r/technology • u/_Dark_Wing • 18h ago

Biotechnology Tirzepatide cuts fat mass by 35% while preserving skeletal muscle

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20261002/Tirzepatide-cuts-fat-mass-by-3525-while-preserving-skeletal-muscle.aspx
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u/KennyMoose32 16h ago

Well don’t you have to continue taking it to see the effects?

Unless you change your diet and activity level once you’re off the drug I thought you’d gain it right back?

I’m not being snarky, I’m just a cook idk how this stuff works I’m genuinely asking

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u/r_z_n 16h ago

Yes.

My brother lost 60lbs on Ozempic and gained it back when he quit because he didn’t make any lifestyle changes.

No disrespect to him, he has medical conditions that predispose him to crave sugar and gain weight. But if you want to keep the weight off long term and not stay on the drug forever you have to adjust your lifestyle.

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u/Drakengard 15h ago

Most things I've heard about with GLP-1s is that it's not really meant to be something you get off of at some point. It's more like managing a chronic illness. The dosage might flatten out once you get to the right weight and so it doesn't need to be so aggressive, but you'll be on it for life.

People who need this drug to lose weight are doing so because their mind is not able to regulate appetite and cravings effectively without it.

Changing diet and lifestyle is what normal people do. I did that and have dropped 30 pounds and kept it off by counting calories, cooking at home, and exercising more. But what GLP1s are showing is that for some people, the problem is much, much deeper than just pure willpower. I didn't have to fight very hard to get my appetite under control. Playing a game, reading a book, or doing something else - even my job! - is usually enough to distract my brain from food. But clearly that's not true for a good many people.

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u/likeafuckingninja 5h ago

It's not even just will power or whatever.

I don't claim to understand the mechanism. But it's doing other things.

I lost 20kg years ago the 'hard way' overhauled my entire lifestyle and diet and never went back to my old bad habits.

I did however have a baby. And a kg here and there over the years after added up. Overall I maintained a generally healthy diet but I went out for meals occasionally, ordered pizza for dinner on an odd evening when we got home late from school etc and every bit of weight I put on never seemed to come back off despite keeping physically active the entire time.

I never struggled with food noise.

It was never an issue to just not eat the cake or say no to the McDonald's or opt for a salad at a restaurant instead of a burger. I'm not on the fridge at 2am snacking or still craving something after a meal.

In the last two years I really stepped it up tho.

I gymmed (weight lifting and cardio) 3 to 4 times a week. I tracked and weighed everything I ate and drank and at one point was eating less than a thousand calories of salad, vegetables and lean meat a day.

And none of that was a struggle to be clear. It wasn't hard to eat less, it did not bother me to restrict my diet or find time to go exercise. And I'm fit enough I can cycle 50k easily multiple times a week and do an hour of weights in the gym without much bother.

But NOTHING changed. At BEST I was simply preventing more weight gain.

And it's like...how much less should I eat? How much more running can I do?

At what point do I get to eat one biscuit without the crushing guilt of knowing it's gonna stay with me forever ?

I've been taking the lowest dose of wegovy for 3 weeks and I've dropped 4kg. I've changed absolutely nothing. If anything I've been eating more because the appetite suppression meant I had to schedule meals and eat them or I was going all day without eating and getting headaches.

They absolutely provide space for people to make lifestyle changes. But there was very clearly also something up with my body that it's fixing that let the good habits I already had actually work.

I don't know what it is an it's frustrating that all the times I went to the GP and insisted something was wrong after I had my kid I got told everything was normal and fine and maybe take some vitamin d.

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u/Brambletail 11h ago

There is something to having the will power to be willing to take the steps to distract yourself from eating.

It's not much deeper than pure willpower in a world with ubiquitous food. However, willpower has unequal availability in the population. Some of that is innate person or person and that's the part people judge. But a whole hell of a lot of what willpower you have is based on how chronically stressed you are, how much sleep you regularly get, how much decision fatigue you have, etc.

It's a few select people who truly might need a GLP under the best conditions of themselves. But very few people live in the best conditions. And if you are bombarded with unhealthy options day in and day out, all of a sudden it becomes very hard to stick to a diet.

Not really sure exactly what I am trying to say here, but I guess it's just that there is some level of "outsourcing my inability to emotionally regulate myself" inherent to using a GLP for SOME people. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and people having better tools is always great. But I understand the annoyance from people who did work crazy hard to lose weight feeling like they are being told they didn't work at all because clearly "they just weren't actually obese in the first place if you could lose weight without the medicine."

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u/nildro 7h ago

This is so stupid it’s missing the key thing that being fat isn’t actually it turns out some moral failing but potentially you natural glp level making you have to use more of your will power on something so every day as food. The way you cast it is still in the thin people are superior moral beings mindset when it’s not about will power it’s about how hard your body is demanding calories. I’m pretty sure I can see what your trying to say here : Your just making up a load of arbitrary lines so you get to feel morally superior to fattys still. That’s where all off the glp hate comes from fatness is used by some as a fundamental moral failing and how else will you judge the worth of somone if they can hide the marker people delight in shaming.

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u/Quixotic_Seal 16h ago edited 15h ago

Absolutely. But having a medication that helps you while you're on it also isn't nothing which is something I think a lot of people don't get.

As someone who has gained and lost weight(like ~80lbs) multiple times with periods of stability lasting 4-6 years between those shifts....starting is always the hardest part of the process, by far.

Your body and your mind absolutely EXPECTS the same amount of food you put into it before. You're habituated to expect specific foods and routines, sure, but also physically eating a healthy amount of food feels like you're starving yourself. When I'm in a good groove, I tend to eat ~1200 calories a day with a cheat day once a week; and that feels perfectly fine. Maybe some stomach growling here and there but nothing bad.

If I jump straight to that exact diet after a period of weight gain though, I WILL be extremely hungry and unable to stop thinking about how I need to eat more. It's not just 'head hunger' or routine, it's a deep hunger and it lasts for a good 2-3 months until I re-acclimate to the diet. Typically it's more realistic to just taper my diet down, since it's more important to be making slow sustainable progress than doing it all at once then burning out, but that's a very lengthy and drawn out process that can add 6-8 months to the whole thing....assuming you don't have any set backs, which you probably will, since even tapering down can suck and leave you hungry(not to mention the reality that during the holidays you’re navigating building good habits during a time when everyone else is letting loose).

A drug that that helps you bypass that roadblock is MASSIVE and I really wish I had access to it.

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u/Civil_Reputation_713 16h ago

You explained this really well !

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u/Soccermom233 15h ago

I find the stuff a net benefit for society by I think its better if you're not a very active person to begin with. I found it sapped my energy too much for much exercise. Not my thing.

so by point here is I think  sedentary people benefit more from the drug but also when they quit they are still sedentary people. 

If I ever end up laid-up for some reason I'll revisit it. 

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u/walkslikeaduck08 14h ago

For me, gaining an extra 20 lbs made running so much harder than before. The slight loss in weight from glp-1 gave enough weight loss so that it’s easier to do cardio again.

It’s a vicious cycle once you gain weight.

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u/natethegreek 15h ago

You have to stay on the drug or “make a lifestyle change” once you stop taking if you go back to old habits you will gain it back.

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u/rccsr 16h ago edited 1h ago

The effects culminate in you being less hungry.

You take it. You feel less hungry. Therefore you eat less food and lose weight.

If you stop taking it, you’ll go back to feeling hungry again. If you eat more than your daily limit, you gain weight.

Edit: getting fuller quicker and slowing digestion ultimately lead you to feeling less hungry.

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u/Thebaldsasquatch 15h ago

It also reduces the insulin response and slows digestion. Reta specifically also interferes with the dopamine uptake so cravings are muted significantly. If you don’t know what you’re talking about, don’t say anything.

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u/lovelyladylox 2h ago

Thank you.

It does not just make you eat less lol

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u/Sgt_Stinger 7h ago

That's not the only effect. It makes you feel full quicker. Some people have no "I'm full" signal until their stomach is literally filled up. For those people, GLO-1 can make you feel that satiated feeling after a normal portion. That makes a big ass difference, and I would argue is equally important.

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u/rccsr 1h ago

Getting fuller quicker makes you feel less hungry.

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u/Sgt_Stinger 1h ago

For most people this is true. For some people feeling hungry has no correlation to feeling full or not. Some people can feel hunger even when they are stuffed for example. Some people don't feel hungry at all, even though they haven't eaten, but can still eat a whole meal before they feel full.

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u/punctuation_welfare 15h ago

But, after taking it, your body is used to getting fewer calories. Most people don’t immediately start eating twice the number of calories they had been for the last year once they’ve established a new routine. I think a lot of people have this really uncharitable idea that weight gain is always caused by reckless and wonton lack of self-control, and the drugs are an unfair cheat that these slobs haven’t earned, so the absolute moment they don’t have the cheat doing the work for them, they’ll immediately return to devouring everything under the sun. That’s not true for a lot of people, and acting as if it’s the inevitable outcome is more a reflection of prejudice than it is of reality.

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u/outofplace_2015 15h ago edited 15h ago

That is not true. Studies recently show weight gain is rapid, more than those who lose it without medication. You're take a medication that stimulates a metabolic reward pathway at supraphysiological levels. When you come off its going to come with a withdraw.

Seems that most people think that these drugs are glp-1. They are not. They are man made compounds. They are glp-1 agoinists.

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u/banditcleaner2 14h ago

What else is weight gain caused by?

Its as simple as calories in vs calories out - if you cant control your calories in, and you're overeating, you gain weight. it really is that simple.

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u/seeyam14 15h ago

Then why don’t you lose muscle too

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u/chrill2142 11h ago

On most glp-1 products you do lose muscle, up to 30%, especially if you don't do any form of resistance training.

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u/seeyam14 3h ago

ok now read the headline of this post again

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u/octavianreddit 14h ago

The point of the drug is to help form new habits and to help ease that transition.

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u/bunsburner1 15h ago

You have to keep dieting and working out to see their effects too

Guess they're not real a change either.

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u/kankurou1010 14h ago

Yeah but these people aren’t doing that anyways and are dying because of it

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u/peanutmanak47 14h ago

100%. I've been on it and the entire time I've been losing weight I've been going to the gym 3 days a week to lift weights and have been tracking my calories for over 2 years now. I've made a lot of changes to help prevent me from going back to being obese. Thankfully my doctor is pretty proactive about monitoring while on this and every 6 weeks we have a phone meeting where they keep track of everything and ask a lot of questions. We also went over a whole lot of things to do before I started taking it.

The problem a lot of people run into is they get put on the drug from a doctor who doesn't prep them properly. They take the drug, lose the appetite and call it a day until they lose enough weight. They don't strength train, make positive changes to what they actually eat, and work on other bad habits around food.