Geth

Hey OP, I will copy a point I made somewhere deeper in this thread that you might not see, because I do really believe that there is help to be had. I commend you on your desire to do something about this, since it will increase your quality of life in ways you never even imagined. Other people have also had great points I think and have touched on the tragedy that is the US medical system, I want to touch on the potential alternative solutions that are too often overlooked.

The obesity epidemic is caused by caloric density creeping up in ultra processed foods, tricking people into thinking they eat a normal amount when they most definitely don’t. The fact that these foods are almost like a drug for some brains combined with the fact that some bodies struggle more than others with burning calories can make it more difficult at first for people to loose weight, but you find yourself in the difficult circumstance of having to pay 200$ per week to do something about it, and there are two alternatives.

"Eat healthier, eat more fruits and veggies, cut out excess sugar, walk more, exercise more, the whole kit and caboodle" - as an external observer with no context all I can read from this is that you replaced some unhealthy calories with some healthy calories. So the first proposal is calorie counting by yourself. You have to be anal about it, every little detail, any little snack has to be on your list and fully counted. If you do this properly and have a hard limit of 1500-2000 per day you will absolutely see results without having to do any excercise or eat any specific food. This is proven science at this point and anyone arguing about this is trying to sell you something or someone else sold them something. More colorful trends like intermittent fasting also achieve caloric deficit in a roundabout way, but in the end it doesn't matter what approach you take, any way that works for you is fine, as long as you don't go over the caloric limit. Losing weight is not exciting and doesn't have some funny quirky solution, it's just simple hard brute force.

Second, a little less brute force solution, but also not free, spend a fraction of that ozempic money on a registered dietician that can monitor your intake and make recommendations. At least that way there’s external support and motivation, as well as much needed help in case you have a history of eating disorder. I found they are like 100-200$ per month so an 8th to a quarter of the ozempic price. This is still going to be hard work, but with support and help from an expert it will be far easier to establish and maintain.

Both of these solutions will help build good habits and help you build an intuition for food caloric content at a glance. Ozempic, if it works, skips these important aspects, which might make you rebound after finishing the treatment, since you never actually learned how to manage your intake, just had reduced appetite for the duration of the treatment. Any aditional things you do like eating healthier and exercising will be a great bonus to your health, but you should honestly skip if they are overwhelming you and impeding you from achieving your goal. It's normal to expect failure when the requirements are steep, so keep it a level you can manage. If calorie restriction is all you can do, then stick to that, but don't compromise it ever because that is the absolute minimum. Everything else may come later.

I wish you good luck with your journey and hope you'll enjoy the new life when you finally succeed.

Edit: bonus point I forgot to make earlier. Exercise may actually increase your appetite because that's just how the body is wired. Which will make resticting calories even more difficult from a mental/willpower perspective. So it may be advisable to actually not exersice while you are trying to achieve your goals, because dealing with both changes of exercising and eating less at the same time can be too much and leads to failure of both. If you have to choose, always do the calorie restriction, like I said before, that is the minimum requirement, everything else is a bonus.

If my alternative would be 200$ per week, I'd take eating less as a solution.

You can buy pre-cut cameras at the camera shop. They tend to come with a screen and modular lenses.

That sounds so dystopian and yet so many governments are moving towards similar ideas.

Right, but this is just a foundation. Adding on to it some fangs will be much easier than starting from scratch, which is why everyone is up in arms. It's a useless and annoying law in it's current form that just makes you question how these politicians use their time in the benefit of the citizen and also a terrible promise for the future.

But everyone else does and they will be voting in the next election dragging you down with them.

Look, human conversations are full of context deduction and inference. In this case "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 50 meters away. Should I walk or drive?" states my random desire, a possible solution and the question all in one context. None of these sentences make sense in isolation as you point out, but within the same frame they absolutely give you everything you need to answer the question of find alternatives if needed.

Sorry for the random online stranger diagnosis but this is just such an excelent example of neurodivergent need for extreme clarity I couldn't help myself.

Mentioning the car wash and washing the car plus the possibility of driving the car in the same context pretty much eliminates any ambiguity. All of the puzzle pieces are there already.

I guess this is an uninteded autism test as well if this is not enough context for someone to understand the question.

Not trying to defend the idiotic argument, but feels like more often than not the human output is not what I would call coherent, capable and well functioning.

I believe we already established that they are making the ram incompatible with the systems of the poor.

Those balls don't care about your supposed clean hands. You could be using those mice with a robot arm and they would still gunk up.

You'd be surprised 🙄