In a 72-week trial in participants with obesity, tirzepatide — a novel glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide and glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonist — provided substantial and sustained reductions in body weight. Participants lost one-fifth of their body weight.
The recommended starting dosage of MOUNJARO is 2.5 mg injected subcutaneously once weekly. The 2.5 mg dosage is for treatment initiation and is not intended for glycemic control.
After 4 weeks, increase the dosage to 5 mg injected subcutaneously once weekly.
(Inspect MOUNJARO visually before use. It should appear clear and colorless to slightly yellow. Do not use MOUNJARO if particulate matter or discoloration is seen. )
I have to admit that I hate drugs for weight loss. I know, I know, if it helps, then what’s the issue?
The issue is that one of my pet peeves is the serious amount of disinformation surrounding obesity and weight loss, and the fact that there is no such thing as a person who “cannot” lose weight. there are only people who’s hunger signal overwhelms their self control and as a result, they overeat.
It’s not genetic. It’s not “starvation mode”. It’s not “muh slow metabolism”. It’s not anything other than this:
If you consume more calories than you burn, on average, you will gain weight. The larger the delta, the more weight you’ll gain.
On the flip side, if you consume less calories than you burn, you will lose weight. The larger the delta, the faster you will lose. There’s no confounding factors. You won’t put on or stop losing weight because your metabolism changes and you go into “starvation mode”. The human metabolism does not vary enough to account of anything other than very tiny weight differences, which is why BMI has a range.
I don’t mind the fact that a drug helps someone overcome their own self control deficits and lose weight. That’s fine. What I mind is all the disinformation confounding what is ultimately and extremely simple phenomenon. It is literally as simple as calories in, calories out, full stop. Anyone saying anything otherwise is lying to you.
Hi Goober I’m a noob here so please be tolerant. I note that you took care to avoid any hint of Killjoy in your comment. That’s great.
One of the things about animals including humans is that they like doing things that they like doing. Some of these things are mental pleasures like high status. Some of these things are physical pleasures like eating.
The over-eater has made a trade-off between various kinds of pleasure. It should be an economic cost/benefit decision. But as you point out, there is money to be made out of promising the over-eater that there will be zero cost, except to the wallet that is, when they buy the magic pills and (so much fun to use but never used) exercise machines and self-help videos. Consumers (literal consumers) are being bullshat that the link between eat and fat no longer exists.
Still there are those like me, fully aware of the consequences, fully aware of the science, who choose to make that decision, to eat more than we should.
This is very cool.
It’s important to understand (sorry Goober) that the human metabolism is not a simple thermodynamic machine. The obesity epidemic is happening not because there is suddenly so much more food but because the food itself has changed.
If this is a wonder drug and works for the obese individual, that’s great. Societally, the answer is not “more drugs” but “better food”.
It can be done. We just need to bust the Food Trust.
Jim, in a free society the consumer is king. Consumers decide what food they want to eat. There are retailers who sell “better food.” They do all right. There are retailers who sell what you might not call “better food.” They also do all right. Retailers who try to sell food that the consumer does not want, do not do all right.
Societally, the answer is to become a food desert. You don’t get a lot of obesity in Somalia. Or you could provide incentives, but this inevitably turns out as Nanny Statism.
Losing so much weight so fast of itself is dangerous? That has been the paradigm for a long time.
After fifty years of standard low fat diet and exercise and calorie restriction, I lost weight and gained it back, yo yo dieting.
Since switching to an ancestral, animal based diet with low carb, I have succeeded with a loss of ninety pounds for nine years now.
And I have no trouble with overeating.
Why?
Both sugar and wheat stimulate the appetite system of the brain. I avoid those.
Omega 6 heavy seed oils stimulate the endocannabenoid system, like marijuana , and cause increased appetite and insulin resistance.
The Zero Acres Farm website has a great white paper about this.
So I avoid these oils as well.
I should note these oils are in everything including baby formula, and used for adulterating olive oil and avocado oil.
It is so perverse that the heart assn has been pushing these for at least sixty years.
Before these oils became prominent in the human diet, coronary heart disease was almost unknown.
Shadeburst: “Jim, in a free society the consumer is king.”
I respectfully disagree with you. “Consumption” is not the end-all, be-all of existence. I can imagine a million titles I would sooner have than “consumer”. It’s offensive, actually, to be called a consumer. At most I will suffer to be called a “customer”. A customer is one who buys things; a consumer is one who destroys. Better than “customer” is “patron”. A patron is one who graces an establishment with his presence and patronage.
Shadeburst: “Consumers decide what food they want to eat. There are retailers who sell “better food.” They do all right. There are retailers who sell what you might not call “better food.” They also do all right. Retailers who try to sell food that the consumer does not want, do not do all right.”
What we have in fact is a prolific array of choices within fairly narrow bounds set by the operation of fifty years of accreted law and quasi-law. Then once we scratch below the surface of the dizzying array of choice we find that for the most part all these “brands” (cutouts) are owned and operated by the same few oligarchical corporate conglomerates. Then once we scratch the scratch we find that even the “independent” operations are plugged into essentially the same logistical network as the others.
This is not specific to food, it’s a general description of how the F&G American “economy” operates.
American capitalism is when the burger shop down the road gets its burgers neatly wrapped in plastic packaging shipped hundreds of miles from the processing facility of one of the same six wholesale distributors that every other burger shop in America gets its burgers from, the burger shop leases its facility at great expense from a billion-dollar commercial real-estate company, the billion-dollar commercial real-estate company acquired the property with backing from a loan from the bank, the bank collects interest on the payments from the billion-dollar commercial real-estate company for “money” it created out of nothing, and the bank immediately turned around and flipped the loan to be divvied up, repackaged, and sold as part of a mystery-meat financial derivative a la CDO to pension funds, hedge funds, sovereign wealth funds, and central banks.
When you think about it, the burger shop is just the sucker that picked up the tab.
Shadeburst: “Or you could provide incentives, but this inevitably turns out as Nanny Statism.”
Look around you???
Lu An Li,
That is more of the same disinformation I was referring to earlier. There is so much really, really bad information out there.
Fat is storage for lean times. It’s designed to be burned. Burning fat for food doesn’t get “dangerous” until your fat reserves go below critical levels (about 5% for men and 10% for women). Until then, you’re fine. There’s a guy who didn’t eat for over a year, he just lived off his fat reserves. He took a supplement to avoid vitamin deficiency, and was fine.
He started out morbidly obese.
Jim,
Sorry, friend, but the human body is incapable of violating the laws of thermodynamics. I agree that there are all sorts of factors causing us to overconsume (shitty food being one of them), but the fact is, obesity is still the result of overconsumption.
Jerrold, I’m not as old as you, and I wasn’t as fat as you, but our experiences are otherwise the same. The heart association and the rest of the health-industrial complex have been pushing their ideas for exactly as long as the people have been physically degenerating at an astonishingly rapid pace. Coincidence?
Goober, it’s possible that overconsumption is the chief proximate cause of obesity. It’s not the ultimate cause. And you’ll have to admit that it’s possible that the human body responds to different calories differently, preferring to store some as fat and excrete others, in which case overconsumption would not even qualify as a proximate cause. A calorie, after all, is a unit of heat, an abstraction, in some sense a fiction, whereas the source of a food calorie is always a particular arrangement of physical stuff with its own peculiar chemical properties.
Jim,
I agree, no coincidence. But this degeneration goes back over a hundred years.
Weston A Price’s book on this was published about 1940. He traveled the world to isolated communities that had no access to industrialized food and found thiese peoples in good health. When modern foods were introduced their health declined.
He identified “displacing foods of modern commerce”. Key components were sugar, roller processed grains and seed oils.
He also identified the key role of fat soluble vitamins like A and D and what he called Activator X, that was only identified in the last twenty years as Vitamin K2. These three potentiate each other.
Seed oils were introduced into the human diet after the civil war and by the 1880s there were adulteration scandals internationally involving olive oil and lard. When Crisco was introduced in 1911 or 12, consumption really took off.
It was only after that that coronary artery disease became a problem.
Shadeburst,
The consumer isn’t king because the harvard medical board dietary recommendations inform everyone what they should be buying and selling.
And by that I don’t just mean a synecdoche where ‘Harvard’ is standing in for ‘the broad spectrum of polygon pseudopods in general’, the ‘original sin’ of 20th century dietary malpractice really kicked into high gear when two literal harvard academics were sponsored by a sugar industry conglomerate with a ‘grant’ of about 50,000 dollarydoos to ‘find’ that high carbohydrates were holy and fat was unholy.
Now, why would two lovers of ‘truth justice and the american way’ such as these fine gentlemen trade ‘scientific integrity’ for such a paltry sum? Well, it’s easy when you don’t actually care about fucking the amerikaner in the first place. If anything, they’d do it for free! But of course, as holy men of a greatly holy establishment, any remuneration appropriated from the supplicants for their efforts are naturally richly deserved in any case.
Goober: “Sorry, friend, but the human body is incapable of violating the laws of thermodynamics. I agree that there are all sorts of factors causing us to overconsume (shitty food being one of them), but the fact is, obesity is still the result of overconsumption.”
Jim; “It’s possible that the human body responds to different calories differently.”
I think that you’re both right.
The complicating factor is that you simply don’t absorb every calorie you consume. Excrement has surprisingly high caloric value. (About 5cal/gm dry.) Certain foods — such as nuts, unprocessed animal meats, and fibrous vegetables — aren’t absorbed easily or well, whereas certain others — like donuts and sugary drinks — are very easy for the body to process. Calorie labels can be deceptive.
See, e.g.: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/96/2/296/4576806
So if the label on a can of Pringles says “200 calories” and the label on a bag of almonds says “200 calories,” you might actually absorb 200 calories from the former, but you’d only absorb about 136 calories from the latter.
Calories In Calories Out is trivially true. The problem is it doesn’t help you make predictions about who will gain or lose weight. That’s why there’s more to it than CICO.
I actually don’t think we’re disagreeing here. I agree that the source of the calories is important for the vast majority of people. Eat 500 calories of french fries (an absolutely miserably small small amount of food) and you’re going to be hungry again in 20 minutes. Eat 500 calories of brocolli and…
…I actually don’t think that’s actually physically possible. Like, I don’t even want to visualize how much mass would be in 500 calories of brocolli, and I’d hazard a guess that most people actually wouldn’t physically be able to eat that much in a single sitting.
So yes, there are definitely confounding factors to making CICO easier or harder, but there was a guy that lost 50 pounds eating nothing but Twinkies to prove a point, and that point was that while eating good foods makes CICO way easier to accomplish (because you won’t be hungry all the damn time), it isn’t necessary. It just sucks.
CICO is king. It’s a incontrovertible law of physics. However, trying to obtain a caloric deficit eating french fries and twinkies is hard as hell.
So I really think we’re agreeing, I’m just stating that bad calories making CICO harder doesn’t make it not true. It’s true, no matter how hard it becomes, and you absolutely can lose weight eating nothing but french fries, it’s just going to suck to the point to where it’s insurmountably difficult.
Adept:
The “pooping out undigested calories” thing is supposed to be taken into consideration when the calorie calculation is written on the bag.
They put “net calories” on the bag, meaning that the 200 calorie bag of almonds probably has more than 200 calories in it, but that on average, you’ll get 200 calories from it and poop out the rest. So that’s accounted for.
As for the variation of efficiency of digestion between individuals, and the variation of burn rates, etc, that’s been shown to be real, but a small enough difference, person to person, to not really account for much. You’re talking about a point or two in BMI, not the difference between being healthy weight.
It did some sort of HTML code I actually wrote BMI below 25 normal weight, BMI 25 to 30 overweight, BMI 30 to 40 obese, BMI over 40 morbidly obese but used greater than and less than signs so it changed it to BMI 140, which I don’t think is physically possible… Weird.
Goober,
I thought that people had proposed such a system, but that it had never been implemented, and that labels still use the old Atwater method.
There is, apparently, some background here:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25033392-800-calories-on-food-packets-are-wrong-its-time-to-change-that/
I could be wrong, of course.
There are many factors that are going into this, whether existent or merely conceivable, but the fellows at SlimeMoldTimeMold have done a good job of covering them all together in one place. (http://achemicalhunger.com/)
The BMI formula as a diagnostic tool has a fundamental flaw in that it defines all weight as fat, and makes no distinction between muscle and fat.
This is critical, since muscle growth is the largest, most important, and in many respects only, means of increasing your bodies basal metabolic rate, which is in turn the basic key of not just yo-yoing, but actually maintaining a healthy body composition, reducing visceral fat levels, and keeping it off indefinitely.
James James: “Calories In Calories Out is trivially true. The problem is it doesn’t help you make predictions about who will gain or lose weight. That’s why there’s more to it than CICO.”
I salute, and envy, your pith.
Jerrold: “I agree, no coincidence. But this degeneration goes back over a hundred years. Weston A Price’s book on this was published about 1940. He traveled the world to isolated communities that had no access to industrialized food and found these peoples in good health. When modern foods were introduced their health declined. [...] Seed oils were introduced into the human diet after the civil war and by the 1880s there were adulteration scandals internationally involving olive oil and lard. When Crisco was introduced in 1911 or 12, consumption really took off. It was only after that that coronary artery disease became a problem.”
Nutrition and Physical Degeneration is a gem, one of the most important books of the past century.
It’s possible, however, that white people are more adapted to these things than hunter-gatherer groups. That isn’t to say that whites are immune (just visit any Walmart and look around) but that the effects of a moderate (by our standards) amount of sugar or corn or wheat causes them to blow up. Recall Benjamin Franklin’s musings on the Indians and their “firewater”.
I think that it’s probably related to seed oils, sugar, wheat, etc., but that doesn’t explain (and I don’t know how to explain) why the effects appear to be exponential: there was a small population-wide decline in health between 1900-1970, a modest decline between 1970-1985, an acceleration from 1985 to 2000, and an absolute fucking collapse since.
We need federal or state capital-I Intervention, frankly. The only problem is that the feds and the staties are functionally retarded when it comes to health, and eat the same slop and are just as fat as everyone else.