'd meet me, you wouldn't necessarily call me "fat".
Previously I would just eat whatever (not super unhealthy, but also not really healthy) and not really exercise beyond my stubborn insistence on walking or cycling everywhere.
I don't see weight loss rugs as a net positive for me. I made some positive changes to fix this, and if I were to take Ozempic I'd just revert back to my lazy git self, and not get all the benefits that a better diet and exercise give me.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43919011
The food industry is a lot like the tobacco industry. Everyone is aware of marketing around health and fitness. But the marketing and social programming that keeps people eating - ad campaigns, portion sizes, food consumption traditions that are billed as "family" events, even things like giant popcorn buckets in cinemas, or the idea that sweet things are "naughty" but also rewarding - gets a pass because it flies under the radar.
It's literally a double bind. Everyone gets two contradictory messages about food, starting from early childhood. And they cannot be reconciled.
So no. It is not about personal morality or shaming people for the sake of it.
Medically, economically, and personally, it really is that important.
because they are. The visual changes are superficial. Exercise is important because it holistically moves people to a healthier and active lifestyle. It literally changes your mental state.
Ozempic is to weight loss what pain killers are to pain or sleeping pills are to insomnia, something that numbs a symptom (hunger in this case), without any impact on the underlying behavioral reasons that led towards the kind of lifestyle that promoted obesity.
But if you just keep showing up and putting in the effort (and most of all, not comparing yourself to anyone else, even your past self), the results will come.
For the morbidly obese, fat loss makes more activity much more feasible.
Dead Comment
I also hope there’s no long term worse side effects, but I agree with pjc50 in that most of the negative reaction is actually about feeling morally superior.
Most disesases are not self inflicted. Obesity is
I really like Mark Lewis's take on YouTube - he's someone who is very fit in general but an injury threw him off and before he knew it, he had gained double digit kilos. This is someone who is motivated but also deals with high food noise.
I deal with low food noise. I am relatively active. I got up to <overweight> pounds slowly and over 8 months was able to lose 40. Even so, I had just one bad month at work and gained 7 pounds without significantly dropping my activity. Just a few meals out and not tracking my calories and I fell off of maintenance quickly. If I resistance train my ability to keep control of my calories falls off quickly because I just get too hungry.
I'd love just a maintenance level just because distraction-level hunger sucks.
This is the big thing: it's amazing how little you can fall out of line and gain weight. A couple hundred calories a day and you're adding weight, every week. It really does take discipline.
The strongest behavioral effect is that I no longer snack at all, a lifetime habit pre-March. That's resulted in ongoing weight reduction, ~9kg so far.
That, in turn, has encouraged me to increase my activity levels a lot. Offered as an anecdatum in which this drug is driving me away from the sedentary tarpit, rather than towards it. YMMV, of course.
I'm taking the meds right now - what the medication allows me to understand is that without changing your sleep, exercise and diet, I simply won't be very successful even while on the meds.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43369502
See also: white people being judgemental about people with darker coloured skins, to the extent that they may sometimes invest in skin lightening, meanwhile white people are investing in artificially darkening their skin with tans (because it's a symbol of conspicuous consumption, the ability to go to sunny places).
I had uncontrollable weight gain, a comorbidity of ME/CFS. GLP-1 agonists has helped a lot with both. I eat a strict diet and exercise as often as I can, which is less often than I’d like due to PEM. I think it’s likely that much of uncontrollable weight gain is due to autoimmune issues and GLP-1As do seem to help with that.
I started GLP-1As as soon as mainstream adoption started and so I could get safety data to help figure out dosing. I had already benefited from extended water fasts but it was rather challenging to keep doing that.
Why are we so dead set on making sure overweight people struggle to put off the weight? Why can't it be easy for them?
I don't mock alcoholics for not being able to control themselves around alcohol. But we are determined to mock overweight people. Despite alcoholics having an easier time dealing with their vice.
Think about it, every other vice is controllable by simply avoiding the thing. Except for food. We must eat. It is a requirement. Having an issue with food is something you must deal with. You have to deal with the underlying issue. It requires true discipline. And it requires you to maintain that discipline 24/7. We don't ask that of any other vice.
Nothing we do nowadays is "natural" or "the way our ancestors did it" so its weird how folks cling onto "caveman diet" like it's some amazing thing. It's just excess consumption and a status symbol.
With extreme levels of direct, personal involvement by multiple professionals (which is what rich people / celebrities have historically used, and variations of which have been studied by researchers) the efficacy level reaches "sort-of OK, but still not great". That's crazy-expensive, though, so not a realistic solution for the masses, plus the results are still pretty lackluster despite the cost.
[1] Could, hypothetically, yes "CICO", technically anyone could lose weight, but they in fact do not work when applied in the real world, statistically speaking.
Why do we need GLP-1s? Is it because of Western diet? Misfiring reward centers (GLP-1s also appear to quell addictive behavior around alcohol and hard drugs)? Broad antibiotic usage along with more sterile living environments causing misbalanced gut flora (not producing sufficient quantities of natural GLP-1)? The most exciting phrase in science is not "Eureka!" but "That’s funny...".
I thought the long term solution was gene therapy for GLP-1 consumers, but now believe it's going to be probiotics that encourage gut flora that excretes sufficient quantities of GLP-1 for the desired metabolic outcome (based on most recent evidence and findings). If feasible, this is exciting because it is much harder to gate this therapy via the medical industrial complex (primarily insurance, pharma, PBMs, etc).
Scientists May Have Found a Natural Alternative to Ozempic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43874436 - May 2025
Without a very precise definition of "work", these discussions quickly degrade to near uselessness.
There is a very large difference between "telling patients to exercise more and eat less doesn't result in long term weight loss" and "exercising more and eating less doesn't result in long term weight loss"
The former is true, and the latter is not.
I agree that from a clinical perspective the former definition is more relevant than the latter.
At the end of the day it is just about diet and exercise - not eating more calories per day than you are burning via exercise.
The problem is, staying healthy is a matter of privilege.
You need to be able to afford to eat healthy (ultra-processed industrial food that's loaded with sugar is often much cheaper than quality produce), even if you have money, a decent chunk of Americans live in areas that are classified as "food deserts" [1], even if you are not in a food desert you still need to be able and have time to get to a store selling quality food, and you need someone with time available to cook healthy meals out of that. It used to be easier back in the time where one income was enough to feed a whole family and the women stayed as housewifes to actually do that, but these times are (thankfully) long gone.
Exercising suffers from similar "problems of privilege". Either you got the money and time to spare to go to a gym, or you got the money and space in your home to install your own gym... or you need actually safe roads where you can walk, jog or bike, and most of the US is so utterly car-dependent that it is outright unsafe to walk.
And on top of that you got the whole "living while Black" issue, with egregious instances like a pregnant Black woman arrested for walking her dog [2] - it's no surprise that the Black and Indigenous population has noticeably higher rates of diabetes [3] or oral health issues [4].
And on top of that, you got the whole issue with educating children about healthy foods, their parents being too poor to afford healthy foods, and that setting up these children for childhood obesity which perpetuates into adulthood. A lot of that is closely correlated with ethnicity and wealth as well.
It's a systemic issue, an insanely complex one at that, with no easy solution to be found - and certainly not a failure of any individual to stay healthy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_deserts_in_the_United_Sta...
[2] https://ca.news.yahoo.com/pregnant-black-woman-ticketed-walk...
[3] https://healthequitytracker.org/exploredata?mls=1.diabetes-3...
[4] https://doh.wa.gov/sites/default/files/legacy/Documents/Pubs...
For example, exercise has appetite suppression effect [1].
[1] https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2022/06/anti-hunger-m...
Diet has appetite suppression effect [2].
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25402637/
https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/adult-obesity-facts/index.html
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_China
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_India
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-03-03/china-ind... | https://archive.today/UeI7X
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
> Rates of overweight and obesity increased at the global and regional levels, and in all nations, between 1990 and 2021. In 2021, an estimated 1·00 billion (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 0·989–1·01) adult males and 1·11 billion (1·10–1·12) adult females had overweight and obesity. China had the largest population of adults with overweight and obesity (402 million [397–407] individuals), followed by India (180 million [167–194]) and the USA (172 million [169–174]). The highest age-standardised prevalence of overweight and obesity was observed in countries in Oceania and north Africa and the Middle East, with many of these countries reporting prevalence of more than 80% in adults. Compared with 1990, the global prevalence of obesity had increased by 155·1% (149·8–160·3) in males and 104·9% (95% UI 100·9–108·8) in females. The most rapid rise in obesity prevalence was observed in the north Africa and the Middle East super-region, where age-standardised prevalence rates in males more than tripled and in females more than doubled. Assuming the continuation of historical trends, by 2050, we forecast that the total number of adults living with overweight and obesity will reach 3·80 billion (95% UI 3·39–4·04), over half of the likely global adult population at that time. While China, India, and the USA will continue to constitute a large proportion of the global population with overweight and obesity, the number in the sub-Saharan Africa super-region is forecasted to increase by 254·8% (234·4–269·5). In Nigeria specifically, the number of adults with overweight and obesity is forecasted to rise to 141 million (121–162) by 2050, making it the country with the fourth-largest population with overweight and obesity.
No. Ozempic is a form of chemically-induced diet. Less invasive than bariatric surgery, but still just a hack to force you to consistently eat less. You can achieve the same by hiring a guy who follows you 24/7, and punches you in the face whenever you start eating too much.
This is still a form of class based dieting.
But to be clear, a bro punching you isn't the same as altering your hormones.