When I'm manic, I get very, very skinny, sometimes frighteningly so. When I'm on meds, I get fat. I'm not trying to get thinner in the former instance, and I'm REALLY not trying to get fat in the latter - I have worked so, so hard with diet and exercise, and I can never win against the effects of my meds. And these experiences have made me forever aware that the moralizing vision of obesity is just fucking wrong. Our bodies react very differently to similar behaviors when it comes to weight loss. What cruelty to tell people who have found something that finally works that it's "spiritually deadening" or whatever the fuck.
I lost 90lbs in 2008-9. I kept most of it off over the subsequent 15+ years. Getting to the low point was easy compared to staying at the low point, which was impossible. I gained and lost the same 30 pounds roughly ~10 times between 2009 and 2025. The gaining happened notwithstanding the fact that I knew I "never wanted to go back" and "always had to be on a diet." My appetite was such that it was trivially easy to overeat even the nutritious food that makes up 95+% of my diet. The losing was always an absolute fucking grind. I knew I could do it and I knew how to do it--it just sucked to have to do.
I got a script for tirzepatide in 2025 and it has been transformative for me. I am *effortlessly* at a body weight I would have struggled to maintain pre-GLP1. In the past, I would deny myself foods I love like pizza because of my penchant for overeating--"one slice becomes five slices and eventually those 30lbs come back." Now I can have a single slice of pizza and not be obsessed about whether I can have another.
I've done it the hard way. I've experienced the satisfaction of hard work leading to a desirable outcome. Tierzepatide is so much better. If I saw Arthur Brooks, I would slap him in his stupid fucking face.
Over the course of about 4 years I lost 270lbs, going from 522 to 250. I reached my low last April and it was great, but I’m now back up to around 325, having regained 70-80lbs in about 8-9 months.
The problem I ran into was that 1) my willpower was exhausted but 2) I still have that disregulated appetite that made me super obese to begin with. If I eat a very bland, low processed, high protein, low carb diet, I can kinda keep my hunger and eating in check. During my loss I locked down my whole life and oriented my entire self towards my #1 goal of weight loss. Once I’m in maintenance the decisions of when to abstain and when to indulge become arbitrary in a way that’s been hard for me to navigate. So if I allow more foods in, it’s a real short road to get to my body urging me to eat 1-3k calories OVER my maintenance. My body and mind just orient me towards eating, mostly junk food, but eating a lot nonetheless. And I’m now in a position where I can’t make weightloss my all-embodying life orientation anymore, so it’s been hard!
So while it’s been disheartening to regain and have to do it again, I’ve got a doc appointment coming about getting on a GLP. I showed I can do the work, can build the discipline, but I can now take a drug that fixes the exact thing that’s wrong with me. I’m planning to write about my experience after, I’d love to live a life not dominated by my struggle with food anymore.
yes, I'm in the same boat. My weight never got so high, but pretty much the only way I've found to lose weight is to stay on a pretty strict low carb diet. When I do the weight comes off. But this is REALLY hard to stay on long term.
But if (when) I break diet it the one nice dinner turns into some desert the next night turns into me buying a bunch of junk food every day within a week or two.
Currently I'm back on diet, I actually made it all the way through the holidays without cheating.
I feel this man! It's like there's an extremely narrow tight rope I need to walk on to keep it in check. Like it seems like you have a similar experience, on Thursday you're fretting over having an extra 120 calories of vegetables because you're a little "real" hungry, but then on Saturday you can do a grocery store haul of 6k calories for your "psychological" hunger. The switch flips and it takes over, and you know you weren't even going hard enough in restriction for it to be a real rebound.
And even then, I feel like we don't have good language to describe all of this. Like in the previous paragraph I tried to distinguish between different hungers. I know what real hunger feels like, it's not real hunger most of the time, at least for me. It's just that I desire to eat, it consumes my thoughts. When I walk the tightrope I don't have these consuming feelings and orientation towards food, but I'm currently deep in it again and hate it.
I empirically know cookie is bad for me right now, I know cookie will make me feel bad both physically and psychologically in this moment, and yet all my body is currently oriented towards is getting cookie, many cookies. I know how to eat healthy and can feel the benefits, it's just that my body really pulls me to do otherwise if I don't stay super strict with my eating.
I feel that so much, I've often used that analogy. And it's especially hard because you're tempted everyday, multiple times a day. Even if you engineer your life to not be tempted there will always be a special occasion that warrants a treat. You feel great, diet's great, doing good in the gym, it's all good what can one thing harm? And then a week later you're wondering how you even stayed on the diet in the first place, desperately trying to get a streak going again.
In addition to Freddie’s great point above, why does Brooks think that overweight people aren’t struggling and achieving at *other things entirely*? I’m not going to give up playing my instrument or learning languages in order to instead spend those hours for a chance at getting thinner. I think I would be much less happy if I exchanged my hobbies for different hobbies that I don’t like nearly as much.
"Users still need to follow a diet and exercise plan to achieve their goals"
I feel like this is misleading and throwing the haters a bone they don't deserve. I'm quite sure many people would lose weight on these drugs without making any (conscious) changes to their lifestyle whatsoever. I've been on tirzepitide for just over a year and I gotta say it would have taken great effort and discipline to maintain my original weight! I'd have needed to force myself to eat and change my diet to be more calorically dense - I'd need to make five trips per week to Paris Baguette to replace a meal with cake instead of my usual one. Maybe you can reach more ambitious weight loss goals by stacking changes in diet and exercise on top of the drugs, but if all you want is a healthier BMI, making zero effort besides taking the drugs seems like a solid option.
If I hit a wall, I'll increase the dosage. If I max that out, there are more powerful drugs like retatrutide coming down the pipe. I have little interest in spending hours of my life in the gym! I'd much rather spend my time engaging in the struggles I actually enjoy - sitting at my computer, crafting the perfect internet comment, optimizing Ultracube uptime in modded Factorio, or working on the next problem in Project Euler...
I'm never going to feel sorry for the people who lost and kept off weight through heroic effort and now watch with chagrin as millions of people do it easier. My sympathies are reserved for the ~20% of people the drugs don't work for. Hope they get similar solutions soon! If you do happen to be one of those people who has lost and kept off a bunch of weight through heroic effort, you should consider the drugs! Put that impressive capacity for effort toward becoming the next tech billionaire or solving hunger instead!
Lost 30% of my body weight (started around a 33 bmi) on tirzepatide with 0 effort, just eating what I felt like which was not much. Had to count calories to make sure I was eating enough. Have always exercised, fat or thin--health benefits of exercise are great but don't have much to do with weight in my experience.
Yeah, my sister (among others I know) have made very few changes and lost a lot of weight. They look better and feel better. But isn't exercising just a good on its own without even considering weight loss? According to the study cited in the article, the vast majority of people who kept the weight off just walked. I don't think they had to reorient their whole lives around fitness. I think most doctors recommend daily activity for people regardless of BMI.
On the "heroic effort", I did that! And honestly it took orienting my whole life around that. I don't want to do it again. I'm electing to go on the drugs now because I need to use my willpower on other endeavors that are much more worthwhile. It's hard to do other things when I have to use an amount of willpower day to day just to not indulge in an eating spiral that most other people just don't have, at least at this magnitude!
I don't expect anyone to take on a heroic effort just to live a normal life. Sure the tools are out there to do it without drugs, but at least from my experience I just got something in me pushing me to eat far more than what others are driven to eat. It's wild
The gym is great for you. But it won’t make an obese person lose weight long term without diet changes. Workouts just make you hungry. That’s why GLP1 drugs and weight loses surgery are so good for obese people. They work. And they make you healthier.
Obviously one should attempt a lifestyle only based treatment for weight loss first. But if it doesn’t work the first time , it should be augmented with medical intervention. And it should attempted prior to becoming obese , when one is just over weight.
We shouldn’t have untreated obesity in the USA. When somebody gets overweight and can’t get back down to healthy , we should be intervening prior to them becoming obese.
I'm one of those people who naturally maintains a fairly healthy weight without particularly trying (not notably thin, but not fat either). I was shocked when I heard from people about the idea of "food noise", the constant mental background chatter of wanting food, which GLP-1s quiet. I just don't experience such a thing; my bad eating habits are things like when I eat a bunch of unhealthy snacks or order take-out because my ADHD hit me and I forgot to prep dinner.
I've come to realize while listening to the stories of people on GLP-1s that most obese people just experience hunger differently and more intensely than I do. I think having ADHD and often discussing mental illness has helped my perspective on this. Different minds work differently. Most people don't really get why doing simple daily chores and keeping up with appointments is so difficult for me without my Adderall. I don't really get why eating a smaller portion and avoiding certain foods would be so hard for some people without their Ozempic. In both cases, we might be able to overcome these struggles and reach each other's baseline with an intense exercise of willpower, but I'm glad that we don't have to and can take the medications instead.
I feel like I could’ve written this almost verbatim. Interestingly, one thing that really helped my understanding of just how differently we experience the world was going through a period of not having my ADHD meds work properly and ending up with symptoms that were very different from my usual ones. My partner also has ADHD, and some of his symptoms are quite different from mine (way more time blindness, significantly more forgetfulness, etc). Despite him telling me that some of his behaviors that drove me a little nuts were because of his ADHD (and also being aware of them as common symptoms), there was a tiny part of me that somehow didn’t truly believe him. It was only after I went through a couple of months where my symptoms became more like his that I finally understood. Before, I’d never done things like going downstairs to grab scissors and then immediately forgetting why I’d gone downstairs. It was a very humbling experience, and as frustrating as the whole thing was, I’m actually really grateful that it happened and that I was able to have my eyes opened like this. I’m now much more careful about judging people’s subjective experiences. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to live with constant food noise, and it is infuriating that Brooks is dismissing this amazing medical breakthrough because he thinks we should all value the struggle more. Seriously, wtf.
That's true! When I first went on Adderall, I lost a small amount of weight, but I think my body has adjusted to taking it every day because I gained that weight back and I now have what I think is an average appetite. Even if I skip my medication for a day, I only feel a tiny bit hungrier than I do on it, so I don't think it affects my appetite much, but I know it's a common side effect for other people.
Something to keep in mind is that Adderall affects people with ADHD very differently than it does those without ADHD, in a way that may seem counterintuitive. For me, Adderall is very calming - it quiets my mind and body - and this is not at all how I understand people describing recreational use of amphetamines (the whole amped up thing, which is essentially the opposite of what I experience). In my case, the medication has at best a very mild appetite suppressant effect. Caffeine is a stronger appetite suppressant for me than Adderall is.
I think a lot of this bad argumentation comes from a sort of holdover puritanical Boomer anti-abundance thinking.
Silver bullets feel too easy, and their puritanism won’t allow them to accept these into their hearts, so they derangedly fret about the sort of material progress they’re ostensibly supposed to support.
I know two groups of people who have used GLP meds, the first group is categorically obese and trying to achieve a healthy weight, and the second group is already at a fairly healthy weight and trying to achieve a perfect body. The second group is the one Arthur is writing to, but he didn't frame his question correctly, possibly because, being a thin man himself that I assume circulates in privileged spaces with little obesity in sight, he didn't realize his own bias and therefor didn't know he was framing his question incorrectly.
I wonder what Brooks would think about me, someone who lost about a third of my body weight 10 years ago without meds or surgery, etc. I did that by changing how I eat and exercising more. Perhaps he'd consider me a person with "real character and strength." OK. But then I'd tell him:
Losing weight wasn't actually all that hard for me relative to other life experiences because I was in the unique position of having employer-sponsored health insurance for therapy that helped me change my habits, a cheap gym and grocery store directly across the street, a lot of free time & no kids, a boyfriend who helped me learn how to lift weights for free, and the energy of a 26-year-old. I was playing the weight-loss game on Easy Mode. A lot of people aren't.
I'd tell him that what *was* a struggle was having a binge eating disorder for years that was made only worse by the way people treated me when I was heavier, and the relentless internal battle I waged (and often lost) every day against the compulsion to annihilate myself with food.
If by taking these meds, someone reaches the same end state I did -- feeling better in their body and no longer having to wage that internal war -- I don't doubt that they will feel similar satisfaction. The ostensibly character-defining struggle doesn't have to be what you put your body through to change it; often it is what you've already endured in it. The accomplishment can be the choice you made to do something, anything, to feel better.
Your general point is of course correct. However, in comparing excess deaths that tend to come in old age, it is better to look at years of life lost rather than simply the number of people who die. I suppose in this case the statistics would be generally similar, although I suspect that relatively more people die of cancer when they aren't all that old.
We should also look at quality of life. Obesity saps that esp in old age. And it’s not just the poor patient suffering. The increased health care cost for a 50 year old with obesity or god forbid a 65 year old , is significant.
It’s very likely GLP 1 drugs will pay for themselves in the coming decades.
I think only fragile egos feel satisfaction for themselves because the thing is hard instead of in the thing itself. Probably a root of some kind of evil.
When I'm manic, I get very, very skinny, sometimes frighteningly so. When I'm on meds, I get fat. I'm not trying to get thinner in the former instance, and I'm REALLY not trying to get fat in the latter - I have worked so, so hard with diet and exercise, and I can never win against the effects of my meds. And these experiences have made me forever aware that the moralizing vision of obesity is just fucking wrong. Our bodies react very differently to similar behaviors when it comes to weight loss. What cruelty to tell people who have found something that finally works that it's "spiritually deadening" or whatever the fuck.
I lost 90lbs in 2008-9. I kept most of it off over the subsequent 15+ years. Getting to the low point was easy compared to staying at the low point, which was impossible. I gained and lost the same 30 pounds roughly ~10 times between 2009 and 2025. The gaining happened notwithstanding the fact that I knew I "never wanted to go back" and "always had to be on a diet." My appetite was such that it was trivially easy to overeat even the nutritious food that makes up 95+% of my diet. The losing was always an absolute fucking grind. I knew I could do it and I knew how to do it--it just sucked to have to do.
I got a script for tirzepatide in 2025 and it has been transformative for me. I am *effortlessly* at a body weight I would have struggled to maintain pre-GLP1. In the past, I would deny myself foods I love like pizza because of my penchant for overeating--"one slice becomes five slices and eventually those 30lbs come back." Now I can have a single slice of pizza and not be obsessed about whether I can have another.
I've done it the hard way. I've experienced the satisfaction of hard work leading to a desirable outcome. Tierzepatide is so much better. If I saw Arthur Brooks, I would slap him in his stupid fucking face.
Amen 🙏
Well said. I appreciate this perspective.
Over the course of about 4 years I lost 270lbs, going from 522 to 250. I reached my low last April and it was great, but I’m now back up to around 325, having regained 70-80lbs in about 8-9 months.
The problem I ran into was that 1) my willpower was exhausted but 2) I still have that disregulated appetite that made me super obese to begin with. If I eat a very bland, low processed, high protein, low carb diet, I can kinda keep my hunger and eating in check. During my loss I locked down my whole life and oriented my entire self towards my #1 goal of weight loss. Once I’m in maintenance the decisions of when to abstain and when to indulge become arbitrary in a way that’s been hard for me to navigate. So if I allow more foods in, it’s a real short road to get to my body urging me to eat 1-3k calories OVER my maintenance. My body and mind just orient me towards eating, mostly junk food, but eating a lot nonetheless. And I’m now in a position where I can’t make weightloss my all-embodying life orientation anymore, so it’s been hard!
So while it’s been disheartening to regain and have to do it again, I’ve got a doc appointment coming about getting on a GLP. I showed I can do the work, can build the discipline, but I can now take a drug that fixes the exact thing that’s wrong with me. I’m planning to write about my experience after, I’d love to live a life not dominated by my struggle with food anymore.
yes, I'm in the same boat. My weight never got so high, but pretty much the only way I've found to lose weight is to stay on a pretty strict low carb diet. When I do the weight comes off. But this is REALLY hard to stay on long term.
But if (when) I break diet it the one nice dinner turns into some desert the next night turns into me buying a bunch of junk food every day within a week or two.
Currently I'm back on diet, I actually made it all the way through the holidays without cheating.
But I'm sooo hungry (or really munchy).
I feel this man! It's like there's an extremely narrow tight rope I need to walk on to keep it in check. Like it seems like you have a similar experience, on Thursday you're fretting over having an extra 120 calories of vegetables because you're a little "real" hungry, but then on Saturday you can do a grocery store haul of 6k calories for your "psychological" hunger. The switch flips and it takes over, and you know you weren't even going hard enough in restriction for it to be a real rebound.
And even then, I feel like we don't have good language to describe all of this. Like in the previous paragraph I tried to distinguish between different hungers. I know what real hunger feels like, it's not real hunger most of the time, at least for me. It's just that I desire to eat, it consumes my thoughts. When I walk the tightrope I don't have these consuming feelings and orientation towards food, but I'm currently deep in it again and hate it.
I empirically know cookie is bad for me right now, I know cookie will make me feel bad both physically and psychologically in this moment, and yet all my body is currently oriented towards is getting cookie, many cookies. I know how to eat healthy and can feel the benefits, it's just that my body really pulls me to do otherwise if I don't stay super strict with my eating.
I equate it to being an alcoholic.
One cookies is too many, but a dozen is not enough.
I feel that so much, I've often used that analogy. And it's especially hard because you're tempted everyday, multiple times a day. Even if you engineer your life to not be tempted there will always be a special occasion that warrants a treat. You feel great, diet's great, doing good in the gym, it's all good what can one thing harm? And then a week later you're wondering how you even stayed on the diet in the first place, desperately trying to get a streak going again.
Get you some tirzepatide. For real. It's an amazing aid.
I've thought about it, but I have HUGE anxiety when it comes to taking new medications or supplements.
Didn't use to have that problem, when I was 20 I could and did take anything under the sun, but somewhere around 35 it developed.
So, at least for now, I will probably keep struggling. My current plan is 11 months of dieting, then a month of gluttony around Christmas.
It’s not new. GLP1 drugs are old enough to drink. The first one was approved by the fda in 2005. Sema has been on the market since 2017.
Millions on people world wide have used the drug for type2 diabetes. It’s a very well studied drug.
Ironically for Brooks *this post* made me very happy.
In addition to Freddie’s great point above, why does Brooks think that overweight people aren’t struggling and achieving at *other things entirely*? I’m not going to give up playing my instrument or learning languages in order to instead spend those hours for a chance at getting thinner. I think I would be much less happy if I exchanged my hobbies for different hobbies that I don’t like nearly as much.
"Users still need to follow a diet and exercise plan to achieve their goals"
I feel like this is misleading and throwing the haters a bone they don't deserve. I'm quite sure many people would lose weight on these drugs without making any (conscious) changes to their lifestyle whatsoever. I've been on tirzepitide for just over a year and I gotta say it would have taken great effort and discipline to maintain my original weight! I'd have needed to force myself to eat and change my diet to be more calorically dense - I'd need to make five trips per week to Paris Baguette to replace a meal with cake instead of my usual one. Maybe you can reach more ambitious weight loss goals by stacking changes in diet and exercise on top of the drugs, but if all you want is a healthier BMI, making zero effort besides taking the drugs seems like a solid option.
If I hit a wall, I'll increase the dosage. If I max that out, there are more powerful drugs like retatrutide coming down the pipe. I have little interest in spending hours of my life in the gym! I'd much rather spend my time engaging in the struggles I actually enjoy - sitting at my computer, crafting the perfect internet comment, optimizing Ultracube uptime in modded Factorio, or working on the next problem in Project Euler...
I'm never going to feel sorry for the people who lost and kept off weight through heroic effort and now watch with chagrin as millions of people do it easier. My sympathies are reserved for the ~20% of people the drugs don't work for. Hope they get similar solutions soon! If you do happen to be one of those people who has lost and kept off a bunch of weight through heroic effort, you should consider the drugs! Put that impressive capacity for effort toward becoming the next tech billionaire or solving hunger instead!
Lost 30% of my body weight (started around a 33 bmi) on tirzepatide with 0 effort, just eating what I felt like which was not much. Had to count calories to make sure I was eating enough. Have always exercised, fat or thin--health benefits of exercise are great but don't have much to do with weight in my experience.
Yeah, my sister (among others I know) have made very few changes and lost a lot of weight. They look better and feel better. But isn't exercising just a good on its own without even considering weight loss? According to the study cited in the article, the vast majority of people who kept the weight off just walked. I don't think they had to reorient their whole lives around fitness. I think most doctors recommend daily activity for people regardless of BMI.
On the "heroic effort", I did that! And honestly it took orienting my whole life around that. I don't want to do it again. I'm electing to go on the drugs now because I need to use my willpower on other endeavors that are much more worthwhile. It's hard to do other things when I have to use an amount of willpower day to day just to not indulge in an eating spiral that most other people just don't have, at least at this magnitude!
I don't expect anyone to take on a heroic effort just to live a normal life. Sure the tools are out there to do it without drugs, but at least from my experience I just got something in me pushing me to eat far more than what others are driven to eat. It's wild
Agree that line is misleading. One should do those things to prevent muscle loss but the weight comes off without it.
The gym is great for you. But it won’t make an obese person lose weight long term without diet changes. Workouts just make you hungry. That’s why GLP1 drugs and weight loses surgery are so good for obese people. They work. And they make you healthier.
Obviously one should attempt a lifestyle only based treatment for weight loss first. But if it doesn’t work the first time , it should be augmented with medical intervention. And it should attempted prior to becoming obese , when one is just over weight.
We shouldn’t have untreated obesity in the USA. When somebody gets overweight and can’t get back down to healthy , we should be intervening prior to them becoming obese.
I'm one of those people who naturally maintains a fairly healthy weight without particularly trying (not notably thin, but not fat either). I was shocked when I heard from people about the idea of "food noise", the constant mental background chatter of wanting food, which GLP-1s quiet. I just don't experience such a thing; my bad eating habits are things like when I eat a bunch of unhealthy snacks or order take-out because my ADHD hit me and I forgot to prep dinner.
I've come to realize while listening to the stories of people on GLP-1s that most obese people just experience hunger differently and more intensely than I do. I think having ADHD and often discussing mental illness has helped my perspective on this. Different minds work differently. Most people don't really get why doing simple daily chores and keeping up with appointments is so difficult for me without my Adderall. I don't really get why eating a smaller portion and avoiding certain foods would be so hard for some people without their Ozempic. In both cases, we might be able to overcome these struggles and reach each other's baseline with an intense exercise of willpower, but I'm glad that we don't have to and can take the medications instead.
I feel like I could’ve written this almost verbatim. Interestingly, one thing that really helped my understanding of just how differently we experience the world was going through a period of not having my ADHD meds work properly and ending up with symptoms that were very different from my usual ones. My partner also has ADHD, and some of his symptoms are quite different from mine (way more time blindness, significantly more forgetfulness, etc). Despite him telling me that some of his behaviors that drove me a little nuts were because of his ADHD (and also being aware of them as common symptoms), there was a tiny part of me that somehow didn’t truly believe him. It was only after I went through a couple of months where my symptoms became more like his that I finally understood. Before, I’d never done things like going downstairs to grab scissors and then immediately forgetting why I’d gone downstairs. It was a very humbling experience, and as frustrating as the whole thing was, I’m actually really grateful that it happened and that I was able to have my eyes opened like this. I’m now much more careful about judging people’s subjective experiences. I can’t imagine what it would be like to have to live with constant food noise, and it is infuriating that Brooks is dismissing this amazing medical breakthrough because he thinks we should all value the struggle more. Seriously, wtf.
An important note is that Adderall is a form of speed. So it's also an appetite suppressant.
That's true! When I first went on Adderall, I lost a small amount of weight, but I think my body has adjusted to taking it every day because I gained that weight back and I now have what I think is an average appetite. Even if I skip my medication for a day, I only feel a tiny bit hungrier than I do on it, so I don't think it affects my appetite much, but I know it's a common side effect for other people.
Something to keep in mind is that Adderall affects people with ADHD very differently than it does those without ADHD, in a way that may seem counterintuitive. For me, Adderall is very calming - it quiets my mind and body - and this is not at all how I understand people describing recreational use of amphetamines (the whole amped up thing, which is essentially the opposite of what I experience). In my case, the medication has at best a very mild appetite suppressant effect. Caffeine is a stronger appetite suppressant for me than Adderall is.
I think a lot of this bad argumentation comes from a sort of holdover puritanical Boomer anti-abundance thinking.
Silver bullets feel too easy, and their puritanism won’t allow them to accept these into their hearts, so they derangedly fret about the sort of material progress they’re ostensibly supposed to support.
David, could you stop slandering Boomers? Puritanical judgmentalism knows no age boundaries.
While that’s true of puritanical judgmentalism in general, I used the moniker because this specific brand is indeed unique to Boomers.
Millennials have a different brand of puritanical judgmentalism that’s not really relevant here, so it wasn’t worth mentioning anyone else.
I know two groups of people who have used GLP meds, the first group is categorically obese and trying to achieve a healthy weight, and the second group is already at a fairly healthy weight and trying to achieve a perfect body. The second group is the one Arthur is writing to, but he didn't frame his question correctly, possibly because, being a thin man himself that I assume circulates in privileged spaces with little obesity in sight, he didn't realize his own bias and therefor didn't know he was framing his question incorrectly.
Or maybe he's just a dick writing clickbait.
I don’t agree. I generally enjoy reading his writing. Also, this comment feels like something the folk on X would enjoy.
Minor correction to the intro - "Worst Take of the Week" is alliterative but not palindromic.
The acronym is a palindrome, which is what I think she was referring to.
WTOTW!
I wonder what Brooks would think about me, someone who lost about a third of my body weight 10 years ago without meds or surgery, etc. I did that by changing how I eat and exercising more. Perhaps he'd consider me a person with "real character and strength." OK. But then I'd tell him:
Losing weight wasn't actually all that hard for me relative to other life experiences because I was in the unique position of having employer-sponsored health insurance for therapy that helped me change my habits, a cheap gym and grocery store directly across the street, a lot of free time & no kids, a boyfriend who helped me learn how to lift weights for free, and the energy of a 26-year-old. I was playing the weight-loss game on Easy Mode. A lot of people aren't.
I'd tell him that what *was* a struggle was having a binge eating disorder for years that was made only worse by the way people treated me when I was heavier, and the relentless internal battle I waged (and often lost) every day against the compulsion to annihilate myself with food.
If by taking these meds, someone reaches the same end state I did -- feeling better in their body and no longer having to wage that internal war -- I don't doubt that they will feel similar satisfaction. The ostensibly character-defining struggle doesn't have to be what you put your body through to change it; often it is what you've already endured in it. The accomplishment can be the choice you made to do something, anything, to feel better.
Your general point is of course correct. However, in comparing excess deaths that tend to come in old age, it is better to look at years of life lost rather than simply the number of people who die. I suppose in this case the statistics would be generally similar, although I suspect that relatively more people die of cancer when they aren't all that old.
The obesity makes you old before your time.
We should also look at quality of life. Obesity saps that esp in old age. And it’s not just the poor patient suffering. The increased health care cost for a 50 year old with obesity or god forbid a 65 year old , is significant.
It’s very likely GLP 1 drugs will pay for themselves in the coming decades.
I think only fragile egos feel satisfaction for themselves because the thing is hard instead of in the thing itself. Probably a root of some kind of evil.