Breaking my thoughts to your comment into 4 parts.
1: “Were you to follow your advice of “days of eating right, sleeping right and training for every single day of over eating”—which people who are obese have tried for decades and achieving normal BMI is rare—how is this mechanically different? Eating right means smaller meals and eating less kcals than daily metabolic needs”
All these using Freedom Units:
I’ve cut from >230 (I think peak around 245⁄250) to under 190 2 times with a 3rd 30 pound cut snuck in there. Going off Friday afternoon memory: 2013: >230 (Graduated law school, moved back to home state) 2014:<190 (insane caloric restriction combined with dumb resistance training and lots of cardio). 2015end:>230 (in 2015ish I started a new job with horrible commute, ~3 hours of driving a day). 2016end/2017/2019/part2020: <190 (keto/IF/less dumb lifting/working from home) 2020-2023: Long slow accumulation from 190 to >230 then down to just over 200, then back to 230 now down again. 505 squat(wraps)/405 deadlift/260 bench/190 ohp (all between 200-220 BW).
In 2020 I had 2 major life changes. My first (of now 2) kids was born and I decided to bulk, not realizing how much harder I would find it to lose weight when I had child induced sleep deprivation + ~5% of the free time I used to have (WFH 40-45 hours per week + and no kids = very high free time). The combination of intentional weight gain + sleep deprivation was/is brutal, and I’m still dealing with the aftermath.
Now I’m considering things and trying to cut (while maintaining muscle). So, I would say I have followed it and am back to following it. This is not the exhortation of some skinny s**t that’s run a 5k a day for 20 years and never had any trouble with weight. This is from someone who has been to the (bottom? top?) of the mountain (stayed there) and is trying to get back.
Current systems seem crap. I’ve seen 3% able to to keep a significant bodyweight loss off for a year said in many places. I don’t have an answer, other than I don’t think the answer is Semaglutide.
2: To the proposed Semaglutide/AADs stack (or sequential usage), I think that’s a very intriguing idea if someone is in their 20s, has disposable income, goes into it both eyes open with blood testing, good sleep/diet/lifting/coaching and generally takes it seriously. Personally, I think it would be somewhat successful, if only because it would function as an very powerful compliance filter (i.e. if someone complies with all the blood testing to go on blast, and diet/sleep/lift/coaching they are going to see very good results regardless, but having the drugs will very plausibly help with compliance). I would note that going straight to Anavar seems a mite excessive, and well monitored “sports TRT” would seem a good first step if someone is thinking of this route (although I have heard in many places it is easier to get a bottle of Anavar than monitored “TRT” (I could more easily get a script for Deca + Test than reliably sourceAnavar based on my understanding)). Disclosure: Purely hypothetical for me, I’ve never experienced a lifting plateau that simple compliance with programming/sleep/diet didn’t fix, so never felt it was reasonable to pursue assistance even before other concerns (i.e. 2 kids and a wife and just terrible genetics for drug interactions).
3: Mechanical stuff: No clue here at all. My honest shot in the dark is 3 guesses. 3a: Semaglutide (based on personal reports online) absolutely messes with your brain/general thought patterns. This could be downstream of hormone changes from dieting, or some unknown interaction or something else. If you go and read people’s stories this is a very common theme. It’s doing more things in your brain than messing with perceptions of fullness/hunger/slowing your stomach down.
3b: Hand wavey “the body is complicated” and who knows on nutrient abosoption/mechanisms.
3c:I think we are so far from understanding willpower (even as it relates to food) that our advice on this front is closer to mysticism than anything else. More honestly, I think we’d be better off simply telling people to do a modified 12 steps with food, or intentionally obsessing about clean eating (i.e. if you hit 30 and have been overweight for >5 years you’re probably better off being an obsessed nutter that can’t shut the f**k up about keto/vegan/carnivore and weighing a healthy BW + doing cardio than you are staying overweight)
4: “What do you think a hypothetical ASI system validated on results is going to prescribe in 2050? It’s not going to be 1 pill once a day. You will likely need an implant loaded with hundreds of drugs and the doses are varying in response to feedback from implanted sensors.”
Yes, strong agree (with the caveat I think you need to add at least another 50 years).
Your anecdote isn’t helpful here. People usually fail this way while semaglutide works.
People take small doses of anavar by itself. If your goal is to add a few lean kilograms back as a 50+ year old, this would be how.
Generally in human physiology if you have no mechanism, no way for A to cause B, it’s correlation and not causation. You certainly would need much more data to prove your “lean loss” hypothesis. The studies I have seen show immediately mortality benefits because lower body mass means less load on the heart and blood vessels. You are claiming long term harm that hasn’t been established to happen.
The Singularity hypothesis says this is possible. Were it to take 50 more years, the hypothesis is false. It’s like saying a nuclear bomb that is detonating slowly and doubling in power level every year is not going to hit megatons of yield for 75 years.
The route to success I see is the singularity will allow for the necessary tools to solve biology (through mass robotic self replication followed by replication of all bioscience experiments to date followed by the systematic building of ever more complex human mockups). A company could do this, getting trillions in investment from self interested (AI company founder) trillionaires, in a friendly jurisdiction. The medical results from a machine with this amount of intelligence, knowledge, and tools would not be deniable. (As in low hanging wise, elderly patients would lose their frailty from bone marrow replacement with deaged hemopoietic stem cells, stage 4 patients would have a 100 percent survival rate, heart disease patients would get regenerated hearts with performance like a marathon runner, and so on. Dementia patients would recover. These things are all possible if you can manipulate the genes in adults and know what you are doing)
The current economic machine will create those trillionaires within 10-15 years if they do succeed in creating AGI.
Breaking my thoughts to your comment into 4 parts.
1: “Were you to follow your advice of “days of eating right, sleeping right and training for every single day of over eating”—which people who are obese have tried for decades and achieving normal BMI is rare—how is this mechanically different? Eating right means smaller meals and eating less kcals than daily metabolic needs”
All these using Freedom Units:
I’ve cut from >230 (I think peak around 245⁄250) to under 190 2 times with a 3rd 30 pound cut snuck in there. Going off Friday afternoon memory:
2013: >230 (Graduated law school, moved back to home state)
2014:<190 (insane caloric restriction combined with dumb resistance training and lots of cardio).
2015end:>230 (in 2015ish I started a new job with horrible commute, ~3 hours of driving a day).
2016end/2017/2019/part2020: <190 (keto/IF/less dumb lifting/working from home)
2020-2023: Long slow accumulation from 190 to >230 then down to just over 200, then back to 230 now down again. 505 squat(wraps)/405 deadlift/260 bench/190 ohp (all between 200-220 BW).
In 2020 I had 2 major life changes. My first (of now 2) kids was born and I decided to bulk, not realizing how much harder I would find it to lose weight when I had child induced sleep deprivation + ~5% of the free time I used to have (WFH 40-45 hours per week + and no kids = very high free time). The combination of intentional weight gain + sleep deprivation was/is brutal, and I’m still dealing with the aftermath.
Now I’m considering things and trying to cut (while maintaining muscle). So, I would say I have followed it and am back to following it. This is not the exhortation of some skinny s**t that’s run a 5k a day for 20 years and never had any trouble with weight. This is from someone who has been to the (bottom? top?) of the mountain (stayed there) and is trying to get back.
Current systems seem crap. I’ve seen 3% able to to keep a significant bodyweight loss off for a year said in many places. I don’t have an answer, other than I don’t think the answer is Semaglutide.
2: To the proposed Semaglutide/AADs stack (or sequential usage), I think that’s a very intriguing idea if someone is in their 20s, has disposable income, goes into it both eyes open with blood testing, good sleep/diet/lifting/coaching and generally takes it seriously. Personally, I think it would be somewhat successful, if only because it would function as an very powerful compliance filter (i.e. if someone complies with all the blood testing to go on blast, and diet/sleep/lift/coaching they are going to see very good results regardless, but having the drugs will very plausibly help with compliance). I would note that going straight to Anavar seems a mite excessive, and well monitored “sports TRT” would seem a good first step if someone is thinking of this route (although I have heard in many places it is easier to get a bottle of Anavar than monitored “TRT” (I could more easily get a script for Deca + Test than reliably sourceAnavar based on my understanding)). Disclosure: Purely hypothetical for me, I’ve never experienced a lifting plateau that simple compliance with programming/sleep/diet didn’t fix, so never felt it was reasonable to pursue assistance even before other concerns (i.e. 2 kids and a wife and just terrible genetics for drug interactions).
3: Mechanical stuff: No clue here at all. My honest shot in the dark is 3 guesses.
3a: Semaglutide (based on personal reports online) absolutely messes with your brain/general thought patterns. This could be downstream of hormone changes from dieting, or some unknown interaction or something else. If you go and read people’s stories this is a very common theme. It’s doing more things in your brain than messing with perceptions of fullness/hunger/slowing your stomach down.
3b: Hand wavey “the body is complicated” and who knows on nutrient abosoption/mechanisms.
3c:I think we are so far from understanding willpower (even as it relates to food) that our advice on this front is closer to mysticism than anything else. More honestly, I think we’d be better off simply telling people to do a modified 12 steps with food, or intentionally obsessing about clean eating (i.e. if you hit 30 and have been overweight for >5 years you’re probably better off being an obsessed nutter that can’t shut the f**k up about keto/vegan/carnivore and weighing a healthy BW + doing cardio than you are staying overweight)
4: “What do you think a hypothetical ASI system validated on results is going to prescribe in 2050? It’s not going to be 1 pill once a day. You will likely need an implant loaded with hundreds of drugs and the doses are varying in response to feedback from implanted sensors.”
Yes, strong agree (with the caveat I think you need to add at least another 50 years).
Your anecdote isn’t helpful here. People usually fail this way while semaglutide works.
People take small doses of anavar by itself. If your goal is to add a few lean kilograms back as a 50+ year old, this would be how.
Generally in human physiology if you have no mechanism, no way for A to cause B, it’s correlation and not causation. You certainly would need much more data to prove your “lean loss” hypothesis. The studies I have seen show immediately mortality benefits because lower body mass means less load on the heart and blood vessels. You are claiming long term harm that hasn’t been established to happen.
The Singularity hypothesis says this is possible. Were it to take 50 more years, the hypothesis is false. It’s like saying a nuclear bomb that is detonating slowly and doubling in power level every year is not going to hit megatons of yield for 75 years.
The route to success I see is the singularity will allow for the necessary tools to solve biology (through mass robotic self replication followed by replication of all bioscience experiments to date followed by the systematic building of ever more complex human mockups). A company could do this, getting trillions in investment from self interested (AI company founder) trillionaires, in a friendly jurisdiction. The medical results from a machine with this amount of intelligence, knowledge, and tools would not be deniable. (As in low hanging wise, elderly patients would lose their frailty from bone marrow replacement with deaged hemopoietic stem cells, stage 4 patients would have a 100 percent survival rate, heart disease patients would get regenerated hearts with performance like a marathon runner, and so on. Dementia patients would recover. These things are all possible if you can manipulate the genes in adults and know what you are doing)
The current economic machine will create those trillionaires within 10-15 years if they do succeed in creating AGI.