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John C's avatar

Great post, glad you're healthier now.

100% agree on the stomach stretching thing. But I would add we have TWO fullness systems in our body. The stomach stretching one is the fast/short term one (that tells us to STOP eating).

The other one is from fiber in our colon. A healthy microbiome releases short chain fatty acids SCFAs when it digests soluble fiber (mostly from veggies, beans and fruits). When the colon has less fiber in it, it releases less SCFAs. When your brain is getting SCFAs, they make you feel contented and not hungry. This slow/long term process tells you when its time to go find more food. The START eating signal.

Bariatric surgery spoofs the first pathway. Ozempic spoofs the second pathway.

The low fiber diet in the US (processed and fast foods are mostly zero fiber) means the second pathway is telling many Americans its 'time to eat' all the time. Ozempic turns that signal down/off.

Or you can just eat 20+ grams of soluble fiber a day, by eating plenty of veggies, beans and fruit.

I'm guessing that your diet contains a decent amount of whole foods and fiber, that is why you didn't 'need' ozempic. If you were eating more processed junk, your outcome might have been different.

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drosophilist's avatar

Hi Noah,

Thank you for sharing your weight loss story! I'm sincerely happy for you.

You make a great point about willpower consisting of attention and pain resistance. As a counterpoint to your story, I want to share a bit about my weight loss attempts, which were very, very different from yours. (I'm a woman, so that probably makes a big difference because of lower BMR.)

I would absolutely freaking *love* my weight loss to be as easy as, "Pay attention = eat less = lose weight without ever feeling hungry." That's just not how my body works.

When I eat until I'm not hungry anymore, I maintain my current (excessive) weight. When I try to cut back "just a bit," it's the worst of both worlds: I'm hungry enough for it to be annoying, but my caloric intake is still high enough that any weight loss is too slow to be noticeable. It's extremely demoralizing and I give up.

The only times I actually succeeded in losing weight was when I was extremely strict about imposing eating limits. None of that namby-pamby feel-good "listen to your body" stuff, because my body clearly wants to be fat. No, it was "this is how much you're having for lunch, body, and if you don't like it too effing bad."

And it sucked absolute ass.

I would sit at my desk, trying to focus on the grant I was writing or the experiments I was planning, and all the time there would be a dialogue in my head:

"I'm hungry."

"You had lunch an hour ago."

"Yeah, but it wasn't enough and I'M FREAKING HUNGRY!"

"Quiet down. Snack is in two hours, you know this. You just have to last till then."

"But I'M HUNGRY NOW!!!!!"

And on and on like this, pretty much around the clock. You can imagine what it did for both my mood and my productivity. I couldn't just make those thoughts stop; they came unbidden. I could only resist them.

To make it extra fun, if I didn't eat enough I would get what I called a "hypoglycemic headache" - a really bad, unpleasant headache that made me useless for anything except menial tasks (no focusing on intellectual work with a hypoglycemic headache). Weight loss, for me, was surfing the very thin line between "hungry enough to lose weight at an appreciable rate" and "not so hungry that I trigger a hypoglycemic headache" (I learned to read the early warning signs).

So, Noah, I applaud your accomplishment and also ask you to recognize that you were extraordinarily lucky in how easy weight loss turned out for you, judging by your description.

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