this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
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You guys are talking about two different things. He says changing your diet is effective and it is.
You’re saying hardly anyone sticks with the diet changes after losing weight so they end up regaining the weight and that’s also true.
Though I’m going to add that a lot of the reason people fail to keep the weight off without drugs is we’re ok with companies outright lying about how healthy their product is. You should not be able to pretend that highly processed crap full of sugar is good for you. It’s really obvious that hardly anyone reads nutritional info and does the math on sugar content by weight.
There's also a ton of psychological aspects that make keeping weight off harder. Your brain will literally self sabotage you repeatedly because humans are designed to gain and keep weight, not lose it.
Adding more exercise? Well that must mean we need to eat more! Eating less? Well obviously we're starving, so now your brain will tell your body to move less. Lost weight for awhile? Clearly we need to slowly increase portion sizes over time.
Long term weight loss is a literally a struggle against yourself and your body does not want you to win.
The point was that the drugs help fight the effects of obesity by keeping weight off permanently. If dieting cannot do the same, then it isn't effective at fighting that threat. Losing weight for 2 years and then relapsing isn't all that helpful in fighting the long term health effects of obesity.
We are talking about different things. I'm talking about evidence and they're not.
You say in your very next line people stop doing it and that's why it doesn't work. Yes. These interventions are not sustainable. If that's your gotcha, that people can't stay on them but crash dieting, starvation, disordered eating, etc is a reasonable idea, then that's a lazy strawman. If you don't have a scientific study to back up that dieting works for actual people, please shut up. I'm really sick of people proping up bullshit without ever trying to figure out if it's true. If you can't find evidence of a diet that actual people can do that results in a 10% loss over 2 years for even a third of the participants, then it's time to update what you think. Short of surgery, nothing works long term for weight loss. Even Ozempic has to be taken for as long as you want the weight off, it stops working for some people after 6 months to a year, and about 75% of people stop taking it within two years.
You’re conflating fad diets with changing your actual diet as in what you eat day to day for the rest of your life.
I’m talking about diet like saying most bats survive on a diet of insects while you’re hearing ‘atkins can totally work bro’.