> most people who succeed at significant weight loss while taking GLP-1 drugs regain most or all of the weight within a couple years if they stop taking the drugs.
Anecdata: I've gone from 260lb down to a minimum of 198ish, up to maybe 230, back down to 193, long slow climb up to 270 and now on a GLP-1 I'm under 230 and definitely look fat, but in the right light you can see my quad separation. The only people I know who've lost the kind of weight I've lost and kept it off (like a 5' man going from 250lb down to 145) went from logging every bite in My Fitness Pal (or similar) to keeping the log running in their head of what they're eating all day every day. Diabetics sometimes say they're making their prefrontal cortex do the work of their pancreas. That feels relatable.
So IDK if there's a weight loss solution that works that you don't have to do in perpetuity. "Eat less" yeah sure, but how? Magic Danish Gila monster potion that makes you want to eat less, or recording everything you eat and using that to tell yourself you're more full than you feel?
I managed some fairly significant weight loss and kept it off kind of by accident.
I was 326 lb when I took the physical that my college required incoming first year students to take. It slowly crept up over the years and by my mid 50s was generally in the 420-440 lb range. I had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes about 10 years before that but responded spectacularly well to cheap diabetes drugs like metformin and Glucotrol. Same for cholesterol--it has been very high but Lipitor brought it down to normal. If you had showed my blood work to a doctor with no other information than my age and sex they would have not found any sign of anything wrong.
But then A1C started going up again, despite steady weight and no diet changes. I decided to try to lower carbs to see if that would help. Most low carb diets aim for a very low amount of carbs which require a lot of work to achieve (especially if like me at the time you don't mostly cook at home), so I decided to just try lower the percent of calories that came from carbs rather than worry about the absolute amount.
I picked 40% because (1) that is lower that average and definitely lower than what I was consuming, and (2) it is real easy to track (more on that below).
I was just trying to see if this change in balance would affect blood sugar and wasn't actually trying to lower calories. So rather than do things like give up most bread like many of the low carb diets require, I got the carb calorie percent down by adding non-carbs. For example if my normal ham and cheese sandwich with low calorie mayo was 60% calories from carbs, I'd switch that to regular mayo and/or double meat and/or double cheese. That would add a couple hundred or so calories which would lower the percent from carbs. The grams of carbs wouldn't change.
Two things happened then. First, my blood sugar did start going down. Second, and unexpectedly, I started losing weight. I had been keeping a simple food log for years at that point and it revealed that I in fact was consuming less calories.
Apparently what was going on is that things like the double meat double cheese regular mayo sandwich were keeping me satisfied longer, so I naturally snacked less, and naturally started eating smaller portions.
In two years I was down to 280 lb, and completely off diabetes and cholesterol. (I'd always had high blood pressure, and going from 420-440 lb to 280 lb had no effect whatsoever on that).
Over the next maybe 18 months it crept up to 320-325 lb (so basically my high school weight) and it has been steady in that range ever since (6 or 7 years so far).
I said earlier that 40% is easy to track. That's because 1 g of carbs has ~4 calories. That means all you have to do is look at the nutrition label and if numerically calories/10 <= carb grams the thing is not over 40% calories from carbs. (You can subtract grams of fiber from the carb grams).
For a meal with multiple items, say a fast food burger and fast food fries and a diet soda you could total the calories and total the carbs and do the calculation on that, but an easier way is to do the burger and fries separately and add the over/under amounts together.
For example let's say you are contemplating a Burger King Whopper (670 calories, 51 carbs) and large fries (440 calories 59 carbs). For the burger calculate 670/10-51=16, and for the fries 440/10-59=-16. 16 + -16 = 0, and your burger and fries together is 40% calories from carbs.
It is also fairly easy to keep a running net for the day, so just remember that say at breakfast you came out say at -8 because you decided to treat yourself to a donut for desert. Then at lunch you could change that Whopper to a Whopper with Cheese (770 calories 53 carbs) which is +24 instead of +16, nicely cancelling out your breakfast donut as far as carb balance goes.
> I had been keeping a simple food log for years at that point
> It is also fairly easy to keep a running net for the day
Right, so there it is: whatever you did to get to a calorie deficit you need to keep doing to be calorie neutral. If it's take a GLP-1 then that works. If it's using pen and paper or an app or even vibes-based reckoning to track everything you eat, then it's that. Regardless it just doesn't seem like a valid criticism of any given weight loss strategy when I have yet to hear of one that doesn't have that feature
Every business leader who makes money is a Marxian! Capturing the surplus value of the labor of others is how a business makes money and that is a value neutral statement.
I used to (idly) consider play-doh with thermite in it on the hood of the car double parked in the bike lane. But then I moved to NYC where nothing would be possible without a little double parking happening.
A related talk is Richard Feldman's "Making Impossible States Impossible." Richard wrote a number of Elm packages and is the creator of the Roc language.
Best I can do is that the middleman took the sweetheart deal conviction for solicitation at face value, and did not know it was a plea down from crimes against children? IDK
All we need to do is create Kalshi contracts! Users bet that a fix won't be created for Issue 123 by date XYZ, developers take the other side of the contract and then do the best kind of insider trading: changing the facts on the ground. We did it!
And a few weeks into that arbitrage traders will catch wind and start betting on the more likely bug closures and then the devs that fix the bug will end up owing money!
There are bribing and HFT opportunities here too. The fix developer is incentivized to wait until the last possible moment to take the position "the PR addressing the bug will be merged by the date" so that the contract will be the cheapest for them to buy and represent the greatest profit when the PR is opened or merged. What's a savvy speculator on the sidelines to do? After the PR is opened, bribe the project maintainer not to accept the PR by that date so they can turn a sure-thing "Yes" into a huge upset "No." Or watch the developer's github for green shower tiles to see activity in private repos. But the developer can throw up chaff that by scripting bunches of commits in other private repos, or changing the commit dates for the bug fixes to be a year ago. The speculator can monitor the developer's posts in language/topic forums or on social media to get a feel for their progress. If they're really connected, maybe they can see their AI agent/chatbot logs through an insider in one of those companies.
This idea rocks because eventually someone is going to get blackmailed with their affair history over, like, adding native XLSX support to FFMPEG. Can't wait. Financialize everything.
Interesting. You have me thinking of Candide as an answer to Quixote.
In very broad strokes, Quixote says my perceptions and ideals are true and apparent evidence to the contrary must be a misunderstanding/ chance/ magic. His agency is to frame the world’s meaning in his own terms. Until finally he gives it up.
Candide accepts societal moral framings (i.e. rationalizations for wrongdoing) naively, but is slowly worn down by the evidence that they’re a sham. But in facing the seemingly intractable harshness of reality, he doesn’t become so cynical as to cede his own agency entirely—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin.”
To me that feels like a wiser response than absurdity or despondency.
4 modifier keys vs 3. Can't go back. Maybe you can get your whole Linux env using 4 modifiers one application at a time, but my god would that be another thing that takes forever on top of everything else you need to configure. No ty.
This was such a big pain for me when switching back to windows / Linux. I’m not sure why it’s not talked about more. 4 modifiers is much better if you are a keyboard “power user” but don’t want to spend days crafting and maintaining a bespoke input system.
A more general point: you can be a “power user” and not have the time to learn about the absurd stack of technologies that is a Linux DE. You may even be a “power user” and not have a job / education related to computers! Shocking!
I'm a dad, I'm doing home improvement stuff, I have cat litter to scoop, I have a day job. I have like 15 minutes at a time to power use my personal computer. I spend it programming. Everything I need to do between opening the lid and typing programs is an affront.
Anecdata: I've gone from 260lb down to a minimum of 198ish, up to maybe 230, back down to 193, long slow climb up to 270 and now on a GLP-1 I'm under 230 and definitely look fat, but in the right light you can see my quad separation. The only people I know who've lost the kind of weight I've lost and kept it off (like a 5' man going from 250lb down to 145) went from logging every bite in My Fitness Pal (or similar) to keeping the log running in their head of what they're eating all day every day. Diabetics sometimes say they're making their prefrontal cortex do the work of their pancreas. That feels relatable.
So IDK if there's a weight loss solution that works that you don't have to do in perpetuity. "Eat less" yeah sure, but how? Magic Danish Gila monster potion that makes you want to eat less, or recording everything you eat and using that to tell yourself you're more full than you feel?
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