What I love about the new weight loss drugs?

The new magical weight loss drugs like Ozempic, Semaglutide, and Wegovy are some of the best things that have happened to our society in a long time. But not for the reasons you may be reading about almost daily these days.

The reason is because they prove that weight loss is about disrupted regulation of appetite causing people to overeat, and not about overeating due to poor willpower.

If we know this and we can get appetite hormones back-on-track then perhaps we can avoid the need for these new drugs altogether?

Now let me explain what I mean by all of this.

Weight loss and calories

Weight is ultimately governed by how many calories you eat. This is why, for years, people have been trying to lose weight by reducing their calorie intake. And yes this achieves weight loss. If you eat less than your body needs, your body will shrink.

However, reducing calories through willpower is futile. In fact, the idea that we can lose weight by consciously reducing calories is downright silly. But it is so ingrained in our culture that me saying it is silly may bother a lot of people.

Why is it silly?

It is silly because it is like saying we should consciously manage our body temperature, which is fixed somewhere around the 37.0 degree mark most of the time.

Now imagine that you try to consciously wear fewer clothes to reduce this temperature to say 36.0 degrees. You could do probably do it for a bit. It would be excruciatingly hard and eventually you would need to put your jumper on.

It is exactly the same with weight loss. You would eat less for a few days, maybe even weeks, but eventually you would need to eat more again. By restricting calories you are trying to ignore the cold. You can't do this forever - eventually you need to put a jumper on.

This is because the amount you need to eat each day is governed by appetite hormones (*). It is not within your conscious control. Just like you don't consciously control your body temperature (also controlled by a mixture of hormone messengers), you do not consciously control your weight.

What do the new weight loss drugs tell us?

The new weight loss drugs are working because people stop being hungry. They stop obsessing over food. This causes them to eat less.

This happens because the drugs have a messenger hormone called GLP-1 which tells the brain "I'm not hungry any more". In this way the new weight loss drugs reduce calorie intake by reducing calories. The person no longer has to consciously reduce calories through willpower.

With time they lose weight - lots of weight - and all without any conscious effort. And the weight gain - as far as we know - stays off. Willpower isn't relevant anymore. But they do have to keep taking the drug ... forever.

The calories are reduced by changes to hormone messengers. The calories are not reduced by willpower. This shows that weight loss is about appetite hormones and not about consciously reducing calories through willpower.

What can we do?

More than two-thirds of Western societies are now overweight or obese. This tells us there is something in our environment causing everyone's appetite messenger hormones to be out of whack.

We already know how what is causing things to be out-of-whack. A study called “Ultra-processed diets cause excess calorie intake and weight gain” carried out by Kevin Hall in 2021 showed that ultra-processed foods or UPF alter appetite hormones and cause humans to overeat by about 500 calories - or three slices of buttered toast - each day.

Yet we seem to have missed the memo.

How do ultra-processed foods make us overeat?

Big food companies have manipulated foods to hijack our appetites to make us overeat.

They design foods - or some people call them 'food like edible substances' - to have a ‘bliss point’ that overwhelms our messenger hormones and our appetite control centres.

Big food companies pay people to taste the foods to find that precise bliss point – that perfect mix of sugar, fat and salt. This bliss point is purposefully designed to flick our hormone messenger switches so that we eat more than we need.

The aim of big food companies is to make money. They make money by selling their products. Their products sell if they taste good. They sell even better if people can't stop eating them.

How did we miss the memo?

We missed the memo because big food companies – and therefore Government establishments that collect taxes from these big food companies – don’t want us to hear it.

They want us to believe the problem is ours and that weight gain is because we eat to much and that we should eat fewer calories. The calories in calories out concept is the perfect concept for big food companies.

Put the responsibility back on the individuals. It is their fault that they are overeating. Clever.

We should all be rejoicing in the new weight loss drugs

The new weight loss drugs have proved that bodyweight has nothing to do with willpower and conscious control of calories.

Disrupted appetite hormones due to ultra-processed food is well-established.

It is not a huge leap of faith to connect the dots.

Get in touch if you need help recalibrating your appetite hormones

If you are struggling to switch to non-processed foods or need help figuring out which foods are ultra-processed, please get in touch. If you are truly eating a non-processed diet and still unable to lose weight then there may be something else going on and I would be happy to work with you to try to unlock this.

*P.S. When I say the word hormone this doesn't just refer to the obvious sex hormones - testosterone and oestrogen. Hormones are chemical messengers in our body that convey messages from one place to another (e.g. from the gut to the brain; the thyroid to the muscles; the ovaries to the placenta). GLP-1 is a hormone produced in the gut that travels to the brain and tells us to stop eating.

"The new weight loss drugs have proved once-and-for-all that weight loss is regulated by hormones and that calories – and our conscious control over calories – have nothing to do with it."

References

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31105044/