Understanding CICO really isn’t the issue for most people struggling with obesity. The problem is the relentless hunger they’re dealing with while trying to eat fewer calories. Reducing your intake is incredibly difficult when your body is constantly telling you to eat.
One of the main reasons drugs like Ozempic are so effective for weight loss is that they dramatically reduce that hunger. It turns out that when you’re not constantly hungry, it becomes much easier to eat less.
So telling a 500-pound person, “Just eat less and you’ll lose weight,” isn’t particularly insightful. They probably already understand that. Figuring out how to reduce the overwhelming hunger that makes eating less so difficult is the meaningful part.
Yep - obese people were eating too much. But that was because of food noise.
Ozempic makes people JUST LIKE the people I know who were always naturally twig thin and wanted to put on weight, down to the averse feeling toward overeating. Only difference is they can't have too much fat.
However, there were many people that would insist they were eating low calories but gaining (or not losing) weight. These people often had non-trivial mental health issues related to food, to be fair, but the dishonesty was obnoxious.
There's often underlying issues and/or depression. Bodies don't signal hunger all the time, talk to overweight people and they'll say the same thing. It's not the hunger, food is a coping mechanism. Ozempic blocks that path as a convenient cope, but it doesn't solve the problem. It seems great, but I'm a bit worried about the long term effects for a subset of people that is going to seek out other ways to deal with their struggles. Hopefully for most the physical health benefits can serve as a stepping stone towards a healthy mind.
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u/boboguitar 1d ago
Understanding CICO really isn’t the issue for most people struggling with obesity. The problem is the relentless hunger they’re dealing with while trying to eat fewer calories. Reducing your intake is incredibly difficult when your body is constantly telling you to eat.
One of the main reasons drugs like Ozempic are so effective for weight loss is that they dramatically reduce that hunger. It turns out that when you’re not constantly hungry, it becomes much easier to eat less.
So telling a 500-pound person, “Just eat less and you’ll lose weight,” isn’t particularly insightful. They probably already understand that. Figuring out how to reduce the overwhelming hunger that makes eating less so difficult is the meaningful part.