this post was submitted on 06 May 2026
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Surprisingly, they have not.
Before GLP1s, weightloss was a myth. 99. something % of people (edit 99.2% of women) who meet the medical definition of obese will always be obese despite a lifetime of effort.
We know for certain from decades of research that weightloss from willpower alone, even with diet plans or excersize plans is functionally impossible. The best they do is yoyo effects - no diet has ever produced perminant weight loss on a real scale.
Very rarely a statistically insignificant sample size enjoy permenant weight loss and these individuals are held up to show it's possible and you can do it too! But that's just not true, and we know it's not true because decades of stats show again and again that perminant weight loss just does not happen.
Horseshit. I literally know multiple people who have lost weight and kept it off.
If you know several people who met the medical definition of obese and have perminantly left that category then you know several outliers, which is entirely possible.
But that is just not representative. Over 99% of obese people do not lose weight. Those few outliers are heavily visible and celebrated so it feels like there must be more.
Yeah, I'm not trusting an article that makes a lot of claims that are contrary to my lived experience and everything else I've ever read but cites nothing.
If 99% of people aren't a thing, then 1% of people are. That's like 80 million people.
Yeah, I'm not trusting an article that makes a lot of claims that are contrary to my lived experience and everything else I've ever read but cites nothing.
I don't say this often...that was a great article. Thanks for sharing.
😊 Right? It really stuck with me. One of those articles that ties together so many obvious and not so obvious pieces into a really clear picture. And in HuffPo no less!
Fun fact: glp1 weight loss isn’t permanent either.
You have to keep taking it.
So now all you’ve done is added some pills.
And?
Beats the shit out of having to weigh and track every calorie for the rest of your life.
People act like willpower is an infinite resource.
Sounds like a miracle, doesn’t it?
Miracles don’t exist.
What is so different about this than a doctor telling you that this statin will help to lower cholesterol, but if you stop taking it, the cholesterol will come back?
Or a doctor saying that this PDE5 will make your dick hard, but if you stop taking it, you'll go back to having a limp dick?
I kinda get what you're saying...but what doctor in their right mind would use that as a reasoning against statins and boner pills?
I think a couple of important things need to be realized...one being that there are a ton of factors that play into obesity.
If you want to cure obesity, it needs to be done at a societal level. You have to be Socratic about it. Nobody ever gets past the first easy "but why" to "what causes obesity."
Doctors realize this about statins, and they prescribe diet and lifestyle in tandem with statins. Why they can't apply the same methods to obesity baffles me.
Whataboutisms are wild.
Then original comment said that traditional weight loss isn’t a permanent cure.
Neither are gpl-1s.
And bringing other medications into it is irrelevant.
And of those who do, no one ever gets past the easy pill, that makes corporations rich.
The reason the US in particular doesn’t have the political will to press for the societal change we know will solve things is because it hurts profits of corporations like nestle or General Mills (and many of these mega corps are also profiting off the medical issues the fist creates.)
If GPL1 is the only way it works for you, that’s between you and your doctor, but long term, it’s not a solution. It’s just another subscription making life more expensive than it needs to be
I don't disagree.
But.
People like you make it sound like sustained weight loss is easy.
It is not. And acting like it is exacerbates the problem.
It is a lifetime of awareness and shutting out signals. It's maintaining willpower for as long as you can eat solid food. And possibly longer.
Getting weight loss advice from somebody who has never been fat is like taking tax advice from a toddler. Or if MLK were white. You don't know. You do not understand. That's fine.
If you're one of the lucky < 1% who manage to lose weight permanently, great, good for you. You are an exception, not the norm. But you don't know that yet. Give it a few years. A seemingly small lifestyle change can start setting you back on old habits.
And that's the next problem, because when it does, it's a personal failure. And that puts fuel on the fire.
Very, very few people successfully break out of that cycle forever. And they never will without everyone else understanding that obesity is a symptom of a larger issue.
Science is finally starting to look at that, and GLP-1s are a great place to look...because your body also creates GLP-1s to control appetite and regulate digestion. However, the synthetic form tends to stick around longer.
Perhaps, then, one cause of the overeating that leads to obesity is either a deficiency, or a malabsorption of the natural GLP-1s.
In which case, trying to fight that without medication sounds like a losing battle, without first understanding what is causing that. And in which case, saying that people should avoid GLP-1s sounds an awful lot like telling diabetics that they need to stop taking insulin.
Who exactly is “people like me”?
Stop making assumptions. Particularly when my comments directly contradict them.
You’re reading things in my comments that aren’t there.
And by the way, GPL-1s aren’t some sudden fix. Yes it helps with the appetite and hunger.
But that comes with other baggage, like needing to monitor for side effects, finding the proper dosage (and keeping on it.)
It’s certainly not a viable solution at the scale that’s currently necessary. Even so, I’m not seeing anyone here saying traditional weight loss isn’t hard- and I’m certainly not.
Yep!
The altered hormone balance is what allows weight loss and if that reverts than so does weight loss.
I know this "you have to keep taking them" argument is big in anti-glp1 circles, but I don't think it's very good - the same is true of vitamin supplements. You have to keep taking them or the deficiency comes back. They still help.
I don't care for glp1s myself but i've heard how happy they make some, so i don't judge others' choices.
“I know this ‘if you go off the diet plan you gain weight’ argument is big in anti diet plans, but…’”
I get that gol1s help people regulate their caloric intake. Don’t get me wrong.
But acting like they’re some miracle when they’re not is counter productive, particularly given that the core issue is ultimately behavioral in the first place.
People who’ve gotten to obesity have done so are more likely to revert to the same habits that led to it in the first place. Unless there’s something fairly radical about their lifestyle.
For me that change was finding a few gymbro friends who both cared enough to keep me going and genuinely celebrated my losses (and gains, weightlifting was part of the exercise thing.)
I’m not a gymbro, and I never will be, but being around them is sort of like a smoker finding new friends who don’t smoke. It makes it easier.
The other more important change was therapy. Lifelong habits don’t change easily, and therapy makes that much easier.
The point being here that GPL1 is not the only way to get there; and in terms of society’s health, almost certainly not the best solution. (That solution would require prevention, and corporations don’t like that.)
Except that for the overwhelming majority, functionally everyone, they are.
I'm not a propent of the drug. I'm slightly wary, I don't want it and i don't bring it up to others. But I don't judge people who do.
It sounds like you're part of the incredibly small minority who have been able to lose weight. Congratulations! It sounds like you worked long and hard to find a regimen that works for you.
Literally 99% of obese people will never find what you found. For them, these drugs are the ONLY realistic option to perminantly lose weight. Nothing else has been shown to work in more than 1% of cases.
And blood pressure medicine, and plenty of other drugs. If benefits > risks & costs, who cares?
How is that different from like antidepressants or thyroid medication, etc? You'll have symptoms again if you stop the pills.
The difference is the social understanding.
Nobody gets thyroid-shamed. People understand hyper-/hypo-thyroidism as an objective symptom of a physiological problem.
Obesity is not viewed the same, though it really should be.
Did I say anything about other medication?
No?
Why bring it up?
“These other things aren’t a permanent cure either!” Is a lazy response.
The original comment was acting like gold-1s are a cure where traditional weight loss isn’t. The reality is if you go off them, the same thing happens as going off your diet.
They're a cure for having an uncontrollable appetite, which makes dieting difficult to impossible.
So if you stop taking them, you retain your controlled appetite?
Spoiler: nope.
They’re not a cure for anything.
That's so pedantic, but yes, they're a treatment for an uncontrollable appetite. Do you mean to suggest that you're against medical treatments which are not cures?
Do you read studies produced by pharma to arrive at those facts? I call bullshit.
Do you know any chronically obese people?
Like, seriously. I'm not joking. What your parent described is something that is entirely true to a lot of people.
Losing weight is "easy", in the sense that how to do it is pretty obvious and well known.
The hard part is keeping it off.
Think of alcoholism. It's easy to just stop being an alcoholic right? I mean, conceptually...just stop drinking alcohol. Simple.
Now stop drinking alcohol for the rest of your life. You can never touch it again.
Not so easy.
Now imagine you need a small amount of alcohol every day or else you will die, but if you ever start to think "oh well I worked hard today I can have a second beer", then before you know it you're a full blown alcoholic again.
That's chronic obesity.
My weight has dropped and rebounded countless times over my life. I know what to do, I know how to do it, I've done it countless times. I'm fucking tired. The idea of having to weigh my food and track my calories for the rest of my life honestly makes me anxious, because I know that as soon as I stop, I'm going to lose all that I've worked for. Because it's happened so many times before.
GLP-1s are different. It's honestly like a light switch. Like "oh, this is how I'm supposed to feel". There is no more thinking about food. Even when starting to feel hungry, it's not "I have to eat right now", it's "I'll get to it when I get to it". It's not all-consuming.
If you are counting calories you aren't doing it right in the first place. Fruits and vegetables are your friend, you can gorge endlessly on them, no one got fat off northern fruit, or vegetables (obviously excluding staples like corn and potatoes.)
Find a way to make vegetables palatable. The other big factor is your gut biome, which can be improved by eating raw veggies, some fruits, and by things like making your own pickled mixes, non distilled vinegar on raw cut veggies, like peppers, cabbage, garlic, onion, peppercorns, and the like. No salt needed if you ask me.
Then the excercize of course, if you can get into an activity, something you look forward to doing.
The biggest drivers of obesity are pop for starters, diet is even worse in other ways. But also all the processed garbage. Whole grains, whole foods in general. Good luck.
Also I should add, sugar propaganda has fobbed off harms on fat, which is important, you want healthy fats obviously, but the stomach doesn't recognize being full until it has it's portion of fat and you will overeat.
Unsolicited dieting advice. Cool. Thanks.
You know I've managed to go 41 years without ever hearing any of this, or incorporating any of it into my daily life.
Hard to believe, but I've spent all that time under a rock, eating pasta and donuts. A very large rock.
Who the fuck are you? Who the fuck do you think you're talking to? Did you read a fucking word I said, or any of the parents above this?
Or do you just come here to fat shame under the guise of providing "advice" to people who have been hearing it from literally everybody in their life? Does that make you feel better about fat shaming? By thinking you're doing a good thing?
You know what's really fucked is I've talked the same way you do, when I'm at my lows. Goes to show how much self-loathing is involved in being fat.
Eat less, move more. It's so simple. Why didn't I think of that.
Even if you sincerely don't think you're fat-shaming, you are. The way you are speaking, is, ironically, belittling. Talking down to me like I'm an idiot. Sorry if that's not the case, but fuck you regardless.
I'm not the person you've been responding to. You're not wrong that it's hard, but it really is simple. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
People keep comparing it to drug addiction and that's pretty a pretty good comparison. Telling a drug addict to stop using drugs is not usually productive on its own because doing so is extremely difficult. However, quitting or severely limiting usage is still the ultimate goal of any addiction treatment plan. The steps are simple but difficult to implement.
No this predates glp1s, the article i linked is from 2018.
GLP-1 medications have been around since about 2005, just fyi. Though it's only recently they have been marketed for general weight management.