[phone[phone]]

It always bothers me when someone says it’s "cheating" to use a GLP-1 agonist.

It helps but the person losing weight still has to clean up their diet and start an exercise routine. There are still major changes they need to make to become successful. GLP-1 agonists help a lot of people make better decisions due to how they fight hunger. Less hunger means less chances to make bad choices when eating, and weight loss progress is a virtuous mental cycle where you keep doing what you’re doing because you see results.

None of that is cheating. There are still major changes one must make. Taking Ozempic but continuing to eat a trash-tier diet will yield little to no progress.

[bbatchelder]

Definitely agree, but man, the sheer number of folks who leave just horrible comments on videos/posts people make about how they lost weight on a GLP-1 agonist is so disheartening.

In addition to saying that its cheating, they will actively wish harm to the person by saying "just wait til you get X" where X is some side effect (real or imagined). Or just the "well once you stop taking it you'll just get fat again".

[phone[phone]]

The people who say "you'll get fat again once you stop taking it" also baffle me.

The most difficult part of losing weight for me personally is changing my routine and habits. Setting myself up with a kitchen that's ready to cook. Figuring out what kind of meals I'm happy to have on a weeknight that don't require a lot of cooking. Preparing parts of meals over an hour or two on the weekend to complete some of the more time consuming parts when I'm not so constrained on time. Learning to deal with the urge I (used to) have to "eat my feelings".

All of those things don't just magically go away when you stop taking a GLP-1 agonist. Losing a lot of weight isn't just about self-control like if you're just trying to lose five pounds to make your pants more comfortable for going to your 20th high school reunion; you have to rewire your habits and mind and make a life long commitment to those changes.

Rewiring your habits and rewiring your brain are things that persist if your intention going into the weight loss was to change your habits instead of just moving the number on the scale. If you are looking to do it only temporarily and are unwilling to lock in those behavioral changes then you're likely going to fail, and that has much more to do with mindset than medication.

[glp1guide]

Just to add to this, there's data to support the intuition there that there is long term good in taking GLP1s even after you stop:

https://glp1.guide/content/do-people-regain-all-the-weight-l...

Now, we need price to go down and availability to go up, but people who think all the weight bounces back as a sort of "gotcha" are silly. It's possible, but is a testament to the difficulty of dealing with obesity -- not some sort of gotcha of the drug.