Weight regain after stopping GLP's

[tubby]

bbbilly said:

it seems like everyone shares a similar outlook, just positioned at different extremes. nobody disputes that GLPs are useful, necessary, and work. my sense is that what we're really debating is how much someone leans on them, not whether they should be used as a tool at all. personally, even at 1.25mg/week of my tirz, i'm in a far better headspace to make good choices when it counts and to stop myself from sliding into a binge. i refuse to let the meds go to waste or undo the progress i'm after, and that refusal is what snaps me out of the cycle. even during the 6 months i was off it, i understood that feeling hungry didn't obligate me to eat, so i simply repeated the same meals daily no matter what my hunger said.

others appear to lean entirely on the medication to get where they want. just compare how many threads sit in the fitness/nutrition category versus any other non specialized section here. quit the meds and naturally the weight returns. the same holds if you quit tracking food and/or exercise, and i doubt anyone disputes that. my own take is that leaning too heavily on them is what keeps those statistics accurate, and from what i've seen i'd bet the folks posting "im not hungry at all but im not losing weight" are exactly why 95% weight regain after quitting persists.

so for people like me, the lens is diet and exercise first, meds second, whereas (granted, most likely folks who'd be outliers in the studies, judging only from the limited comments on forums like these without knowing the full effort they put into weight management) the other lens treats meds as the heavy lifter and the only thing that works.

again im unaware of any studies on this subject aswell, but i've noticed a common pattern among naturally thin people: "ya im hungry but i dont have time to eat right now so ill just eat later." it's less about hunger cues and more about mentally recognizing what those cues mean, and i'd be curious to see the outcome if they had a super effective GLP that only silenced the food noise entirely, while leaving appetite suppression and gastric emptying untouched. what those studies would look like.

What lessthanhalf leaves out is that he treats every diet as if it were a calorie-restriction diet. Staying on a calorie-restricted diet over the long haul is brutally hard. Honestly, a diet where the only thing you alter is portion size — same foods, just less — may be the single hardest kind to stick with.

On the other side, I suspect you're not giving enough weight to how much GLPs do hormonally. The way you see it, GLPs are a tool that helps you choose better. Suppose, just as an example, that GLPs plus those better choices get you down 50 pounds and then you stall. Now imagine you quit GLPs completely at that point but kept up the better choices — maybe new habits that keep binging at bay. Chances are you'd put back part of those 50 pounds, maybe 10 to 20, and then stall again. I'm on board with your approach and your mindset, but it's worth admitting that what you've lost comes from 2 places: the better habits GLPs made possible, and the hormonal effect on weight.

 

[bbbilly]

tubby said:

bbbilly said:

it seems like everyone shares a similar outlook, just positioned at different extremes. nobody disputes that GLPs are useful, necessary, and work. my sense is that what we're really debating is how much someone leans on them, not whether they should be used as a tool at all. personally, even at 1.25mg/week of my tirz, i'm in a far better headspace to make good choices when it counts and to stop myself from sliding into a binge. i refuse to let the meds go to waste or undo the progress i'm after, and that refusal is what snaps me out of the cycle. even during the 6 months i was off it, i understood that feeling hungry didn't obligate me to eat, so i simply repeated the same meals daily no matter what my hunger said.

others appear to lean entirely on the medication to get where they want. just compare how many threads sit in the fitness/nutrition category versus any other non specialized section here. quit the meds and naturally the weight returns. the same holds if you quit tracking food and/or exercise, and i doubt anyone disputes that. my own take is that leaning too heavily on them is what keeps those statistics accurate, and from what i've seen i'd bet the folks posting "im not hungry at all but im not losing weight" are exactly why 95% weight regain after quitting persists.

so for people like me, the lens is diet and exercise first, meds second, whereas (granted, most likely folks who'd be outliers in the studies, judging only from the limited comments on forums like these without knowing the full effort they put into weight management) the other lens treats meds as the heavy lifter and the only thing that works.

again im unaware of any studies on this subject aswell, but i've noticed a common pattern among naturally thin people: "ya im hungry but i dont have time to eat right now so ill just eat later." it's less about hunger cues and more about mentally recognizing what those cues mean, and i'd be curious to see the outcome if they had a super effective GLP that only silenced the food noise entirely, while leaving appetite suppression and gastric emptying untouched. what those studies would look like.

What lessthanhalf leaves out is that he treats every diet as if it were a calorie-restriction diet. Staying on a calorie-restricted diet over the long haul is brutally hard. Honestly, a diet where the only thing you alter is portion size — same foods, just less — may be the single hardest kind to stick with.

On the other side, I suspect you're not giving enough weight to how much GLPs do hormonally. The way you see it, GLPs are a tool that helps you choose better. Suppose, just as an example, that GLPs plus those better choices get you down 50 pounds and then you stall. Now imagine you quit GLPs completely at that point but kept up the better choices — maybe new habits that keep binging at bay. Chances are you'd put back part of those 50 pounds, maybe 10 to 20, and then stall again. I'm on board with your approach and your mindset, but it's worth admitting that what you've lost comes from 2 places: the better habits GLPs made possible, and the hormonal effect on weight.

The core of what I'm getting at is this: GLP's have become so easy to get that the majority of folks only care about removing any need to think about eating — they wipe out appetite and food chatter entirely, and pay little to no mind to building decent eating patterns. That goes double in the grey market space, where a lifetime's worth can be bought for roughly what just a handful of months of the brand-name product would run you.

None of that is automatically a problem. I'm personally about to place an order for around 10 kits, and at the low doses I use, that ought to stretch somewhere between 20-30 years, depending on whether I dial up or down for cuts/bulks across those years — all for the price of about 6 months of my zepbound.

What I'm driving at, though, is that the studies showing people regain after stopping are a bit misleading, because so many go in with the attitude of "let the glp do all the work and ill eat whatever i want, i just cant eat that much of it" — so naturally they put the weight back on. It's the same as when someone diets purely to drop pounds for summer. They aren't really invested in holding onto that body composition; they just want to look good for the summer and then return to how they normally eat instead of altering their lifestyle.

Still, it would be interesting to learn why that 5% do succeed at keeping it off. Did they overhaul their lives completely? Was some kind of metabolic adaptation at play? To me that's the more promising angle here, rather than the fact that 95% regained the weight... which is what I'd expect from most people.

 

[Grogu]

tubby said:

bbbilly said:

it seems like everyone shares a similar outlook, just positioned at different extremes. nobody disputes that GLPs are useful, necessary, and work. my sense is that what we're really debating is how much someone leans on them, not whether they should be used as a tool at all. personally, even at 1.25mg/week of my tirz, i'm in a far better headspace to make good choices when it counts and to stop myself from sliding into a binge. i refuse to let the meds go to waste or undo the progress i'm after, and that refusal is what snaps me out of the cycle. even during the 6 months i was off it, i understood that feeling hungry didn't obligate me to eat, so i simply repeated the same meals daily no matter what my hunger said.

others appear to lean entirely on the medication to get where they want. just compare how many threads sit in the fitness/nutrition category versus any other non specialized section here. quit the meds and naturally the weight returns. the same holds if you quit tracking food and/or exercise, and i doubt anyone disputes that. my own take is that leaning too heavily on them is what keeps those statistics accurate, and from what i've seen i'd bet the folks posting "im not hungry at all but im not losing weight" are exactly why 95% weight regain after quitting persists.

so for people like me, the lens is diet and exercise first, meds second, whereas (granted, most likely folks who'd be outliers in the studies, judging only from the limited comments on forums like these without knowing the full effort they put into weight management) the other lens treats meds as the heavy lifter and the only thing that works.

again im unaware of any studies on this subject aswell, but i've noticed a common pattern among naturally thin people: "ya im hungry but i dont have time to eat right now so ill just eat later." it's less about hunger cues and more about mentally recognizing what those cues mean, and i'd be curious to see the outcome if they had a super effective GLP that only silenced the food noise entirely, while leaving appetite suppression and gastric emptying untouched. what those studies would look like.

What lessthanhalf leaves out is that he treats every diet as if it were a calorie-restriction diet. Staying on a calorie-restricted diet over the long haul is brutally hard. Honestly, a diet where the only thing you alter is portion size — same foods, just less — may be the single hardest kind to stick with.

On the other side, I suspect you're not giving enough weight to how much GLPs do hormonally. The way you see it, GLPs are a tool that helps you choose better. Suppose, just as an example, that GLPs plus those better choices get you down 50 pounds and then you stall. Now imagine you quit GLPs completely at that point but kept up the better choices — maybe new habits that keep binging at bay. Chances are you'd put back part of those 50 pounds, maybe 10 to 20, and then stall again. I'm on board with your approach and your mindset, but it's worth admitting that what you've lost comes from 2 places: the better habits GLPs made possible, and the hormonal effect on weight.

When it comes to calorie restriction, I'd likely be seen as a jedi master. It's the weight loss approach I default to, and it's worked for me. Still, I'm with you 100% that calorie restriction is hard. Tracking calories isn't simple and it's a real annoyance, yet 110 pounds later, this method has treated me well. Cutting calories means eating less food overall, and also changing what you eat, since you can't just keep eating smaller portions of the same foods and remain under your calorie target—that simply won't work.

I'm firmly of the view that to shed pounds, a person must take in fewer calories than they burn. To me, the specific diet matters less than simply eating fewer calories. So if someone does better on Keto, Paleo, Carnivore, Atkins, or any other plan, and that leads to fewer calories being consumed, then they should go for it. The key point, though, is that weight loss requires burning more calories than you consume.

tubby said:

bbbilly said:

it seems like everyone shares a similar outlook, just positioned at different extremes. nobody disputes that GLPs are useful, necessary, and work. my sense is that what we're really debating is how much someone leans on them, not whether they should be used as a tool at all. personally, even at 1.25mg/week of my tirz, i'm in a far better headspace to make good choices when it counts and to stop myself from sliding into a binge. i refuse to let the meds go to waste or undo the progress i'm after, and that refusal is what snaps me out of the cycle. even during the 6 months i was off it, i understood that feeling hungry didn't obligate me to eat, so i simply repeated the same meals daily no matter what my hunger said.

others appear to lean entirely on the medication to get where they want. just compare how many threads sit in the fitness/nutrition category versus any other non specialized section here. quit the meds and naturally the weight returns. the same holds if you quit tracking food and/or exercise, and i doubt anyone disputes that. my own take is that leaning too heavily on them is what keeps those statistics accurate, and from what i've seen i'd bet the folks posting "im not hungry at all but im not losing weight" are exactly why 95% weight regain after quitting persists.

so for people like me, the lens is diet and exercise first, meds second, whereas (granted, most likely folks who'd be outliers in the studies, judging only from the limited comments on forums like these without knowing the full effort they put into weight management) the other lens treats meds as the heavy lifter and the only thing that works.

again im unaware of any studies on this subject aswell, but i've noticed a common pattern among naturally thin people: "ya im hungry but i dont have time to eat right now so ill just eat later." it's less about hunger cues and more about mentally recognizing what those cues mean, and i'd be curious to see the outcome if they had a super effective GLP that only silenced the food noise entirely, while leaving appetite suppression and gastric emptying untouched. what those studies would look like.

What lessthanhalf leaves out is that he treats every diet as if it were a calorie-restriction diet. Staying on a calorie-restricted diet over the long haul is brutally hard. Honestly, a diet where the only thing you alter is portion size — same foods, just less — may be the single hardest kind to stick with.

On the other side, I suspect you're not giving enough weight to how much GLPs do hormonally. The way you see it, GLPs are a tool that helps you choose better. Suppose, just as an example, that GLPs plus those better choices get you down 50 pounds and then you stall. Now imagine you quit GLPs completely at that point but kept up the better choices — maybe new habits that keep binging at bay. Chances are you'd put back part of those 50 pounds, maybe 10 to 20, and then stall again. I'm on board with your approach and your mindset, but it's worth admitting that what you've lost comes from 2 places: the better habits GLPs made possible, and the hormonal effect on weight.

Research indicates that when glp-1 treatment stops, the typical regain is closer to 75% of the excess weight that was lost. That means even if new habits have formed, in a case where someone loses 50 pounds, builds new habits, and then halts glp-1 treatment, the regain would be closer to 38 pounds rather than 10 to 20 pounds.

 

[Flexon]

lessthanhalf said:

Flexon said:

Long-term success really comes down to changing how you live, and the food you choose matters more than anything else when it comes to losing weight. Moving your body is vital for overall wellbeing, yet it won't move the scale unless your meals keep you full. The answer is to eat foods that satisfy you. Without that fullness cue, you'll keep eating past what you need. GLP-1 may be useful for getting started on a healthier path, but it cannot be the sole adjustment.

Diet and exercise can definitely lead to weight loss. But based on the evidence, for almost everyone it fails over the long haul — only roughly 5% of those who shed a large amount of weight through diet and exercise, or through GLP's and then quit the GLP's, manage to keep it off, or keep most of it off, long term. Thousands of studies exist on this. From my perspective, that makes it not an effective treatment. Back when nothing better was available, it was certainly preferable to doing nothing, and even medium-term gains of 5 to 10% can benefit metabolic health. With GLP medications, average long-term weight loss is realistically around 20 to 29% for tirz or reta.

I believe the scientific evidence is fairly strong that in people with severe obesity the appetite control system is quite broken, and that weight loss does not repair it. If the system governing eating isn't functioning properly, then consuming satiating food in health-appropriate amounts won't deliver the right signals to stop eating. On top of that, after substantial weight loss, metabolic adaptation to lower calorie intake means maintaining weight requires eating considerably fewer calories than someone of the same weight who never lost weight. Weight loss also raises hunger signalling. These 2 effects, independent of faulty appetite regulation, make keeping weight off extraordinarily difficult.

Between 2022 and 2023 I dropped about 70kg through diet and exercise, without glp's. To hold my weight steady I had to keep intake at roughly 1600 kcal/day, and even with a very carefully planned diet I felt hungry nearly all the time. Going by past experience, regaining the weight sooner or later was the most probable result. Luckily, after around a year of that, GLP medications became available as an alternative.

GLP drugs assist with weight loss and are just as effective at maintaining it long term as long as you continue taking them. Obviously eating a healthy diet and exercising is a good thing, but weight loss and the health benefits of these medications do not require this to work. The health benefits are undoubtedly greater when diet is good and exercise is happening, but GLP medications do improve food choices without any effort. And make exercise easier and safer after weight loss.

So when you compare lifestyle changes with GLP therapy, one performs OK short term with extremely low long term success rates, while the other is more effective in the short, medium and long term at causing and maintaining weight loss. It really is that simple, one works, the other does not.

Dropping 70kg through calorie restriction alone is a serious demonstration of willpower. I'm curious what your meals actually looked like back then — which foods made up most of your intake? Did you cycle through various approaches? It's plausible that a different way of eating could keep you just as full while producing a comparable outcome. Experience taught me there's no single 'perfect' diet; whatever succeeds in one set of circumstances or period may fail in another.

Trial and error, plus fine-tuning, is unavoidable. So is reshaping behavioral habits — but that has to rest on reliable information. Sadly, the dominant nutrition framework may not be the correct one, which means taking a leap of faith and putting things the mainstream labels 'risky' to the test. Take certain peptides: BPC 157, for instance, is branded 'for research only', 'never trialed in humans', 'uncharted territory', and so on. Even so, a number of individuals have reported it helped them with various issues. My own n1 experiment found it completely useless for the ailment I was attempting to 'fix' with it (likely because my actual problem lay elsewhere), yet quite helpful for a separate debilitating condition I had no idea it might address.

 

[lessthanhalf]

I've had way too much experience with dropping pounds, unfortunately, and I dug into every piece of research I could get my hands on. The main issue for me was the constant hunger that came with trying to keep the weight off, but even worse was the intense, almost impossible-to-control hunger that would hit a few hours after eating high-calorie, highly rewarding foods, even if I only had a little. Once that kicked in, stopping was really tough, and I could regain a lot of weight fast.

Something was clearly going haywire with the appetite-regulating chemicals in that situation.

So I set out to create a diet that wouldn't set off that reaction and would keep hunger as low as possible. That meant going very high on protein—up to 50% of calories—with almost no fat, no high glycemic index carbs, and sticking to things like very lean meats, low-fat high-protein dairy, fruits, and veggies, and aiming for nothing above about 1.5 kcal/gram. It worked for losing weight and keeping it off. Once I figured out what was causing the uncontrollable hunger, I had to completely steer clear of those trigger foods, and I've kept that up for 3 1/2 years now. But without adding GLP medication after about a year, it was still pretty challenging. Other than being a bit lacking in certain fats, it's basically a pretty healthy way of eating. The diet was built to prevent quick changes in blood sugar and any strange hormonal or brain responses to those shifts, and it does a decent job of managing hunger—way better than getting the same calories from smaller portions of higher-calorie foods. A lot of this diet would get a thumbs-up from nutritionists, except for the very high protein and very low fat parts.

I'm convinced that you have to take in fewer calories to shed pounds, but it can get a little complicated. From when I started losing weight to when I finished, my energy expenditure fell by nearly half—I was dropping 6kg/month at first and then nothing at the end, all on the same intake of about 1600kcal/day, which is where it's been since. No diet changes the basic thermodynamics of weight; at best, they help with hunger or make things more bearable. Keto has some slight appetite-curbing effects, but not as much as GLP's. There's no free ride with any diet, though reta gets close by bumping up metabolic rate by 1-200 kcal/day, and slgt2is can make you excrete a couple hundred calories of sugar in urine daily.

Magical thinking is really widespread when it comes to diets and weight loss. If I try this new diet, this time it'll work, or if I sort out my eating habits, this time it'll work—even though everything from the rest of your life shows these attempts ultimately failed. I believe being truthful with yourself and admitting you have a weight issue isn't a bad move, and using a effective drug to handle it is definitely not a sign of weakness or giving up; it's just a smart, logical way to deal with a problem. And most of the time, trying to quit it after losing weight is more magical thinking. You became overweight for some reason or reasons, and those usually don't disappear—they're part of you. Accepting that and sticking with an effective treatment is how you break free from the diet-and-relapse cycle that almost everyone with weight problems goes through.

 

[staffn1]

In several Facebook trizepatide groups I belong to, many members report that they built solid eating routines and workout habits, and dropped a significant amount of weight while on the injection. But once they quit the shot—for various reasons—things went badly: relentless food noise and fast weight regain. A great deal of inflammation came along with that too.

 

[Flexon]

When obesity, poor diet, or infections from bugs or fungi cause damage that lasts a long time, the pathways that carry fullness signals can end up disrupted, as one example. The good news is that the body's capacity to repair itself is close to miraculous; the hard part is giving it the right conditions, whether through medication or other means.

Some individuals do fine on a high-protein approach, while others thrive on a high-fat one (70% of calories or above), ideally from saturated sources. This is roughly what works for me, though not without downsides. My issue came when I tried to hold my weight steady after cutting out everything except beef, salt and water. That approach improved nearly everything else, but eventually my gut, which had already reacted badly to other foods, started reacting badly to this one too. So I began testing ways to bring some of the problematic foods back in. It took a few years of adjusting before I landed on a diet I could keep up long term with only minor side effects, and I also added the occasional sauna visit to sweat out toxins.

 

[tubby]

Grogu said:

tubby said:

bbbilly said:

it seems like everyone shares a similar outlook, just positioned at different extremes. nobody disputes that GLPs are useful, necessary, and work. my sense is that what we're really debating is how much someone leans on them, not whether they should be used as a tool at all. personally, even at 1.25mg/week of my tirz, i'm in a far better headspace to make good choices when it counts and to stop myself from sliding into a binge. i refuse to let the meds go to waste or undo the progress i'm after, and that refusal is what snaps me out of the cycle. even during the 6 months i was off it, i understood that feeling hungry didn't obligate me to eat, so i simply repeated the same meals daily no matter what my hunger said.

others appear to lean entirely on the medication to get where they want. just compare how many threads sit in the fitness/nutrition category versus any other non specialized section here. quit the meds and naturally the weight returns. the same holds if you quit tracking food and/or exercise, and i doubt anyone disputes that. my own take is that leaning too heavily on them is what keeps those statistics accurate, and from what i've seen i'd bet the folks posting "im not hungry at all but im not losing weight" are exactly why 95% weight regain after quitting persists.

so for people like me, the lens is diet and exercise first, meds second, whereas (granted, most likely folks who'd be outliers in the studies, judging only from the limited comments on forums like these without knowing the full effort they put into weight management) the other lens treats meds as the heavy lifter and the only thing that works.

again im unaware of any studies on this subject aswell, but i've noticed a common pattern among naturally thin people: "ya im hungry but i dont have time to eat right now so ill just eat later." it's less about hunger cues and more about mentally recognizing what those cues mean, and i'd be curious to see the outcome if they had a super effective GLP that only silenced the food noise entirely, while leaving appetite suppression and gastric emptying untouched. what those studies would look like.

What lessthanhalf leaves out is that he treats every diet as if it were a calorie-restriction diet. Staying on a calorie-restricted diet over the long haul is brutally hard. Honestly, a diet where the only thing you alter is portion size — same foods, just less — may be the single hardest kind to stick with.

On the other side, I suspect you're not giving enough weight to how much GLPs do hormonally. The way you see it, GLPs are a tool that helps you choose better. Suppose, just as an example, that GLPs plus those better choices get you down 50 pounds and then you stall. Now imagine you quit GLPs completely at that point but kept up the better choices — maybe new habits that keep binging at bay. Chances are you'd put back part of those 50 pounds, maybe 10 to 20, and then stall again. I'm on board with your approach and your mindset, but it's worth admitting that what you've lost comes from 2 places: the better habits GLPs made possible, and the hormonal effect on weight.

When it comes to calorie restriction, I'd likely be seen as a jedi master. It's the weight loss approach I default to, and it's worked for me. Still, I'm with you 100% that calorie restriction is hard. Tracking calories isn't simple and it's a real annoyance, yet 110 pounds later, this method has treated me well. Cutting calories means eating less food overall, and also changing what you eat, since you can't just keep eating smaller portions of the same foods and remain under your calorie target—that simply won't work.

I'm firmly of the view that to shed pounds, a person must take in fewer calories than they burn. To me, the specific diet matters less than simply eating fewer calories. So if someone does better on Keto, Paleo, Carnivore, Atkins, or any other plan, and that leads to fewer calories being consumed, then they should go for it. The key point, though, is that weight loss requires burning more calories than you consume.

tubby said:

bbbilly said:

it seems like everyone shares a similar outlook, just positioned at different extremes. nobody disputes that GLPs are useful, necessary, and work. my sense is that what we're really debating is how much someone leans on them, not whether they should be used as a tool at all. personally, even at 1.25mg/week of my tirz, i'm in a far better headspace to make good choices when it counts and to stop myself from sliding into a binge. i refuse to let the meds go to waste or undo the progress i'm after, and that refusal is what snaps me out of the cycle. even during the 6 months i was off it, i understood that feeling hungry didn't obligate me to eat, so i simply repeated the same meals daily no matter what my hunger said.

others appear to lean entirely on the medication to get where they want. just compare how many threads sit in the fitness/nutrition category versus any other non specialized section here. quit the meds and naturally the weight returns. the same holds if you quit tracking food and/or exercise, and i doubt anyone disputes that. my own take is that leaning too heavily on them is what keeps those statistics accurate, and from what i've seen i'd bet the folks posting "im not hungry at all but im not losing weight" are exactly why 95% weight regain after quitting persists.

so for people like me, the lens is diet and exercise first, meds second, whereas (granted, most likely folks who'd be outliers in the studies, judging only from the limited comments on forums like these without knowing the full effort they put into weight management) the other lens treats meds as the heavy lifter and the only thing that works.

again im unaware of any studies on this subject aswell, but i've noticed a common pattern among naturally thin people: "ya im hungry but i dont have time to eat right now so ill just eat later." it's less about hunger cues and more about mentally recognizing what those cues mean, and i'd be curious to see the outcome if they had a super effective GLP that only silenced the food noise entirely, while leaving appetite suppression and gastric emptying untouched. what those studies would look like.

What lessthanhalf leaves out is that he treats every diet as if it were a calorie-restriction diet. Staying on a calorie-restricted diet over the long haul is brutally hard. Honestly, a diet where the only thing you alter is portion size — same foods, just less — may be the single hardest kind to stick with.

On the other side, I suspect you're not giving enough weight to how much GLPs do hormonally. The way you see it, GLPs are a tool that helps you choose better. Suppose, just as an example, that GLPs plus those better choices get you down 50 pounds and then you stall. Now imagine you quit GLPs completely at that point but kept up the better choices — maybe new habits that keep binging at bay. Chances are you'd put back part of those 50 pounds, maybe 10 to 20, and then stall again. I'm on board with your approach and your mindset, but it's worth admitting that what you've lost comes from 2 places: the better habits GLPs made possible, and the hormonal effect on weight.

Research indicates that when glp-1 treatment stops, the typical regain is closer to 75% of the excess weight that was lost. That means even if new habits have formed, in a case where someone loses 50 pounds, builds new habits, and then halts glp-1 treatment, the regain would be closer to 38 pounds rather than 10 to 20 pounds.

The majority of people misunderstand this point. Simply following an online "keto" approach ("consume fewer than X grams of carbohydrates daily") does not ensure weight loss, yet certain more precisely adjusted keto variants work very well and don't require deliberately counting calories. Those locked into a CICO perspective believe this happens because the diet suppresses appetite, so fewer calories get eaten overall, but that explanation usually doesn't hold up. Some keto versions contain plenty of calories and still produce weight loss.

That said, I want to be clear that I don't view "keto" by itself as the answer. Instead, keto demonstrates that what we eat influences our hormones in ways that remain mysterious and not well understood. Supporters of keto point to the carbohydrate insulin model (CIM) to explain why a high-calorie keto diet can sometimes succeed, and this explanation appears valid under some circumstances, though not universally.

 

[tubby]

Grogu said:

tubby said:

bbbilly said:

it seems like everyone shares a similar outlook, just positioned at different extremes. nobody disputes that GLPs are useful, necessary, and work. my sense is that what we're really debating is how much someone leans on them, not whether they should be used as a tool at all. personally, even at 1.25mg/week of my tirz, i'm in a far better headspace to make good choices when it counts and to stop myself from sliding into a binge. i refuse to let the meds go to waste or undo the progress i'm after, and that refusal is what snaps me out of the cycle. even during the 6 months i was off it, i understood that feeling hungry didn't obligate me to eat, so i simply repeated the same meals daily no matter what my hunger said.

others appear to lean entirely on the medication to get where they want. just compare how many threads sit in the fitness/nutrition category versus any other non specialized section here. quit the meds and naturally the weight returns. the same holds if you quit tracking food and/or exercise, and i doubt anyone disputes that. my own take is that leaning too heavily on them is what keeps those statistics accurate, and from what i've seen i'd bet the folks posting "im not hungry at all but im not losing weight" are exactly why 95% weight regain after quitting persists.

so for people like me, the lens is diet and exercise first, meds second, whereas (granted, most likely folks who'd be outliers in the studies, judging only from the limited comments on forums like these without knowing the full effort they put into weight management) the other lens treats meds as the heavy lifter and the only thing that works.

again im unaware of any studies on this subject aswell, but i've noticed a common pattern among naturally thin people: "ya im hungry but i dont have time to eat right now so ill just eat later." it's less about hunger cues and more about mentally recognizing what those cues mean, and i'd be curious to see the outcome if they had a super effective GLP that only silenced the food noise entirely, while leaving appetite suppression and gastric emptying untouched. what those studies would look like.

What lessthanhalf leaves out is that he treats every diet as if it were a calorie-restriction diet. Staying on a calorie-restricted diet over the long haul is brutally hard. Honestly, a diet where the only thing you alter is portion size — same foods, just less — may be the single hardest kind to stick with.

On the other side, I suspect you're not giving enough weight to how much GLPs do hormonally. The way you see it, GLPs are a tool that helps you choose better. Suppose, just as an example, that GLPs plus those better choices get you down 50 pounds and then you stall. Now imagine you quit GLPs completely at that point but kept up the better choices — maybe new habits that keep binging at bay. Chances are you'd put back part of those 50 pounds, maybe 10 to 20, and then stall again. I'm on board with your approach and your mindset, but it's worth admitting that what you've lost comes from 2 places: the better habits GLPs made possible, and the hormonal effect on weight.

When it comes to calorie restriction, I'd likely be seen as a jedi master. It's the weight loss approach I default to, and it's worked for me. Still, I'm with you 100% that calorie restriction is hard. Tracking calories isn't simple and it's a real annoyance, yet 110 pounds later, this method has treated me well. Cutting calories means eating less food overall, and also changing what you eat, since you can't just keep eating smaller portions of the same foods and remain under your calorie target—that simply won't work.

I'm firmly of the view that to shed pounds, a person must take in fewer calories than they burn. To me, the specific diet matters less than simply eating fewer calories. So if someone does better on Keto, Paleo, Carnivore, Atkins, or any other plan, and that leads to fewer calories being consumed, then they should go for it. The key point, though, is that weight loss requires burning more calories than you consume.

tubby said:

bbbilly said:

it seems like everyone shares a similar outlook, just positioned at different extremes. nobody disputes that GLPs are useful, necessary, and work. my sense is that what we're really debating is how much someone leans on them, not whether they should be used as a tool at all. personally, even at 1.25mg/week of my tirz, i'm in a far better headspace to make good choices when it counts and to stop myself from sliding into a binge. i refuse to let the meds go to waste or undo the progress i'm after, and that refusal is what snaps me out of the cycle. even during the 6 months i was off it, i understood that feeling hungry didn't obligate me to eat, so i simply repeated the same meals daily no matter what my hunger said.

others appear to lean entirely on the medication to get where they want. just compare how many threads sit in the fitness/nutrition category versus any other non specialized section here. quit the meds and naturally the weight returns. the same holds if you quit tracking food and/or exercise, and i doubt anyone disputes that. my own take is that leaning too heavily on them is what keeps those statistics accurate, and from what i've seen i'd bet the folks posting "im not hungry at all but im not losing weight" are exactly why 95% weight regain after quitting persists.

so for people like me, the lens is diet and exercise first, meds second, whereas (granted, most likely folks who'd be outliers in the studies, judging only from the limited comments on forums like these without knowing the full effort they put into weight management) the other lens treats meds as the heavy lifter and the only thing that works.

again im unaware of any studies on this subject aswell, but i've noticed a common pattern among naturally thin people: "ya im hungry but i dont have time to eat right now so ill just eat later." it's less about hunger cues and more about mentally recognizing what those cues mean, and i'd be curious to see the outcome if they had a super effective GLP that only silenced the food noise entirely, while leaving appetite suppression and gastric emptying untouched. what those studies would look like.

What lessthanhalf leaves out is that he treats every diet as if it were a calorie-restriction diet. Staying on a calorie-restricted diet over the long haul is brutally hard. Honestly, a diet where the only thing you alter is portion size — same foods, just less — may be the single hardest kind to stick with.

On the other side, I suspect you're not giving enough weight to how much GLPs do hormonally. The way you see it, GLPs are a tool that helps you choose better. Suppose, just as an example, that GLPs plus those better choices get you down 50 pounds and then you stall. Now imagine you quit GLPs completely at that point but kept up the better choices — maybe new habits that keep binging at bay. Chances are you'd put back part of those 50 pounds, maybe 10 to 20, and then stall again. I'm on board with your approach and your mindset, but it's worth admitting that what you've lost comes from 2 places: the better habits GLPs made possible, and the hormonal effect on weight.

Research indicates that when glp-1 treatment stops, the typical regain is closer to 75% of the excess weight that was lost. That means even if new habits have formed, in a case where someone loses 50 pounds, builds new habits, and then halts glp-1 treatment, the regain would be closer to 38 pounds rather than 10 to 20 pounds.

Yet in my opinion, standard calorie restriction diets carry this core conflict:

A binging problem doesn't affect every obese person, though it is widespread. When someone does struggle with binging, comparing it to alcoholism (or drug addiction broadly) can be helpful. Telling an alcoholic "just limit yourself to 1-2 drinks per night and you'll be fine" is not how you help them regain control of their life. On certain nights they may manage to resist, but on many others they won't — and then the whole bottle is finished and their life is a wreck once more.

For the alcoholic, the key realization is usually that true control over that demon comes not from moderation, but from removing alcohol 100% from their life. Applying this to obesity is tricky because you clearly cannot remove food entirely from your life. What you can do, though, is build systems that cut off easy access to the types of food you tend to binge on, and make a deliberate choice to never eat those foods.

That is truly awful if those foods mean more to you than mere fuel, and for some people it's an absolute dealbreaker. Others turn to different control tactics — "cheat days," filling up on other (less binge-triggering) foods at meals before the binge foods, and so on.

You could probably sum this up by saying that to whatever degree binging (and similar) behavior fuels your obesity, plain calorie restriction will either fail or demand unending mental effort until it consumes your life. It is possible to succeed with it (and in my view you and lessthanhalf deserve gold medals for what you achieved), but (absent GLPs) that path means accepting the struggle for the rest of your life.

Every diet restricts something, but for me personally, diets that cut out entire categories of food (e.g. I simply won't eat X, Y, and Z) are mentally easier to handle and stick with than diets that keep all the same foods but have you eat less. Clearly, that isn't true for everyone. I bring it up only because most people won't truly know how they respond to different approaches without actually trying them for several months and seeing what emerges from each.

 

[Grogu]

tubby said:

Grogu said:

tubby said:

bbbilly said:

it seems like everyone shares a similar outlook, just positioned at different extremes. nobody disputes that GLPs are useful, necessary, and work. my sense is that what we're really debating is how much someone leans on them, not whether they should be used as a tool at all. personally, even at 1.25mg/week of my tirz, i'm in a far better headspace to make good choices when it counts and to stop myself from sliding into a binge. i refuse to let the meds go to waste or undo the progress i'm after, and that refusal is what snaps me out of the cycle. even during the 6 months i was off it, i understood that feeling hungry didn't obligate me to eat, so i simply repeated the same meals daily no matter what my hunger said.

others appear to lean entirely on the medication to get where they want. just compare how many threads sit in the fitness/nutrition category versus any other non specialized section here. quit the meds and naturally the weight returns. the same holds if you quit tracking food and/or exercise, and i doubt anyone disputes that. my own take is that leaning too heavily on them is what keeps those statistics accurate, and from what i've seen i'd bet the folks posting "im not hungry at all but im not losing weight" are exactly why 95% weight regain after quitting persists.

so for people like me, the lens is diet and exercise first, meds second, whereas (granted, most likely folks who'd be outliers in the studies, judging only from the limited comments on forums like these without knowing the full effort they put into weight management) the other lens treats meds as the heavy lifter and the only thing that works.

again im unaware of any studies on this subject aswell, but i've noticed a common pattern among naturally thin people: "ya im hungry but i dont have time to eat right now so ill just eat later." it's less about hunger cues and more about mentally recognizing what those cues mean, and i'd be curious to see the outcome if they had a super effective GLP that only silenced the food noise entirely, while leaving appetite suppression and gastric emptying untouched. what those studies would look like.

What lessthanhalf leaves out is that he treats every diet as if it were a calorie-restriction diet. Staying on a calorie-restricted diet over the long haul is brutally hard. Honestly, a diet where the only thing you alter is portion size — same foods, just less — may be the single hardest kind to stick with.

On the other side, I suspect you're not giving enough weight to how much GLPs do hormonally. The way you see it, GLPs are a tool that helps you choose better. Suppose, just as an example, that GLPs plus those better choices get you down 50 pounds and then you stall. Now imagine you quit GLPs completely at that point but kept up the better choices — maybe new habits that keep binging at bay. Chances are you'd put back part of those 50 pounds, maybe 10 to 20, and then stall again. I'm on board with your approach and your mindset, but it's worth admitting that what you've lost comes from 2 places: the better habits GLPs made possible, and the hormonal effect on weight.

When it comes to calorie restriction, I'd likely be seen as a jedi master. It's the weight loss approach I default to, and it's worked for me. Still, I'm with you 100% that calorie restriction is hard. Tracking calories isn't simple and it's a real annoyance, yet 110 pounds later, this method has treated me well. Cutting calories means eating less food overall, and also changing what you eat, since you can't just keep eating smaller portions of the same foods and remain under your calorie target—that simply won't work.

I'm firmly of the view that to shed pounds, a person must take in fewer calories than they burn. To me, the specific diet matters less than simply eating fewer calories. So if someone does better on Keto, Paleo, Carnivore, Atkins, or any other plan, and that leads to fewer calories being consumed, then they should go for it. The key point, though, is that weight loss requires burning more calories than you consume.

tubby said:

bbbilly said:

it seems like everyone shares a similar outlook, just positioned at different extremes. nobody disputes that GLPs are useful, necessary, and work. my sense is that what we're really debating is how much someone leans on them, not whether they should be used as a tool at all. personally, even at 1.25mg/week of my tirz, i'm in a far better headspace to make good choices when it counts and to stop myself from sliding into a binge. i refuse to let the meds go to waste or undo the progress i'm after, and that refusal is what snaps me out of the cycle. even during the 6 months i was off it, i understood that feeling hungry didn't obligate me to eat, so i simply repeated the same meals daily no matter what my hunger said.

others appear to lean entirely on the medication to get where they want. just compare how many threads sit in the fitness/nutrition category versus any other non specialized section here. quit the meds and naturally the weight returns. the same holds if you quit tracking food and/or exercise, and i doubt anyone disputes that. my own take is that leaning too heavily on them is what keeps those statistics accurate, and from what i've seen i'd bet the folks posting "im not hungry at all but im not losing weight" are exactly why 95% weight regain after quitting persists.

so for people like me, the lens is diet and exercise first, meds second, whereas (granted, most likely folks who'd be outliers in the studies, judging only from the limited comments on forums like these without knowing the full effort they put into weight management) the other lens treats meds as the heavy lifter and the only thing that works.

again im unaware of any studies on this subject aswell, but i've noticed a common pattern among naturally thin people: "ya im hungry but i dont have time to eat right now so ill just eat later." it's less about hunger cues and more about mentally recognizing what those cues mean, and i'd be curious to see the outcome if they had a super effective GLP that only silenced the food noise entirely, while leaving appetite suppression and gastric emptying untouched. what those studies would look like.

What lessthanhalf leaves out is that he treats every diet as if it were a calorie-restriction diet. Staying on a calorie-restricted diet over the long haul is brutally hard. Honestly, a diet where the only thing you alter is portion size — same foods, just less — may be the single hardest kind to stick with.

On the other side, I suspect you're not giving enough weight to how much GLPs do hormonally. The way you see it, GLPs are a tool that helps you choose better. Suppose, just as an example, that GLPs plus those better choices get you down 50 pounds and then you stall. Now imagine you quit GLPs completely at that point but kept up the better choices — maybe new habits that keep binging at bay. Chances are you'd put back part of those 50 pounds, maybe 10 to 20, and then stall again. I'm on board with your approach and your mindset, but it's worth admitting that what you've lost comes from 2 places: the better habits GLPs made possible, and the hormonal effect on weight.

Research indicates that when glp-1 treatment stops, the typical regain is closer to 75% of the excess weight that was lost. That means even if new habits have formed, in a case where someone loses 50 pounds, builds new habits, and then halts glp-1 treatment, the regain would be closer to 38 pounds rather than 10 to 20 pounds.

Yet in my opinion, standard calorie restriction diets carry this core conflict:

A binging problem doesn't affect every obese person, though it is widespread. When someone does struggle with binging, comparing it to alcoholism (or drug addiction broadly) can be helpful. Telling an alcoholic "just limit yourself to 1-2 drinks per night and you'll be fine" is not how you help them regain control of their life. On certain nights they may manage to resist, but on many others they won't — and then the whole bottle is finished and their life is a wreck once more.

For the alcoholic, the key realization is usually that true control over that demon comes not from moderation, but from removing alcohol 100% from their life. Applying this to obesity is tricky because you clearly cannot remove food entirely from your life. What you can do, though, is build systems that cut off easy access to the types of food you tend to binge on, and make a deliberate choice to never eat those foods.

That is truly awful if those foods mean more to you than mere fuel, and for some people it's an absolute dealbreaker. Others turn to different control tactics — "cheat days," filling up on other (less binge-triggering) foods at meals before the binge foods, and so on.

You could probably sum this up by saying that to whatever degree binging (and similar) behavior fuels your obesity, plain calorie restriction will either fail or demand unending mental effort until it consumes your life. It is possible to succeed with it (and in my view you and lessthanhalf deserve gold medals for what you achieved), but (absent GLPs) that path means accepting the struggle for the rest of your life.

Every diet restricts something, but for me personally, diets that cut out entire categories of food (e.g. I simply won't eat X, Y, and Z) are mentally easier to handle and stick with than diets that keep all the same foods but have you eat less. Clearly, that isn't true for everyone. I bring it up only because most people won't truly know how they respond to different approaches without actually trying them for several months and seeing what emerges from each.

What you're pointing at seems genuinely significant—each person has to figure out a path that fits them psychologically as well as physically. With alcohol, someone can choose to never touch it again; with food, that option doesn't exist, since eating is a daily necessity for everyone. That makes food a far messier problem than drinking.

Maybe credit cards work as a closer comparison than alcohol does. There are those who handle them wisely, and there are those who do better avoiding them altogether. Which approach makes sense really comes down to the person. Still, whichever route someone takes, the same basic rule applies: escaping credit card debt requires spending no more than you can actually cover.

 

[Calm Logic]

bbbilly said:

it seems like everyone shares a similar outlook, just positioned at different extremes. nobody disputes that GLPs are useful, necessary, and work. my sense is that what we're really debating is how much someone leans on them, not whether they should be used as a tool at all. personally, even at 1.25mg/week of my tirz, i'm in a far better headspace to make good choices when it counts and to stop myself from sliding into a binge. i refuse to let the meds go to waste or undo the progress i'm after, and that refusal is what snaps me out of the cycle. even during the 6 months i was off it, i understood that feeling hungry didn't obligate me to eat, so i simply repeated the same meals daily no matter what my hunger said.

others appear to lean entirely on the medication to get where they want. just compare how many threads sit in the fitness/nutrition category versus any other non specialized section here. quit the meds and naturally the weight returns. the same holds if you quit tracking food and/or exercise, and i doubt anyone disputes that. my own take is that leaning too heavily on them is what keeps those statistics accurate, and from what i've seen i'd bet the folks posting "im not hungry at all but im not losing weight" are exactly why 95% weight regain after quitting persists.

so for people like me, the lens is diet and exercise first, meds second, whereas (granted, most likely folks who'd be outliers in the studies, judging only from the limited comments on forums like these without knowing the full effort they put into weight management) the other lens treats meds as the heavy lifter and the only thing that works.

again im unaware of any studies on this subject aswell, but i've noticed a common pattern among naturally thin people: "ya im hungry but i dont have time to eat right now so ill just eat later." it's less about hunger cues and more about mentally recognizing what those cues mean, and i'd be curious to see the outcome if they had a super effective GLP that only silenced the food noise entirely, while leaving appetite suppression and gastric emptying untouched. what those studies would look like.

If it truly is nothing more than a "tool," then by that logic it could be swapped out for any other tool, which would make it pointless to use at any stage. By the same reasoning, someone could cover the distance from LA to NYC on foot rather than taking a plane. Perhaps a cross-country running message board would suit you better than a forum about GLPs.

On this forum, we've gone around and around on the tool argument with countless gym/Meso bros, and it stopped being amusing long ago:




A hard truth about GLP-1s and Body Transformations



GLP-1s can help with weight loss, but it won't give you the dream body or lasting results you're actually looking for. So let me drop some value that might save you from future disappointment. Weight Loss ≠ Muscle Building GLP-1s suppresses appetite and slows gastric emptying. You might get...

GLP1Chat.com




GLP-1s 'cheating' OR a TOOL



Hi all! I am having an interesting spiral of thoughts right now.. I see so many people online saying GLP1s are 'cheating'. But lets be real. How is it cheating if it isn't a game? This is life. This is my health and my journey in taking back my body and being able to live the healthy life I...

GLP1Chat.com

More often than not, it's those same individuals who are on every sort of "compound" (steroids), or at minimum on injections such as L-carn and HGH, or downing a mountain of oral supplements. In other words, they're relying on every available substance themselves, yet they turn around and lecture others about getting their act together.

You dropped 100 pounds on Zepbound, but apparently it's merely a "tool:"


/community-link/thread/12585/


Nearly everyone I know who is on GLPs now eats healthier than they did before. If anything, they also exercise more than they used to. So in certain respects, you're preaching to the converted. Still, being on GLPs doesn't stop you from doing all of those things as well. The two aren't mutually exclusive, and a few super-responders even microdose GLPs purely for weight loss. Then there are the anti-inflammatory or bloodwork advantages too.

 

[woundcarping]

Oxygen only serves as a fuel for cellular respiration — go the rest of your days without it and see how far you get.

 

[mainefungi]

Keeping up with the lifestyle matters. On top of that, tapering off should mirror how you increased the dose. At every stage, focus on building the ability to withstand cravings for food. An exit strategy is essential.

 

[woundcarping]

Once I reach my goal, my intention is to lower both how much I take and how often I take it. That said, I won't force myself through misery when nothing indicates an exit plan is truly required for long-term success.

My exit plan spans 50 years, though I doubt that's the kind you mean.

 

[Calm Logic]

mainefungi said:

Keeping up with the lifestyle matters. On top of that, tapering off should mirror how you increased the dose. At every stage, focus on building the ability to withstand cravings for food. An exit strategy is essential.

Focus on yourself. You handle your own stuff, doc.

 

[trojanpeptide]

There's a bit of extra padding on me, not a big deal, and I ought to get back to lifting (my weights are packed away right now since I've spent the winter renovating my basement). Even if I do reach my target weight, quitting isn't in my plans. I might step down to a single injection per week rather than the 2 split doses I do now, and possibly lower my 3.5 mg weekly total, but absent long-term evidence of harm, stopping doesn't seem justified. This video is one I've passed along to several people. Whether this Quinn Stillson is the real deal is unclear—everyone's trying to make a buck, so maybe he's shilling—but even so, it's an entertaining watch for us pep-heads. So, which peptide took 1st place? That's exactly my point.

 

[tubby]

Grogu said:

tubby said:

Grogu said:

tubby said:

bbbilly said:

it seems like everyone shares a similar outlook, just positioned at different extremes. nobody disputes that GLPs are useful, necessary, and work. my sense is that what we're really debating is how much someone leans on them, not whether they should be used as a tool at all. personally, even at 1.25mg/week of my tirz, i'm in a far better headspace to make good choices when it counts and to stop myself from sliding into a binge. i refuse to let the meds go to waste or undo the progress i'm after, and that refusal is what snaps me out of the cycle. even during the 6 months i was off it, i understood that feeling hungry didn't obligate me to eat, so i simply repeated the same meals daily no matter what my hunger said.

others appear to lean entirely on the medication to get where they want. just compare how many threads sit in the fitness/nutrition category versus any other non specialized section here. quit the meds and naturally the weight returns. the same holds if you quit tracking food and/or exercise, and i doubt anyone disputes that. my own take is that leaning too heavily on them is what keeps those statistics accurate, and from what i've seen i'd bet the folks posting "im not hungry at all but im not losing weight" are exactly why 95% weight regain after quitting persists.

so for people like me, the lens is diet and exercise first, meds second, whereas (granted, most likely folks who'd be outliers in the studies, judging only from the limited comments on forums like these without knowing the full effort they put into weight management) the other lens treats meds as the heavy lifter and the only thing that works.

again im unaware of any studies on this subject aswell, but i've noticed a common pattern among naturally thin people: "ya im hungry but i dont have time to eat right now so ill just eat later." it's less about hunger cues and more about mentally recognizing what those cues mean, and i'd be curious to see the outcome if they had a super effective GLP that only silenced the food noise entirely, while leaving appetite suppression and gastric emptying untouched. what those studies would look like.

What lessthanhalf leaves out is that he treats every diet as if it were a calorie-restriction diet. Staying on a calorie-restricted diet over the long haul is brutally hard. Honestly, a diet where the only thing you alter is portion size — same foods, just less — may be the single hardest kind to stick with.

On the other side, I suspect you're not giving enough weight to how much GLPs do hormonally. The way you see it, GLPs are a tool that helps you choose better. Suppose, just as an example, that GLPs plus those better choices get you down 50 pounds and then you stall. Now imagine you quit GLPs completely at that point but kept up the better choices — maybe new habits that keep binging at bay. Chances are you'd put back part of those 50 pounds, maybe 10 to 20, and then stall again. I'm on board with your approach and your mindset, but it's worth admitting that what you've lost comes from 2 places: the better habits GLPs made possible, and the hormonal effect on weight.

When it comes to calorie restriction, I'd likely be seen as a jedi master. It's the weight loss approach I default to, and it's worked for me. Still, I'm with you 100% that calorie restriction is hard. Tracking calories isn't simple and it's a real annoyance, yet 110 pounds later, this method has treated me well. Cutting calories means eating less food overall, and also changing what you eat, since you can't just keep eating smaller portions of the same foods and remain under your calorie target—that simply won't work.

I'm firmly of the view that to shed pounds, a person must take in fewer calories than they burn. To me, the specific diet matters less than simply eating fewer calories. So if someone does better on Keto, Paleo, Carnivore, Atkins, or any other plan, and that leads to fewer calories being consumed, then they should go for it. The key point, though, is that weight loss requires burning more calories than you consume.

tubby said:

bbbilly said:

it seems like everyone shares a similar outlook, just positioned at different extremes. nobody disputes that GLPs are useful, necessary, and work. my sense is that what we're really debating is how much someone leans on them, not whether they should be used as a tool at all. personally, even at 1.25mg/week of my tirz, i'm in a far better headspace to make good choices when it counts and to stop myself from sliding into a binge. i refuse to let the meds go to waste or undo the progress i'm after, and that refusal is what snaps me out of the cycle. even during the 6 months i was off it, i understood that feeling hungry didn't obligate me to eat, so i simply repeated the same meals daily no matter what my hunger said.

others appear to lean entirely on the medication to get where they want. just compare how many threads sit in the fitness/nutrition category versus any other non specialized section here. quit the meds and naturally the weight returns. the same holds if you quit tracking food and/or exercise, and i doubt anyone disputes that. my own take is that leaning too heavily on them is what keeps those statistics accurate, and from what i've seen i'd bet the folks posting "im not hungry at all but im not losing weight" are exactly why 95% weight regain after quitting persists.

so for people like me, the lens is diet and exercise first, meds second, whereas (granted, most likely folks who'd be outliers in the studies, judging only from the limited comments on forums like these without knowing the full effort they put into weight management) the other lens treats meds as the heavy lifter and the only thing that works.

again im unaware of any studies on this subject aswell, but i've noticed a common pattern among naturally thin people: "ya im hungry but i dont have time to eat right now so ill just eat later." it's less about hunger cues and more about mentally recognizing what those cues mean, and i'd be curious to see the outcome if they had a super effective GLP that only silenced the food noise entirely, while leaving appetite suppression and gastric emptying untouched. what those studies would look like.

What lessthanhalf leaves out is that he treats every diet as if it were a calorie-restriction diet. Staying on a calorie-restricted diet over the long haul is brutally hard. Honestly, a diet where the only thing you alter is portion size — same foods, just less — may be the single hardest kind to stick with.

On the other side, I suspect you're not giving enough weight to how much GLPs do hormonally. The way you see it, GLPs are a tool that helps you choose better. Suppose, just as an example, that GLPs plus those better choices get you down 50 pounds and then you stall. Now imagine you quit GLPs completely at that point but kept up the better choices — maybe new habits that keep binging at bay. Chances are you'd put back part of those 50 pounds, maybe 10 to 20, and then stall again. I'm on board with your approach and your mindset, but it's worth admitting that what you've lost comes from 2 places: the better habits GLPs made possible, and the hormonal effect on weight.

Research indicates that when glp-1 treatment stops, the typical regain is closer to 75% of the excess weight that was lost. That means even if new habits have formed, in a case where someone loses 50 pounds, builds new habits, and then halts glp-1 treatment, the regain would be closer to 38 pounds rather than 10 to 20 pounds.

Yet in my opinion, standard calorie restriction diets carry this core conflict:

A binging problem doesn't affect every obese person, though it is widespread. When someone does struggle with binging, comparing it to alcoholism (or drug addiction broadly) can be helpful. Telling an alcoholic "just limit yourself to 1-2 drinks per night and you'll be fine" is not how you help them regain control of their life. On certain nights they may manage to resist, but on many others they won't — and then the whole bottle is finished and their life is a wreck once more.

For the alcoholic, the key realization is usually that true control over that demon comes not from moderation, but from removing alcohol 100% from their life. Applying this to obesity is tricky because you clearly cannot remove food entirely from your life. What you can do, though, is build systems that cut off easy access to the types of food you tend to binge on, and make a deliberate choice to never eat those foods.

That is truly awful if those foods mean more to you than mere fuel, and for some people it's an absolute dealbreaker. Others turn to different control tactics — "cheat days," filling up on other (less binge-triggering) foods at meals before the binge foods, and so on.

You could probably sum this up by saying that to whatever degree binging (and similar) behavior fuels your obesity, plain calorie restriction will either fail or demand unending mental effort until it consumes your life. It is possible to succeed with it (and in my view you and lessthanhalf deserve gold medals for what you achieved), but (absent GLPs) that path means accepting the struggle for the rest of your life.

Every diet restricts something, but for me personally, diets that cut out entire categories of food (e.g. I simply won't eat X, Y, and Z) are mentally easier to handle and stick with than diets that keep all the same foods but have you eat less. Clearly, that isn't true for everyone. I bring it up only because most people won't truly know how they respond to different approaches without actually trying them for several months and seeing what emerges from each.

What you're pointing at seems genuinely significant—each person has to figure out a path that fits them psychologically as well as physically. With alcohol, someone can choose to never touch it again; with food, that option doesn't exist, since eating is a daily necessity for everyone. That makes food a far messier problem than drinking.

Maybe credit cards work as a closer comparison than alcohol does. There are those who handle them wisely, and there are those who do better avoiding them altogether. Which approach makes sense really comes down to the person. Still, whichever route someone takes, the same basic rule applies: escaping credit card debt requires spending no more than you can actually cover.

Thanks for getting back to me, but I don't think you caught what I was actually saying.

What I mean is this: in the same way that booze sets off an alcoholic, it's possible that basic refined carbohydrates (pasta, pizza, crackers, and so on) set off someone who binges. Making a rule such as "these items won't be kept at home and I won't consume them while out" would mirror an alcoholic's rule of "I can have as many non-alcoholic drinks as I like, but no alcohol." The alcoholic still has to drink something (just not alcohol), and likewise the binge eater still has to eat something (just not the foods they often binge on).

I'm not saying you must or even ought to try this. I'm only offering it as an illustration of a diet style that works differently from "calories" or "eating less."

 

[tubby]

Calm Logic said:

bbbilly said:

it seems like everyone shares a similar outlook, just positioned at different extremes. nobody disputes that GLPs are useful, necessary, and work. my sense is that what we're really debating is how much someone leans on them, not whether they should be used as a tool at all. personally, even at 1.25mg/week of my tirz, i'm in a far better headspace to make good choices when it counts and to stop myself from sliding into a binge. i refuse to let the meds go to waste or undo the progress i'm after, and that refusal is what snaps me out of the cycle. even during the 6 months i was off it, i understood that feeling hungry didn't obligate me to eat, so i simply repeated the same meals daily no matter what my hunger said.

others appear to lean entirely on the medication to get where they want. just compare how many threads sit in the fitness/nutrition category versus any other non specialized section here. quit the meds and naturally the weight returns. the same holds if you quit tracking food and/or exercise, and i doubt anyone disputes that. my own take is that leaning too heavily on them is what keeps those statistics accurate, and from what i've seen i'd bet the folks posting "im not hungry at all but im not losing weight" are exactly why 95% weight regain after quitting persists.

so for people like me, the lens is diet and exercise first, meds second, whereas (granted, most likely folks who'd be outliers in the studies, judging only from the limited comments on forums like these without knowing the full effort they put into weight management) the other lens treats meds as the heavy lifter and the only thing that works.

again im unaware of any studies on this subject aswell, but i've noticed a common pattern among naturally thin people: "ya im hungry but i dont have time to eat right now so ill just eat later." it's less about hunger cues and more about mentally recognizing what those cues mean, and i'd be curious to see the outcome if they had a super effective GLP that only silenced the food noise entirely, while leaving appetite suppression and gastric emptying untouched. what those studies would look like.

If it truly is nothing more than a "tool," then by that logic it could be swapped out for any other tool, which would make it pointless to use at any stage. By the same reasoning, someone could cover the distance from LA to NYC on foot rather than taking a plane. Perhaps a cross-country running message board would suit you better than a forum about GLPs.

On this forum, we've gone around and around on the tool argument with countless gym/Meso bros, and it stopped being amusing long ago:




A hard truth about GLP-1s and Body Transformations



GLP-1s can help with weight loss, but it won't give you the dream body or lasting results you're actually looking for. So let me drop some value that might save you from future disappointment. Weight Loss ≠ Muscle Building GLP-1s suppresses appetite and slows gastric emptying. You might get...

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GLP1Chat.com




GLP-1s 'cheating' OR a TOOL



Hi all! I am having an interesting spiral of thoughts right now.. I see so many people online saying GLP1s are 'cheating'. But lets be real. How is it cheating if it isn't a game? This is life. This is my health and my journey in taking back my body and being able to live the healthy life I...

View attachment 10664


GLP1Chat.com

More often than not, it's those same individuals who are on every sort of "compound" (steroids), or at minimum on injections such as L-carn and HGH, or downing a mountain of oral supplements. In other words, they're relying on every available substance themselves, yet they turn around and lecture others about getting their act together.

You dropped 100 pounds on Zepbound, but apparently it's merely a "tool:"


/community-link/thread/12585/


Nearly everyone I know who is on GLPs now eats healthier than they did before. If anything, they also exercise more than they used to. So in certain respects, you're preaching to the converted. Still, being on GLPs doesn't stop you from doing all of those things as well. The two aren't mutually exclusive, and a few super-responders even microdose GLPs purely for weight loss. Then there are the anti-inflammatory or bloodwork advantages too.

It seems to me you're hearing what you'd prefer to hear, not what bbbilly is really saying. Calling a GLP a "tool" fits quite well for what it does.

For plenty of folks here, staying on that tool over the long haul is probably the smartest route and the one with the fewest obstacles, especially for those who want to keep eating what you could call "modern" foods.

A different route involves treating a GLP like training wheels, letting you trial a way of eating that right now seems out of reach. Downside: this likely hands you an inflated belief in your capacity to keep up that diet once GLPs are gone, and from what I gather the withdrawal period will be brutal. Upside: I can't pull up the chart at the moment, but somewhere there's a fascinating waterfall plot showing weight shifts once people quit GLPs, and a tiny slice of them keep shedding pounds even after coming off it, which is genuinely surprising! Betting on landing in that small group isn't wise, yet it does demonstrate that this kind of strategy can work for some.

 

[Calm Logic]

"Opposite ends of the spectrum" — that's not ambiguous. And the "tool" phrasing wasn't my only basis anyway. Maybe I'm not the sharpest, but I recognize the gym bro type.

He makes plenty of assumptions about the folks in this space (or "some people," to use his wording), so I'll take the same license with him:




Weight regain after stopping GLP's



I thought this study was interesting Trajectory of weight regain after cessation of GLP-1 receptor agonists: a systematic review and nonlinear meta-regression https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(26)00043-X/fulltext It shows that people who lost weight on GLP's might...

GLP1Chat.com

Why does he expect more threads about nutrition or fitness instead of GLPs? This is a GLP forum, after all. It isn't a weekly diet debate board or gym bros united .com. None of that means the members here live on junk food or never leave the couch. Quite the reverse.

 

[tubby]

lessthanhalf said:

I've had way too much experience with dropping pounds, unfortunately, and I dug into every piece of research I could get my hands on. The main issue for me was the constant hunger that came with trying to keep the weight off, but even worse was the intense, almost impossible-to-control hunger that would hit a few hours after eating high-calorie, highly rewarding foods, even if I only had a little. Once that kicked in, stopping was really tough, and I could regain a lot of weight fast.

Something was clearly going haywire with the appetite-regulating chemicals in that situation.

So I set out to create a diet that wouldn't set off that reaction and would keep hunger as low as possible. That meant going very high on protein—up to 50% of calories—with almost no fat, no high glycemic index carbs, and sticking to things like very lean meats, low-fat high-protein dairy, fruits, and veggies, and aiming for nothing above about 1.5 kcal/gram. It worked for losing weight and keeping it off. Once I figured out what was causing the uncontrollable hunger, I had to completely steer clear of those trigger foods, and I've kept that up for 3 1/2 years now. But without adding GLP medication after about a year, it was still pretty challenging. Other than being a bit lacking in certain fats, it's basically a pretty healthy way of eating. The diet was built to prevent quick changes in blood sugar and any strange hormonal or brain responses to those shifts, and it does a decent job of managing hunger—way better than getting the same calories from smaller portions of higher-calorie foods. A lot of this diet would get a thumbs-up from nutritionists, except for the very high protein and very low fat parts.

I'm convinced that you have to take in fewer calories to shed pounds, but it can get a little complicated. From when I started losing weight to when I finished, my energy expenditure fell by nearly half—I was dropping 6kg/month at first and then nothing at the end, all on the same intake of about 1600kcal/day, which is where it's been since. No diet changes the basic thermodynamics of weight; at best, they help with hunger or make things more bearable. Keto has some slight appetite-curbing effects, but not as much as GLP's. There's no free ride with any diet, though reta gets close by bumping up metabolic rate by 1-200 kcal/day, and slgt2is can make you excrete a couple hundred calories of sugar in urine daily.

Magical thinking is really widespread when it comes to diets and weight loss. If I try this new diet, this time it'll work, or if I sort out my eating habits, this time it'll work—even though everything from the rest of your life shows these attempts ultimately failed. I believe being truthful with yourself and admitting you have a weight issue isn't a bad move, and using a effective drug to handle it is definitely not a sign of weakness or giving up; it's just a smart, logical way to deal with a problem. And most of the time, trying to quit it after losing weight is more magical thinking. You became overweight for some reason or reasons, and those usually don't disappear—they're part of you. Accepting that and sticking with an effective treatment is how you break free from the diet-and-relapse cycle that almost everyone with weight problems goes through.

From a hormonal standpoint, that way of eating might work just fine for a person aiming to keep a normal weight. That said, a subset of people who are obese and/or insulin resistant will find it really hard to shed meaningful pounds that way. What you've managed to do shows some seriously impressive determination, and combined with how well-informed and articulate your replies are, it earns a great deal of respect from me for you and for what you contribute here.

The difficulty I'm pointing at: even though you're centering low-glycemic carbs (which keeps blood sugar and insulin lower), a diet high in protein will still push and hold blood insulin levels above what a low-protein diet would. I'd guess you already know this, but other readers of this reply might not be aware that protein causes insulin to spike (search "insulin index" for more on that).

And a key disclaimer for others reading: while I might argue for restricting protein in a non-GLP weight loss strategy, that logic doesn't carry over when someone is using GLPs, and I would NOT recommend low-protein for weight loss on GLPs.

lessthanhalf said:

I've had way too much experience with dropping pounds, unfortunately, and I dug into every piece of research I could get my hands on. The main issue for me was the constant hunger that came with trying to keep the weight off, but even worse was the intense, almost impossible-to-control hunger that would hit a few hours after eating high-calorie, highly rewarding foods, even if I only had a little. Once that kicked in, stopping was really tough, and I could regain a lot of weight fast.

Something was clearly going haywire with the appetite-regulating chemicals in that situation.

So I set out to create a diet that wouldn't set off that reaction and would keep hunger as low as possible. That meant going very high on protein—up to 50% of calories—with almost no fat, no high glycemic index carbs, and sticking to things like very lean meats, low-fat high-protein dairy, fruits, and veggies, and aiming for nothing above about 1.5 kcal/gram. It worked for losing weight and keeping it off. Once I figured out what was causing the uncontrollable hunger, I had to completely steer clear of those trigger foods, and I've kept that up for 3 1/2 years now. But without adding GLP medication after about a year, it was still pretty challenging. Other than being a bit lacking in certain fats, it's basically a pretty healthy way of eating. The diet was built to prevent quick changes in blood sugar and any strange hormonal or brain responses to those shifts, and it does a decent job of managing hunger—way better than getting the same calories from smaller portions of higher-calorie foods. A lot of this diet would get a thumbs-up from nutritionists, except for the very high protein and very low fat parts.

I'm convinced that you have to take in fewer calories to shed pounds, but it can get a little complicated. From when I started losing weight to when I finished, my energy expenditure fell by nearly half—I was dropping 6kg/month at first and then nothing at the end, all on the same intake of about 1600kcal/day, which is where it's been since. No diet changes the basic thermodynamics of weight; at best, they help with hunger or make things more bearable. Keto has some slight appetite-curbing effects, but not as much as GLP's. There's no free ride with any diet, though reta gets close by bumping up metabolic rate by 1-200 kcal/day, and slgt2is can make you excrete a couple hundred calories of sugar in urine daily.

Magical thinking is really widespread when it comes to diets and weight loss. If I try this new diet, this time it'll work, or if I sort out my eating habits, this time it'll work—even though everything from the rest of your life shows these attempts ultimately failed. I believe being truthful with yourself and admitting you have a weight issue isn't a bad move, and using a effective drug to handle it is definitely not a sign of weakness or giving up; it's just a smart, logical way to deal with a problem. And most of the time, trying to quit it after losing weight is more magical thinking. You became overweight for some reason or reasons, and those usually don't disappear—they're part of you. Accepting that and sticking with an effective treatment is how you break free from the diet-and-relapse cycle that almost everyone with weight problems goes through.

I value the diplomatic way you flagged my dietary claims as "bullshit," and I see your point. Clinical research backing such claims is close to nonexistent, yet from my own experience and that of others, there is enough anecdotal evidence to suggest something real is going on (even if I don't think we've pinned down exactly what). As I mentioned, the striking outcomes some people get with keto (while at the same time not feeling much hunger) works as a proof of concept.

To be clear, I'm not saying thermodynamics gets broken, and after the fact (by definition) a calorie deficit clearly had to exist there, since that person lost weight. The real issue is that pursuing a calorie deficit (while still eating the same foods that didn't work well for you) is practically doomed to fail, much like you can't hold your pee in forever. You're battling a natural biological drive and you will almost certainly come out on the losing end. That isn't a moral failing at all, and on that point I agree with you.

But if a person stops limiting hunger and instead limits their diet in various targeted ways, they will almost certainly gain or lose weight under different strategies, until they hit a plateau with each new one. Each approach brings its own difficulties, obviously, and there's no promise someone will find a method that gets them to their target weight. That's exactly where GLPs shine (and why we're all here). Still, let's not act like different diets don't matter a great deal too, or that everything reduces to "calories." What you eat (or avoid) has major hormonal effects on your body and interacts in complicated ways. If you'd rather stay locked into a CICO framework, you could say those hormonal shifts affect CO, so that a calorie deficit is either gained or lost. You obviously can't prove that's right (beyond the definitional sense), because outside a metabolic ward with sophisticated equipment, CO is always an inferred quantity and not something directly measurable.