As a lot of people here know, I am the last person to be saying this, but if it was possible to take a pill to avoid paying for groceries, it’s probably worth it.
Just don’t end up living on Ensure and V8 because it’s just as expensive, trust me.
I used to think of eating and sleeping as wasting my productive time. Were I then able to take a pill to reclaim that time, I would have. I’m much lazier now. I like the new me.
Trust me, eating is one of the best things in the world. Maybe the best thing in the world if it’s the right meal. Every culture is built around food.
I am very much in a position to know this.
Edit: I forgot my point, which was that even though it’s great, if people could only do it when they wanted to instead of when they had to, they would probably make that choice.
My mom told me that when she was send away to a remote school where she lived with other teens they drenched cotton balls in orange juice and ate that to lose weight. That thought still haunts me.
What’s crazy about that, you could just eat high fiber foods and get the same effect.
People did that because the cotton wouldn’t be digested and make their stomachs feel full for a long time. Literally the same thing nondigestable fiber does.
What’s actually crazy is most people today barely eat any fiber.
It’s more than just eating less. The drugs change people’s relationship with food and it helps them control their impulses. This new class of weight loss drugs really are revolutionary.
A good friend of mine is on them. He physically gets sick if he overeats. He has event missed work because he was home vomiting. He learned fast to eat small amounts only. We used to have lunch about once a month. We have not gone out since he started on them.
The worldwide impact of these new drugs could be kind of amazing. They don’t just have you burn more calories or not digest food you eat. They completely change how people think about food. When obesity is an epidemic that causes all kinds of health problems, imagine how much less we’d spend on healthcare if more people were healthier weights.
Can’t have that. Might hurt profits somewhere. A big insurance company here just removed one of the drugs from coverage inexplicably.
Makes you wonder why despite a doctor prescribing it for weight loss, the insurance company can go ahead and just, nope out. and what motivation do they have to keep people fat?
On top of this, what’s medically considered overweight is a really flawed logic and weight can often be a comorbidity of other problems that get passed off by doctors as the person just being too fat. For example, according to the BMI, champion weightlifters are morbidly obese.
BMI classifying weightlifters as morbidly obese is a flaw of the BMI, not on how medics consider obesity. BMI is used because for most people it is really simple and quick and gives a reasonable result. When a doctor considers your health, they consider many many factors including your bloodwork, quantity and location of fat, fitness level and more
To the point that it gets rotten yes. But the entire purpose of the drug is to dramatically slow the digestion process which has a whole host of other problems, rotten food inside you is just the grossest.
I think the lesson here is that all drugs have side effects and it’s a question of whether the positive effect is worth the danger. If you are looking for the perfect pharmaceutical, it will never exist.
In this case, not science but an investment firm. Trying to figure out if they should cut investments in restaurants, groceries or both.
It is slightly interesting that people mostly seem to cut eating out and not groceries, rather than it being proportional. That being said, if I’m taking a weight loss drug I’m probably trying to eat at least a little healthier, which probably means less eating out.
I’m on Ozempic. I eat way less. Many restaurants offer portion sizes that are far, far too big for a person NOT on weight loss drugs let alone one who is. I often ask for a half or a quarter portion because I don’t want to waste the rest of the food. I always say I will pay full price but I don’t want all the food. Some restaurants give me a break on the price. Others don’t. When you’re faced with such huge portions it’s just easier to avoid restaurants.
I’m a caregiver for a diabetic person and Medicare decided at the new year that they would not cover the medications he’s been doing very well on because they (state insurance, not his doctors) want him on Ozempic instead. They let him keep his insulin, but Victoza, Pandin and Jardiance are gone. We’re having a very hard time keeping his blood sugar steady, he’s getting dangerous lows that he’s not capable of communicating to us, and higher spikes than I’ve seen in the four years I’ve cared for him, so we’re testing more frequently and no, they will not cover the additional testing supplies, that’s out of pocket now.
So, yes. Some people on Medicare are being forced to take it.
I am taking Ozempic, Metformin, and Jardiance but I live in a civilized country where my doctor makes the decisions about what drugs I am taking and talks to me about his recommendations before prescribing.
That’s kind of missing the forest for the trees. Dying because some company pushed weight loss pills on your doctor who then pushed them onto you is kind of fucked up just like drugs like Chantix driving people to kill themselves or leak fluids out of their asshole in order to stop smoking, two things that have a multitude of other methods to acheive the same goal with much less of a risk.
I do when I go to a restaurant close to home. I travel for work and can’t take leftovers back to my hotel most of the time. I’ve found that most restaurants are good about cutting portion sizes and that sometimes when I ask for half because I can’t eat a whole portion but offer to pay full price they will give me a break.
Not in the US, but production is limited and there have been pretty bad shortages in Canada and Australia. They had to put an export ban on Ozempic because so much of it was being sold to Americans, in Canada we pay $160US, while the same box sells for $970US in the states.
Im a diabetic, and earlier in the year we had a hard time getting it due to all the off label use.
Everyone and their mother got on it and lost tons of weight. Then suddenly it came out that, shockingly, drugs have side effects and some can hurt your heart. Suddenly there’s a flurry of lawsuits and a perfectly good drug is removed from the market because the public abused it.
That’s where I was on the whole fen-phen thing. I recall speaking to a couple doctors (in casual conversation) who thought that the lawsuits were stupid and that it was, indeed, good for the morbidly obese to have options like this. Me, personally, I believe that a bunch of lawyers got dollar signs in their eyes and decided to go after the big bucks.
I guess the FDA can be persuaded with enough pressure.
Most takeout and many restaurants aren’t healthy, and I would expect many people taking dietary supplements/weight loss pills to be health conscious. And also eat less in general.
Also: The focus the article and study puts on this impacting the corporate food world sickens me.
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