re: Study: people return to baseline weight within 1.5 years of stopping GLP-1s

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Or having ridiculous metabolism

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I'm not sure you're truly comprehending what “don’t eat garbage” actually means. A hundred years ago most people maintained a healthy weight without counting calories or worrying about metabolism, because the food environment was mostly whole foods instead of engineered junk.

Not eating garbage doesn’t mean studying nutrition labels or swapping one processed thing for another. It means eating actual food. Whole or minimally processed stuff. Not deep frying everything, not putting cheese in and on everything, never or very rarely eating fast and/or ultra-processed food.

I lost 130 pounds in under a year doing exactly that. I didn’t count a single calorie, never did portion control, and ate until full as often as I wanted. I just focused on the food itself instead of the numbers attached to it. I’ve stayed around 155 (5'9") pounds for ten years the same way. There is nothing special about my "metabolism."

The problem is people hear “don’t eat garbage” and think it means gluten-free cookies, keto snacks, or swapping the fried patty for the grilled one at the same fast-food place. That’s still the same ultra-processed food system. It’s just a slightly different version of it.

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This is the part most on TD don't understand. They all want it to be a moral failing of some sort.

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Absolutely.

You're going to do what your brain tells you to do, sooner or later.

And because we're not just talking about ghrelin and leptin, but also serotonin and cortisol, "refusing to give in" can actually cause clinical depression.

But it's not just that...the big thing they don't understand is that when you lose weight, the changes in your hormones cause your metabolism to slow down so that you burn even fewer calories than you should at the new weight.

For example, a 180 lb guy who has always been 180 lbs might find caloric equilibrium at 2,200 calories a day.

But a person who went from 275 lbs down to 180 lbs might have to reduce down to 1,700 calories a day to find equilibrium and not start to gain weight back.

AND, your leptin and ghrelin signals are still disrupted from the weight loss, so you are even hungrier than the lifetime 180 pounder would be at 1,700 calories.

And the problem is that this phenomenon appears to be very long standing if not permanent. The Biggest Loser study looked at contestants in that show SIX YEARS after they lost weight and those trends were still persistent.

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Test a 20 year old male testosterone level, then test it again 20 years later and get back to me on the difference in metabolic rate. TRT is massive now, and no one has to guess why.

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And then compare their body composition too. The testosterone argument isn’t as clean as you seem to think. Yes, levels tend to decline slowly with age, but body fat suppresses testosterone. Fat tissue converts testosterone into estrogen.

That means low testosterone is very often a symptom of obesity, not the cause of it. When people gain fat and become less active, testosterone often drops as an effect.

People move less and gain fat, the extra body fat suppresses testosterone, and then the lower testosterone gets blamed for the weight gain that actually came first.

That’s why weight loss alone frequently raises testosterone levels without TRT.

Pointing to testosterone doesn’t prove metabolism suddenly drops at 30. It shows how body composition and behavior feed into hormone levels, not that a hormone crash is it.