It's a hugely important thing to do for your health in general, but the amount of effort needed to counteract the modern diet via exercise is absurd.
The alternative is eating better - better food, less calories. But for a lot of people, they have tried and failed to do this for years. Even people that have had a history of being able to do this successfully can find themselves struggling. And once you're fat, the feedback loops kick in and make it more and more difficult. Is it within everyone's power to not be fat? Yes. Is it significantly harder for some people for a variety of reasons? Also yes.
So we could act like this is a moral failing and fat people should just be fat until they manage to scrape together the willpower to ignore their body pushing them to eat, or we could recognize that these medications are extremely effective at helping tame those signals their body is sending. (Plus seeing a tons of other positive impact on things like fat deposits in the liver, insulin resistance, cardiovascular protection, sleep apnea, etc. - and these are seen even before significant weight loss occurs.)
These medications aim to reduce the addictiveness of foods. A very apt analogy is nicotine gum/patches. This is that, but for food (although early studies also show success for opioids and alcoholism).
I feel like there is a lot of hypocrisy going on around this. People asking overweight/obese people "why not just eat less?!" and people responding "GLP-1 medications help me do just that," and the critics essentially saying "it is unfair fair that this drugs helps you do the thing I claim I want you to do."
Also, calorie restriction, not exercise is what successful people use to lose weight. Exercise is highly recommended and will help you live a long and healthy life, but it won't help an Obese person loose >20 lbs of body fat. TDEE and calorie restriction will though.
"Why not do the more difficult thing instead of the very easy and cheap thing that also accomplishes your goal?" will always be a bizarre question to ask in earnest. The answer should be so glaringly obvious that the question just falls out of your head.
I'm 6' 2" and weigh 215. I ride my bike 20 miles/week. Not a lot, but not nothing. My goal isn't really to lose a bunch of weight. I'm always hungry and I'm eating plenty. There's an ongoing hunger background noise in my stomach and brain. I'm definitely doing some self experimentation to get this figured out.
It's a hugely important thing to do for your health in general, but the amount of effort needed to counteract the modern diet via exercise is absurd.
The alternative is eating better - better food, less calories. But for a lot of people, they have tried and failed to do this for years. Even people that have had a history of being able to do this successfully can find themselves struggling. And once you're fat, the feedback loops kick in and make it more and more difficult. Is it within everyone's power to not be fat? Yes. Is it significantly harder for some people for a variety of reasons? Also yes.
So we could act like this is a moral failing and fat people should just be fat until they manage to scrape together the willpower to ignore their body pushing them to eat, or we could recognize that these medications are extremely effective at helping tame those signals their body is sending. (Plus seeing a tons of other positive impact on things like fat deposits in the liver, insulin resistance, cardiovascular protection, sleep apnea, etc. - and these are seen even before significant weight loss occurs.)