Today I’m taking a break from talking about weight and healthcare to write about navigating so much of the nonsense that happens during the holiday season.

Today will be the first post in a short series discussing attempts to “calculate” the (supposed) “costs” of “ob*sity.”

Before we get into any of this I want to say unequivocally that anytime we try to calculate the cost of a group of people, including and especially, to support a call for their eradication, we are going down a very bad, very wrong road. So while I will be discussing the specific issues with these calculations, please always remember that the calculations shouldn’t be undertaken in the first place.

In Part 1 we looked at the basics and early research around GLP-1s for weight loss and muscle loss. In part 2 we looked at recent research around the newest GLP-1 weight loss drugs, tirzepatide (Zepbound) and semaglutide (Wegovy).

In this final part of the series we are going to talk about the justifications/excuses/spin that are happening around the loss of lean muscle mass on GLP-1s.

In Part 1 we looked at an early study of GLP1 drugs and muscle loss. Today we’ll look at two more recent studies, one for Eli Lilly’s drug tirzepatide and one for Novo Nordisk’s drug semaglutide.

As GLP-1 drugs get heavily marketed for weight loss, we know that when people stop taking the drugs they experience rapid weight regain. We also know that, while the claim is that if people stay on the drugs forever they’ll maintain the weight loss, there isn’t any research proving that and that in the longest study of these drugs for weight loss (4 years) they lost 89.5% of the sample.

There is another aspect that I think is not being discussed nearly enough and that is the subject of how much of the weight that is lost is coming from what is known as lean body mass.

Several months ago I was asked to complete an interview over email for online publication The Quo. I was recently told that the writer fell ill and that the piece won’t be published. The interview was, essentially, a quick guide to the issues with diet drugs and surgeries for children so I thought I would publish the answers here.

I write a lot here about the fallacy of blaming health issues on body size. Today I want to talk about the tendency to credit weight loss for physical, psychological, and social benefits. For example, someone will (at least short term) lose weight and offer a testimonial about how much better they feel, how much more they are doing in the world etc. Or a study will determine that Health Related Quality of Life (HRQoL) has improved after weight loss.

Just like a weight-centric healthcare system (and world) tends to completely uncritically blame weight for health issues, it also completely uncritically credits weight loss for health, life, and HRQoL improvements. Today I want to take a critical look at this.

I last wrote about the Ob*sity Action Coalition (OAC) in 2022 and you can read about their history in that post here. It’s time for an update.

I got the following question from reader Katrina:

“You spoke to my doctoral program recently and in the Q&A you said something about poking holes into people’s thinking where better ideas could fall in. In the past I’ve talked to my doctor about research. I love the research posts you make but I know my doctor isn’t going to read or listen to something that long (he really should he just won’t!) Do you have some quick questions I could ask to poke some holes in his thinking that better ideas could fall into?”

Sure Katrina, here are my top 5 quick questions for when a doctor (or friend or family member or article etc.) makes claims that being higher-weight causes health issues and/or that weight loss is a treatment or cure.

One of the things I’m seeing with the rise of GLP-1 weight loss drugs is other companies trying to use these drugs as a profit center. Today we’ll look at a drug that is seeking approval to help those who take GLP-1s avoid some of the adverse events.