The other side of this is related to morals. People learned self-discipline by having to moderate their diet. Replacing that challenge with an injection is another example of a world in which people are not challenged to grow as people, but merely go out and buy something to make themselves feel or look better.
People who don't experience difficulties moderating their diet and could flounder their "self discipline" are now on a level field with people who did have difficulties with their diet. So they feel threatened by it.
Another example of a world in which people are not challenged to grow as people; instead of being happy that more people can get healthy they dismiss the medical advances as "moral failures" since they can no longer feel superior.
I've worked out my entire life. Always one of the strongest people in the gym. Almost always overweight. Not obese but overweight. Once I had kids I really packed on the pounds. In January I got on GLP1s and over 4 months dropped from 6'1 at 240lbs to 209lbs. I'm 46 years old with defined abs and a bench of over 405lbs. My BP has gone down and I am in a healthy range for the first time in 20+ years. My cholesterol is perfect now. I feel 20 years younger. I stopped snoring for the first time in 2 decades. My wife sleeps like a baby now which is probably the most important change. I wake up and jump out of bed fully energized and rested for the first time in decades.
Sometimes people just need a helping hand. There is no shame in that.
It appears your issue is that you just don't think its fair and that people should have to take the long way. I would argue that's a you issue and not an us one.
I'm continually frustrated with the four thousand year old history of people being surprised that other people "don't just ${something good for you} and don't just stop ${something bad for you}." Great, we've tried the "Acting surprised people do unhealthy or bad things" strategy and the "scolding people for doing unhealthy things" strategy for a couple millennia and people still do the things.
Will we continue this strategy or will we try something else now?
youre distant ancestors chased every meal they ate. your more recent centuries old ancestors probably worked 6.5 day weeks, 12 hour shifts, and had to have all the children working as well, for a pittance. YOU on the other hand have no problem finding any kind of out-of-season food and probably drive everywhere, barely lifting a finger in comparison. THIS IS THE DIFFERENCE.
Why were there no obese (poor) people 100 years ago?
Of course it is an option - I lost 100 lbs this way, and kept it off more than 5 yeads. As you know, that's very, very hard.
But I think these drugs are awesome. I have family members who are obese and don't seem to have whatever I have that allowed me to lose weight the old-fashioned way. I hope they'll be able to lose weight safety with the drugs.
Exercise is undoubtedly good and has many benefits. Unfortunately it's not a realistic way to lose weight for most people.
Our bodies are just too efficient. We can't "outrun the fork" (unless it's our full-time job). We must modify our diet. Which is not easy for many reasons.
Of course it is, and I used to basically 100% agree with you but i've changed my mind over the years. It's so wildly asymmetric that I don't think this is a useful framing anymore.
what i mean is, on one side you have huge teams of absolutely brilliant well-resourced food scientists A/B testing their products to maximize addictiveness and other related metrics. On the other side you have a stressed out parent tired from a full day of work just trying to quickly get some food for their family.
This isn't fair! It should make you angry when you see regular people who are probably a lot more like you than you think being preyed on by others
That's only relevant if socialized medicine forces you to pay for the moral failures of other people, though. Spending your own money to feel better is widely accepted behavior.
Socialized medicine forces you to pay for the victims of drunk driving accidents, for when people shoot themselves in the hand with a nail gun, for the hospital bills of vaccine deniers ending up in the emergency room, for....
At some point I think you just have to accept that the whole point of socialized medicine is to just make sure people get healthcare regardless. If you want to engage in some kind of market analysis and means testing, you can always live in America, where it's guaranteed that people get exactly as much healthcare as they deserve, since net worth and liquid cash is correlated perfectly with an individual's moral success.
Unfortunately, for those who are obese no amount of diet or exercise will give them the "perfect" body.
I see many who were overweight lose weight and get ripped, while others have no chance to reach that far. Someone with a BMI of 40 has basically ruined their body and while they may look better with a shirt, they will keep it on while on the beach because of the excessive skin.
The reward and motivation for a person with a few pounds extra and a truly obese person are simply too different. Someone who has not reached whatever weight threshold that fits their body type has a chance to look "normal", while the more obese person will reach a point where losing more weight has less impact even after plastic surgery.
This has failed though. Over 40% of Americans are obese. This costs us as a society hundreds of billions in healthcare costs, much of it federally subsidized. Being obese is a simple choice now, one can choose to be fat or choose to take a once weekly shot and not be fat.
Take Elon Musk, he is clearly overweight. Is your argument that he lacks self-discipline as a person and is as such a complete failure? Of course not, the man is clearly more disciplined and driven than most people. He just eats like crap as he has other priorities.
I am open to you explaining the argument as to why 40% of people being obese so that they have to learn self discipline in just that single area of their life and all of the associated social, health and financial costs is more beneficial to society as a whole than people taking a shot and losing weight and gaining all of the benefits that being obese robs society of.
Society evolves as its technology does. I'm sure its not the case but your argument appears to devolve to "Back in my day we didn't need a shot to be thin like you young kids, we walked up hill both ways to school with our little brother on our back. IN THE SNOW!"
Honestly, this is essentially BS. I'd say that 95% of healthy weight people stay that weight because their metabolism and appetite works properly. People who stay in shape by paying careful attention to their diet are a tiny minority.
Where I live (Spain) there’s a massive intergenerational gap between how our parents ate and how we eat and exercise. A huge number of people around me go to great lengths to control what they eat and make an effort to move. I see it at the beach, at the restaurant or at the gym. You can ask anyone in the older generations if younger people are physically healthier and you’d find an almost unanimous yes. Coincidentally we have one of the highest life expectancies in the world. None of this is given.
I am not sure I would rely on observations of gyms and beaches for whether people are healthier for fear of selection bias. Going to the beach and seeing mostly fit bathers is like going to the hospital and seeing mostly sick people and thinking that can be generalized to society.
Why would you ask old people if young people are healthier than they were? Surely, Spain compiles medical statistics.
Anyway, Spain appears to have the same weight issues as everywhere else:
> Coincidentally we have one of the highest life expectancies in the world
Those numbers are relying on how long the older generation lives. If the younger people are physically more active, how do you know that they will also live as long? It could be that modern expectations of what a "healthy" body should look like takes it too far, and that you will end up with a shorter life.
I see a lot of former athletes dying in their 60s/70s from heart failures and other conditions. Perhaps the body has limits to how much abuse it can take.
