Drug-Based GAINZZZ?

First, some nonsense: "The Relentless Reality of Anti-Fatness in Fitness."

These biased "Fitness Experts" who continue claiming that being greatly overweight is bad for your health and longevity! Haven't they read The New Science (TM)?!

A "seasoned athlete," who is also grossly obese, relates this "comical" story of a gym fitness pro trying to instruct her in how to exercise.

Jaffe laughed as she recounted the story to me--and it is almost comical, imagining this seasoned athlete staring down at a two-pound dumbbell while a trainer tries to "teach" her what a bicep curl is. The session continued as such, Jaffe recalls, with her asking about functional exercises and the trainer instead demonstrating a squat. "I kept having to reiterate, 'I know what these things are. I want you to give me something new, so I don't get bored.'" Though she'd been very clear on her goals, the trainer seemed to have another one in mind:

"You do know that you need to eat fewer calories than you burn," she said, "in order to lose weight."

"What makes you think I want to lose weight?" Jaffe asked. "I didn't put that on my intake form." The trainer said she'd assumed as much because of Jaffe's "curvier" physique. One last time, Jaffe--who was then a size 16--explained that she was there to support her endurance training. It was literally there, in writing.

The trainer seemed flummoxed. "So you did those things you wrote on your form?"

This is the woman who insists it is "comical" for a fitness pro at the gym to assume she needs instruction about how to exercise:

"Seasoned athlete."

How dare you assume I need coaching! I'm obviously a fitness fanatic!

Though bizarre, Jaffe's experience is hardly novel. Of the dozens of people I spoke with for this story, few could identify one specific incident of anti-fat bias in a fitness space that stood out more than others--because incidents like this are the rule, not the exception.

Though the term "fatphobia" only went mainstream in recent years with the rise of the body positivity movement (and has already fallen out of favor for some), anti-fat bias has been a part of white America for centuries.

...

To make a long, complex story very short: People were suddenly interested in quantifying health, and life insurance companies promoted the use of weight tables (though they differed greatly from company to company) to do so. In a matter of decades, fatness evolved from a moral issue to a medical one.

Fatness was always a medical issue. Doctors in the seventeenth century noted that fat people tended to die young. Doctors encouraged people to diet in the 1800s, when it was a "disease of the affluent."

There's another concept we didn't really hear about in the '50s that gets a lot of play today: obesity. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines obesity as "weight that is higher than what is considered healthy for a given height" and positions it as being in the middle of a spectrum ranging from "overweight" to "extremely obese." Between 1960 and 2012, the rate of obesity in U.S. adults increased about 20%, according to the CDC. (Though, depending on race and gender, there's significant variation in both the statistics and the volume of data.) Concern over this matter escalated when, in 1998, the NIH tweaked its Body Mass Index classifications, lowering the cutoff for "healthy" weight from 27.3 (for women) or 27.8 (for men) to 25. Overnight, nearly 30 million Americans went from a-okay to soft, sick aberrations--symptoms of the epidemic ravaging this great nation.

With all due respect: It's not people who are borderline obese who are really at risk, and of course it's not the people who are borderline obese who are shrieking that "obesity" itself is a made-up concept invented by white supremacists.

It's the people who are severely obese and would be diagnosed as such under any plausible metric.

In good news for the obese: You know how fat celebrities keep losing a bunch of weight? Adele? Rebel Wilson?

Even Mindy Kaling dropped a lot of weight, and appeared to be actually... thin.

And then they say it was just diet and exercise?

Well, yeah, like the "Marvel Method" of bulking up actors to look like men who, coincidentally, appear to have been on a one-year cycle of steroids, they're not just relying on diet and exercise.

They're taking a new class of drugs which appear to actually work. Weight loss drugs Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro are flying off the shelves so fast that there are national shortages.

In the past five years, several new drugs have been brought to market that could lead to a profound, if not revolutionary, change in how health care providers -- and the public -- view weight loss.

Three drugs in particular -- sold under the brand names Wegovy, Ozempic, and Mounjaro -- have shown remarkable effects on weight loss in clinical trials.

While Wegovy is approved by the Food and Drug Administration for weight loss, the other two medications are only approved as treatment for type 2 diabetes, though they do also contribute to significant weight loss.

This has led to increased demand for these drugs, causing a shortage of Ozempic and Mounjaro in early 2023 that threatened the availability of these drugs for diabetes patients.

Globally, more than 650 million people are obese, and by 2030, an estimated 1 billion adults will be obese. This makes obesity the most prevalent chronic disease in the world.

As an exercise science scholar, I have spent more than 15 years studying the effects of diet and exercise on the human body, primarily focused on body composition changes such as gaining skeletal muscle or losing body fat, or both.

...

While these medications hold promise, they are not wonder drugs. In my view, they warrant much more research before they become the basis for a new weight management protocol.

Ozempic and Mounjaro are FDA-approved for the treatment of type 2 diabetes, which affects more than 37 million people in the US.

On top of that, nearly 100 million people are considered prediabetic, meaning that together over 40 percent of the US population suffers from an inability to properly manage blood sugar.

Obesity and type 2 diabetes are closely related conditions, so much so that some experts are now calling the two conditions "diabesity". These dire figures are what prompted pharmaceutical companies to search for new weight loss treatments.

Fat people are not fat because they're particularly lazy. They're fat because their bodies don't properly regulate their blood sugar. Their bodies would probably be pretty healthy during periods of food scarcity, but, of course, the western world doesn't see much food scarcity. It sees mostly food overabundance.

And fat people's hormones just aren't set properly to deal with that.

The drugs are designed to readjust the body's hormones to liberate blood sugar from fat, and store less glucose as fat.

Wegovy and Ozempic are a class of drug known as a semaglutide. Since people with type 2 diabetes are unable to properly manage blood sugar, injections with this class of drug help the body release the proper amount of insulin after eating by mimicking a naturally occurring hormone called GLP-1.

At the same time, semaglutides also reduce the release of the hormone glucagon, which works opposite of insulin to increase blood sugar. In non-diabetics, these two hormones work together to maintain normal blood sugar levels.

But since this mechanism is not functioning properly in diabetics, which leads to high blood sugar, semaglutides help to control blood sugar and also reduce appetite.

I don't know if the drugs work. Anecdotally, I've heard they do; this article calls the results "staggering" in some cases.

Are there long-term health risks associated with the drugs? I don't know that either. I do know how Dr. Atkins responded to claims that the Atkins diet might have long-term health risks: Obesity itself is a very well-documented health risk. One can worry about hypothetical unknown risks, but in the meantime, the known, proven risk must be treated.

I'm not endorsing these drugs. I just know they're getting more and more popular and it seems I should mention them.

Natural GAINZZZ are the best GAINZZZ, of course.

But maybe the perfect shouldn't be the enemy of the merely good.

Self-Defense GAINZZZ:

Climbing GAINZZZ:

Note that he actually... climbs down. I was afraid he'd get stuck and wouldn't know how to climb down. But he figures it out!

Gymnastic GAINZZZ:

So, do you have any GAINZZZ? Have any of you tried these new weight-loss drugs?

Anyone have any PLANZZZ or BOOKZZZ they want to discuss?

I just downloaded the first book of Mack Bolan, The Executioner and the first book of the Remo Williams series. I wanted to try some violent pulp.

posted by Ace at 05:17 PM

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