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In 2021 I lost a good chunk of weight the old fashioned way. From 250ish to 215. I did it with "good old fashioned working out and not eating more". It was a miserable, white-knuckle experience. I was eating healthy food, enough calories (moderate but sane deficit), but the only thing I thought about at all moments was getting to the next meal. What snack is low enough calories to have to make it. It was miserable. As soon as I let up a bit, everything unraveled and I found myself back in the 250s by the start of this year.

Now I'm on Tirzepatide (Zepbound), and I'm back to 235ish, and trending lower. I still work on eating healthy, but now I'm not just HUNGRY at all moments. My life continues, and I only have to make individual healthy choices at meal times, and grocery times, rather than a constant struggle at all waking moments. It's seriously a big difference.



> I still work on eating healthy, but now I'm not just HUNGRY at all moments.

I think this is something a lot of people pushing back against the GLP-1 agonists don't realize because they don't experience it: back before I started Mounjaro (another GLP-1 agonist) I was constantly hungry if I hadn't eaten a meal in the last 45 minutes. Absolutely zero hyperbole there - I once went to an all you can eat buffet, ate until I was over full, came home, and within about an hour and a half of that I was snacking on something because I was hungry. Not peckish. Not "feeling like a snack". Hungry to the point where that feeling intruded on my every thought until it was sated.

After starting Mounjaro that's GONE. Gone gone. I now have to set an alarm to remember to eat. It's absolutely phenomenal and likely the reason why I'll live past my forties instead of being stuck in that same cycle and dying of the effects of obesity.


> Absolutely zero hyperbole there - I once went to an all you can eat buffet, ate until I was over full, came home, and within about an hour and a half of that I was snacking on something because I was hungry.

I don't have any eating issues but that reminds me of the first time I went on a 7-day cruise.

There's nothing to do on the ship, and the food is free and pretty tasty, so... I basically ended up at the buffet eating and drinking all day long. Sausage and egg biscuits, banana bread, pot roast, steak, pasta, fried rice, cinnamon buns, they had everything. I was stomach-busting full, every minute of every day. I'd gorge myself on a huge plate of Indian food from the buffet, and then a few hours later head to another deck for a lobster dinner. Not to mention, drinking coffee, beer, and wine the entire time.

It was kind of insane. And what was crazier was after a few days of this routine I got used to it, and even looked forward to eating more food the next day. It was sort of like directly embracing one of the seven deadly sins to the maximum extent possible. I'm not sure what that experience means other than it seems like the the human body can comfortably arrange itself into a habitual downward cycle fairly rapidly.


It's because we're evolved for boom-bust cycles. Give it another 500,000 or so years and humans might evolve to cope with food always being available at all times.


Not only that, but type 2 diabetes makes you paradoxically more hungry - your body thinks it is starving because it cannot get sugar into its cells so it makes you MORE hungry which causes you to get heavier which often causes the diabetes to get worse which makes you MORE hungry which means you eat and get heavier and......


As someone who's never struggled with weight, it's been eye opening to hear how food focused a lot of peoples thoughts are. It was like on the same level as finding out some people can't visualize things in their minds.




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