[Auracle]

I'm sorry, but I'm a decently in shape person that tried semaglutide for reasons other than losing weight and I disagree.

While I'm sure we all are a bit different satiety wise (and I've found it greatly depends on how much I've been eating overall recently), your experience on the drug is not what the rest of us feel like all the time. It's unfortunately normal for our biology to basically want to shove calories down our mouths all the time. I consciously pace my food intake every single day. I just had a huge plate of nachos, some christmas cookies, and a pickle...and I could still eat more. The only reason I ate that much is because I feel a cold coming on so I relaxed my usual limits.

The kind of "fullness" you get on semaglutide isn't natural. I've never felt like that my entire life. The closest thing would be after something like a Thanksgiving meal, but that's more of a "my stomach hurts" than "I really don't feel like I can put more in my stomach."

My sister in law is the skinniest, most in shape person I know. She's 35, has had 3 kids, and has abs, an ass she clearly worked for, etc. My wife (unfortunately) regularly compares herself to her and in this case also thinks like you, that it just comes naturally. She gave me her old phone so I could test some stuff on it as I don't have an Android phone handy. She didn't wipe it. MyFitnessPal was on there, and she was limiting herself to 1400 calories a day.

Almost all of us work for it. Truth be told, and please hold your downvotes for this, I get a little upset when the rest of you get to have insurance pay ridiculous sums of money for a medication that makes it easier for you than the rest of us, side effects aside, and you think it's simply evening out the playing field.

And it needs to be said in case my wife ever finds this: she's also ridiculously hot and even though she can't see it has, at times, been skinnier than her sister.

[_dain_]

>It's unfortunately normal for our biology to basically want to shove calories down our mouths all the time.

Not for me.

>I consciously pace my food intake every single day. I just had a huge plate of nachos, some christmas cookies, and a pickle...and I could still eat more. The only reason I ate that much is because I feel a cold coming on so I relaxed my usual limits.

This is completely alien to my experience.

I eat until I get full, then I stop eating. I do not have any difficulty whatsoever maintaining a healthy weight. I don't think about calories at all. I have no idea how many calories or nutrients are in anything I eat; I've never paid attention to the that part of the label. It does not enter my mind for even a moment.

Sometimes I exercise regularly, sometimes I slip and get lazy for a while. Sometimes I eat a lot of fast food, sometimes I pull myself together and make better stuff at home. Throughout all this, my weight does not noticeably budge at all. I've been 20-22 BMI for my whole adult life.

>Almost all of us work for it. Truth be told, and please hold your downvotes for this, I get a little upset when the rest of you get to have insurance pay ridiculous sums of money for a medication that makes it easier for you than the rest of us, side effects aside, and you think it's simply evening out the playing field.

I didn't work for it. It doesn't mean I'm a good and diligent person, it means I got lucky with my biochemistry and genetics. In another life, a different sperm would have met a different egg and I'd end up with different alleles and I'd end up fat.

It isn't fair that I'm living my life on diet easy-mode. If semaglutide can replicate this for people who aren't so genetically lucky, that's a fucking miracle.

[pneumic]

I was like this for a long time, then I got older. That said, you seem to be following your body's instincts well, so good for you.

[scarmig]

> I consciously pace my food intake every single day. I just had a huge plate of nachos, some christmas cookies, and a pickle...and I could still eat more.

You give some thought to it every day, but do you think about it every minute? You could still eat more, but do you still have the same intrusive hunger to eat that you did before you started the nachos?

> Almost all of us work for it.

Your claim here seems to be that you work for it harder than people who have less success. But do you have any actual evidence of that?

Like, can you truthfully say that to keep your presumably healthy BMI you overcome nearly constant thoughts about how hungry you are? Can you eat an entire pizza and still be hungry except it's physically painful to eat?

People vary in their experiences of satiety. Many people do manage to be thin without constantly feeling hunger; that's what being on semaglutide does.

[CadmiumYellow]

It's funny hearing people debate this topic on HN where the community skews heavily male. The vast majority of women have experienced both of these states of mind and in fact do so on a monthly basis. Three weeks out of the month I get hungry, I eat, I get full, and I don't feel hungry again or think about food at all for hours. You could put a cupcake in front of my face when I was full and I wouldn't even look at it. It requires zero effort to behave this way. Yet during that fourth week I get a constant gnawing feeling in my stomach that never goes away except in the first few minutes after eating something (usually simple carbs). I think about food nearly every minute of the day. Then one day it's like a switch flips and I'm back to having a perfectly normal appetite and satiety signals. It's an excellent lesson in how we're all at the mercy of our biology to some extent.

[Auracle]

I’m a male with hormonal issues and I’ve also taken growth hormone peptides that make you ridiculously hungry. I’m no stranger to how hormones can affect our bodies. All I’m saying is that the type of satiety you get on semaglutide isn’t natural and I’ve never felt it before in my life.

[CadmiumYellow]

Oh I definitely believe you on that. I haven't taken semaglutide myself but from what I've read it seems to increase satiety by slowing digestion, which is why it has nausea as a side effect, and I can't imagine that that's the same as the normal feeling of satiety you get from eating reasonable amounts. Did it make you less hungry in a sick way rather than a neutral way, maybe?

[runnerup]

> Can you eat an entire pizza and still be hungry except it's physically painful to eat?

Same as the other poster, yes, but I can also still eat more without pain if it's a Large Domino's Pepperoni Pizza. If it's the Dominos "Deep Dish" though, that's my maximum. I can regularly put away a large Little Caesars pepperoni without trying, it's just a "normal meal".

The difference between me and people fatter than me is that after a large meal like this, my body stops "demanding" food for 1-2 days. Thats what keeps my weight in a +/- 3 lb range.

I know the difference because every once in a blue moon after I turned 30, my body's hunger signals will make me un-satiable. The experience of suddenly being unable to diet was jarring. I've managed to fix that somehow, thankfully. But it was very, very clear over several weeks that dieting was entirely beyond my control no matter how much willpower I had.

[Auracle]

What semaglutide does is make the idea of putting more food in your stomach when it’s full…not nauseating, but something akin to that. It’s hard to describe. It almost feels like theres just no more room and the food will come back up. The main point I’m trying to get across is that (probably, sample size of 1) isn’t how healthy weight people feel.

And yes, I could easily eat more than one pizza. It’s a habit to simply stop at a few pieces, or more if I haven’t eaten much that day.

I’ve also taken growth hormone peptides that make you insatiably hungry. Literally insatiable - far beyond what I assume could be natural. I still usually limited myself. If I needed more I made popcorn or something and then went to bed hungry.

[tomp]

> Can you eat an entire pizza and still be hungry except it's physically painful to eat?

Yes. Except that it’s not physically painful not to eat (that would happen probably at 1 1/2 pizzas, but I almost never go there).

I’ve been feeling this way and limiting my food intake since teenage years (almost half my life). Sometimes more, other times less successfully (six pack to love handles, but never beyond that).

[Blackthorn]

> I get a little upset when the rest of you get to have insurance pay ridiculous sums of money for a medication

If this was well and truly about the money you'd support it, because it's going to be cheaper than paying for long-term medical costs of obesity.

[Auracle]

Yeah, and that's a definite bonus. It's the attitude I've read from people taking it that grinds my gears - when I read the semaglutide subreddit it was full of people saying "oh, so this is what skinny people feel like."

No, how you feel on the drug isn't how most of us skinny people feel. I'm probably somewhat uniquely qualified to make that distinction at the moment. The rest of us have worked hard our entire lives to stay skinny and now you all get a cheat. It's one thing if you recognize it, but it's beyond annoying if you don't.

[scarmig]

> The rest of us have worked hard our entire lives to stay skinny and now you all get a cheat.

Someone could just as easily say that you've had access to a cheat your entire life and are now bitter other people have access to it. The fact that you have a stronger satiety response does not mean you are morally superior or are more entitled to a healthy life than others.

[Auracle]

They could say that but they may very well be wrong. Obviously we can’t switch bodies and say, but I’m a non-diabetic person of a healthy weight that’s taken semaglutide. All I’m saying is the “full” you get when taking that drug was absolutely foreign to me.

[fn-mote]

> The rest of us have worked hard our entire lives to stay skinny [...]

Disagree.

I am skinny.

I spent almost no time thinking about it.

I eat whatever I want. If I overeat, my body feels bad... it tells me to stop.

After fasting 24 hours, my hunger turns off. I have no cravings. I am not eyeing chips and cookies with lust. I do not dream of roast chicken dinner.

Our human experiences of hunger and satiety differ more than I ever would have imagined.

Now should I look for a moral judgement? On me? On you?

I think I'll find something more positive to do with the rest of my day.

[JeremyNT]

> Almost all of us work for it. Truth be told, and please hold your downvotes for this, I get a little upset when the rest of you get to have insurance pay ridiculous sums of money for a medication that makes it easier for you than the rest of us, side effects aside, and you think it's simply evening out the playing field.

I don't really think this is a healthy way to look at it.

Yes every day is a struggle for most of us. I've been in the "healthy" BMI for a majority of my adult life, but only just barely. This requires constant effort and work for me. I assume that most "fit" people are similarly fixated on the quest to remain healthy.

But clearly, there's "something" that we have which makes it possible for us to succeed at this, which people who do not succeed lack. I don't begrudge them taking a shortcut, and I don't mind if they never understand my version of the struggle here, because I don't claim to understand theirs.

Fundamentally, we need to understand that our physiology has not evolved in a situation where we are both sedentary and have unlimited, good tasting food at our disposal, and any tools we have to make this situation easier should be embraced.

[pjc50]

> she was limiting herself to 1400 calories a day

This is closer to disordered eating than healthy eating.

> The rest of us have worked hard our entire lives to stay skinny and now you all get a cheat

Ah, the student loan forgiveness argument, and the pro-spanking argument: I suffered, so you should as well, because suffering is intrinsically moral and pleasure is bad.

[Auracle]

> This is closer to disordered eating than healthy eating.

I believe she was losing what little weight she gained during pregnancy.

It’s not about suffering. Like I said, as long as you’re aware of it I don’t really care past the fact that I’m paying for it with my insurance premiums…but as someone else pointed out, it should be cheaper in the long run.

[kmmlng]

I'd be very careful with this kind of reasoning. We just do not know the insides of others peoples heads. How can you rule out that there are differences between peoples appetites?

Personally, I eat when I am hungry. My body typically generates hunger signals around the times I routinely eat. At other times I'm usually not hungry. Sometimes, I'll eat just for taste, but that is rare. I've had periods of time where I was trying to gain weight for fitness reasons and it was a real struggle. My natural state is to be skinny and it's quite hard for me to deviate from that. There a plenty of people like me and there are also plenty of people who tend to be overweight unless they actively fight it.

Clearly there are differences. There are extremes and their is a continuum between those extremes. You can exert some amount of willpower to change your position on the continuum, but the closer to the extremes you are, the harder it will be to arrive at a "normal" position.

And this is just inherent feelings of appetite. Some people may additionally be subconsciously eating to fill some kind of emotional hole or trauma. There is a lot going on and I wouldn't want to be too quick to judge.

[Auracle]

Right, I’m sure there are extreme outliers on each side, but when half the population is fat it’s clearly not just that. The only point I was really getting at is that semaglutide doesn’t make you “feel like all those skinny people do and look how easy they’ve had it.”

Apart from people like you, perhaps. I also have a friend like that but he has pretty severe untreated ADD so I think that plays a part.