Part 4 of my response to the original post
On GLP-1s (perception and science) and weight regain
“public antifatness campaigns,” so marketing? Companies want to sell a product so they market it as what it is? The ads that I’ve mainly seen aren’t even particularly negative about fatness, I never really see the health risks of obesity or that any saying that you will feel better at a lower weight instead all the ads and promotions I see revolve around how much easier it is to lose weight on the drugs. Of course, I don’t like that it’s portrayed as a tool for self-confidence but you don’t artificially create a market to sell to, you capitalise on a pre-existing desire. And people not wanting to be fat for any reason isn’t inherently fatphobic, it’s really not that someone doesn’t want to look like another fat person, it’s that they don’t want to look like fat them (if that makes sense?). You have to understand that not wanting to be fat/not wanting to be skinny/wanting to be a healthy body weight/wanting to be muscular etc. is just the desire for body modification. Why I wouldn’t put wanting to be obese or wanting to be underweight in the same category is because they’re unhealthy states.
I don’t really understand what “bad science,” means in this context because the drugs work on most people, it’s a synthetic version of a hunger-controlling hormone that is already in your body. If you feel less hungry, you eat less food, your body is forced to use your fat stores for energy, you lose weight, the science on the mechanism is pretty sound?
If we’re talking about serious side effects, that’s very fair, it is important to take claims of safety with a grain of salt when most studies are funded by the companies that sell these drugs, any large corporation does not have your best interest in mind. However, some of them are related to the mechanism through which it works (any GI issues) and adjusting the dose might help but people’s bodies respond differently to any drug, if you looked up any drug you will find a long list of possible side effects. I just found out that calcium supplements might worsen arteriosclerosis (likely not a concern unless you have a pre-existing cardiovascular condition). And sometimes a drug gets banned after years of use because you can’t know everything, I remember a common heartburn/gastritis medication that was recalled because of its link to cancer.
A drug and a diet can’t really be compared so I’m ignoring the bit about Jenny Craig and WW. On fen-phen, genuinely ask yourself do you care about possible negative side effects of every drug or does it just apply to weight loss drugs? If we’re talking about side effects that we don’t know of, then you’ll have to be incredibly suspicious of every drug. If it’s of known severe effects, liver failure is a known possible side effect of a medication I’m on, I still take it though I monitor my liver function and limit my drinking, would you tell me to stop taking it just on the possibility of it? Obviously if later it is found that GLP-1s reliably cause any long-term health risk then it should be banned like fen-phen, I truly have no inherent care for GLP-1s, I have never used it and have no use for them.
On weight regain, the big bad monster that fat liberation loves to hold over people’s heads, do you think GLP-1s are a magic spell? That they somehow transform every single thing about you to match that of someone who’s no longer fat? It JUST restricts how much food a person can consume comfortably while you’re on the drug, for some people it can help with food addiction but any sustained restriction of hyper-palatable foods will do that too. It’s the same with fad diets (like Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers [1]) that once a person goes off them and resumes eating how they were pre-diet, their weight goes back up to their pre-diet weight.
It’s why people talk about a lifestyle change!! I’m never going back to binging, using food to cope with low dopamine, primarily eating ultraprocessed foods and constantly eating out. I vastly prefer how I feel with my current food habits! I also hopefully will continue lifting and hiking consistently, but that’s a little outside of my control (depending on injury and mobility). If people on a GLP-1 managed to sustain their diet once off it, they wouldn’t regain weight.
At the end of the day only you can choose whether or not to take a GLP-1, it is wholly up to you. You don’t NEED it to lose weight, the thing about withholding medical treatment due to size is that you don’t even have to reach a healthy weight or even class I obese. Having a BMI of below 40 or 35 if you’re Asian will likely mean that you’re no longer disqualified based on weight, of course I don’t know everyone’s situation but those are the general guidelines I have found. Using my own dimensions (female, 168cm and 23 years old) for example to have a BMI of 35 (I’m Asian) I would have to weigh 99kg/218lbs. I would have to eat 2105 calories to maintain 98kg, just below the cutoff. That’s not a small amount of food for me now though it was the norm pre-weight loss.
Part 1
Footnotes
[1] admittedly I am maybe too young to know enough about either of these plus I don’t think they were as big in my country. They didn’t feel pertinent to the overall discussion to I didn’t bother with research, if anyone knows more, do let me know if there was anything really bad about them