"In a World of Addictive Foods, We Need GLP-1s" (1 Viewer)

[Mr Person]

(Or at least, that's the title on the main page. The title changes a bit when you click on the article).
Opinion
Guest Esay
David A. Kessler

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Throughout my life I’ve been fat, thin and various sizes in between. Since I was a kid I’ve gained and lost weight repeatedly, putting on 20 pounds, taking it off, putting on 30 pounds and then losing it again. It has been a cycle of despair.​

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The fact that I’m a doctor, a former dean of two medical schools and ran the Food and Drug Administration for six and a half years was of no help to me. Like millions of others, I was caught between what the food industry has done to make the American diet unhealthy and addictive and what my metabolism could accommodate. We may now be at the brink of reclaiming our health. New and highly effective anti-obesity medications known as GLP-1s have revolutionized our understanding of weight loss, and of obesity itself. These drugs alone are not a panacea for the obesity crisis that has engulfed the nation, and we should not mistake them for one. But their effectiveness underscores the fact that being overweight or obese was never the result of a lack of willpower. ​

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It is the result of biology instead, and that is why these drugs work. They help people feel full after eating and reduce the cravings that are central to our addiction to the irresistible, highly processed, highly palatable foods that have glutted our shelves over the last five decades. For many of us, our biology makes the pull of these ultraformulated foods nearly impossible to resist.​

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/opinion/ozempic-weight-loss-drugs.html

[Article continues on about how junk/fast food is formulated to manipulate the brain's reward system, how 40% of Americans are now obese and rife with visceral fat (!!!!!!), how Trump rejected a Biden plan to expand access to GLP-1 drugs ('cause spending), how they aren't magic bullets and you still need your willpower to eat better and exercise more, how the FDA approved them for long-term use without long-term studies, how the author lost 65lb, how food labeling is not "fully transparent" because "consumers should know about the function and health consequences of every ingredient in the packaged foods they buy (does this guy think people are going to read a pamphlet for every product?),]


I'll put it this way. I'm all for these drugs. But the bolded insults me, frankly. I resent that kind of excuse making.

My own comment follows (length)

 

[Mr Person]

Towards the end of college, I had largely stopped going to the gym by senior year, drank what I felt like, ate like I felt like, had a tremendous appetite still, and generally behaved without regard to my health. I'm around 6 feet. I noticed I was moving towards 200lb. Between college and law school a few months later, I made several very intentional changes:

- Quit smoking cold turkey
- Stopped ****ing around with....other things
- Seriously reduced drinking
- Completely abandoned sweets, fast food, junk food, and caloric liquids other than milk, veggie juice, and what booze I did have. I generally avoided large servings of starch (so, I never made fries, for example).
- Resumed running. Resumed regular intense resistance training.

Then, with the stress of law school, sleep deprivation, etc, I'd manage to forget to eat. End up dropping down to something like 160lb. But after the first year or even first semester I had a handle on things, the resumed lifting helped add muscle, and I stabilized more around 180lb.

I've continued that to this day. Decades. However, in the last several years, my appetite dropped off. So I can get away with having a sweet here or there. Every now and then, I'll make a cheesy salsa dip and have at it with a bag of tostitos. But these are very rare. Otherwise, I eat what I cook. For the most part, carbs are complex carbs. Though I'll certainly have a bagel now and then. I may not have fast food, but I'll sometimes buy a burrito. Etc. But if my metabolism slows, I'll just drop what I need to drop again. Willpower exists.

I yo-yo around 175lb to the extent I check.



You do not have to eat the food the author talks about in the bolded. I do not think it is helpful at all to tell people that it's not their fault they're obese and that instead that they were somehow hoodwinked or forced to eat horribly and not exercise by Big Food. Bullshit. Yes, there's a ton of bad food out there. Companies make it because people buy it. That's how things work.

While obesity does have a genetic component, yes, it is very much willpower that drives it. I'm not special. I don't deserve an award. My only advantage is that I caught it early, since the longer you're overweight or obese the harder the body will fight to get back up to weight. If someone just isn't willing to go through the discomfort of giving up their favorite foods, then I'm fine with there being GLP-1 drugs at hand to do for them what they refuse to do for themselves. But stop telling me you can't help it.

But stop telling me you just can't help it. You can. You choose not to.

 

[lynnwinslow]

Willpower obviously helps but I know of people who had the willpower and just couldn’t drop the weight. One person’s Doctor told her that she might be trying too hard which was causing her body to conserve the fat. I think for women hormones play a big, mysterious part.
Also, I think some people are genetically more susceptible to the addictive additives in some food. So their weight issues need to be treated with diet, exercise and addiction assistance which I think the new drugs provide.

 

[verrip1]

Once they start putting GLP-1s in Haagen-Dazs, the problem will solve itself.

 

[Grand Mal]

Willpower obviously helps but I know of people who had the willpower and just couldn’t drop the weight. One person’s Doctor told her that she might be trying too hard which was causing her body to conserve the fat. I think for women hormones play a big, mysterious part.
Also, I think some people are genetically more susceptible to the addictive additives in some food. So their weight issues need to be treated with diet, exercise and addiction assistance which I think the new drugs provide.

Women of child-bearing age can face a real challenge. I saw a program about it years ago and it explained that many women's bodies can be incredibly efficient at storing fat when they diet. Their body responds to a diet as if it's a famine and stores energy in case of pregnancy. One woman in the program was gaining weight on 1,000 calories a day.
And genetics is also an important factor. I was nearly 6'7" all my adult life (in my 70's now and lost about 3/4") and always ate and drank whatever I felt like without ever getting fat. I did a pretty athletic job for nearly 30 years but that ended in my mid 50's and it's still never been a problem.