Weight Loss Thread

Koushirou said:

Yeah, I know my lifestyle is shit and I keep trying to change it, but always just goes back to my default, I guess. Not sure what else to do but keep trying, though.

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Have your tried the weight loss drugs? They work fast.

Koushirou said:

I’m not about to keel over dead from being fat and I’m not going to just put myself on some bullshit for the rest of my life for a problem I should be able to solve myself if I was worth half a shit.

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You dont take them for the rest of your life.

They're too expensive in the US anyway. You've talked about your financial situation in other threads and the GLP-1 drugs are drugs of affluence in the US currently.

Koushirou said:

I’m not about to keel over dead from being fat and I’m not going to just put myself on some bullshit for the rest of my life for a problem I should be able to solve myself if I was worth half a shit.

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I've lost 44 pounds since the start of 2025 and I'm not longer medically obese, it's going to take time to put that back on if I fuck up.

Khane said:

They're too expensive in the US anyway. You've talked about your financial situation in other threads and the GLP-1 drugs are drugs of affluence in the US currently.

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Jesus Christ it's x5 more!? I'm paying ~$200 here and recouping it from not paying for fast food deliveries and snacking.

Google says it's $1000+ for Americans!?

There's the "golden dose" if that helps, the injector pens have 5 doses in them and for some reason you can only access 4 of them. You can get at the rest with a syringe.

Chris said:

Google says it's $1000+ for Americans!?

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Well, nobody pays sticker cost for meds like that. Some insurances will cover it, then it's like $20/mo. You can get it from compounding pharmacies much, much cheaper, or you can buy from a peptide shop, depending on your risk aversion.

Control said:

Well, nobody pays sticker cost for meds like that. Some insurances will cover it, then it's like $20/mo. You can get it from compounding pharmacies much, much cheaper, or you can buy from a peptide shop, depending on your risk aversion.
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You cannot get the patented Semaglutide formulation from compounding pharmacies just to be clear. And I'm not sure they can even use Semaglutide in their formulations anymore now that the FDA declared there is no longer a shortage. Those compounding pharmacies are nebulous and dubious. Your screenshot lists it at 6mg for instance. I don't think you can get a dosage anywhere near 6mg from Novo Nordisk.

I know a lot about this because I was trying to convince my obese mid 60s parents to try to get on it and after they talked to my Aunt and other family friends they got prescriptions for it only to find out insurance "covers" it on their HDHP and its ~$1300/mo. If they don't go through insurance, and instead go through the Novo Nordisk group card its ~$650/mo. Insurance companies here are... well we don't really need to get into how fucked insurance is right? Most of these insurers won't even cover Ozempic for Diabetics unless they are on HDHPs and will likely not hit their deductibles until like October in any given calendar year, meaning the insurance company only has to cover 2 months a year. Trying to get covered for Wegovy if you aren't diabetic is unlikely on non-HDHPs and not cost effective vs the novo nordisk group card (which is $500/mo now). And $500/mo is a drug of affluence.

Khane said:

You cannot get the patented Semaglutide formulation from compounding pharmacies just to be clear. And I'm not sure they can even use Semaglutide in their formulations anymore now that the FDA declared there is no longer a shortage. Those compounding pharmacies are nebulous and dubious. Your screenshot lists it at 6mg for instance. I don't think you can get a dosage anywhere near 6mg from Novo Nordisk.

I know a lot about this because I was trying to convince my obese mid 60s parents to try to get on it and after they talked to my Aunt and other family friends they got prescriptions for it only to find out insurance "covers" it on their HDHP and its ~$1300/mo. If they don't go through insurance, and instead go through the Novo Nordisk group card its ~$650/mo. Insurance companies here are... well we don't really need to get into how fucked insurance is right? Most of these insurers won't even cover Ozempic for Diabetics unless they are on HDHPs and will likely not hit their deductibles until like October in any given calendar year, meaning the insurance company only has to cover 2 months a year. Trying to get covered for Wegovy if you aren't diabetic is unlikely on non-HDHPs and not cost effective vs the novo nordisk group card (which is $500/mo now). And $500/mo is a drug of affluence.

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Not sure of the compounding regulations, but you can buy from the peptide shops (my previous screenshot) if you trust them and don't mind reconstituting and injecting manually. Also, just because you're on a HDHP doesn't necessarily mean you're paying full price. I know a few people taking it, and $20/mo wasn't theoretical. Shittons of people are taking this, and most of them aren't shelling out the sticker price. Insurance may be bitch about covering it for weightloss exclusively, but if you need it, you're probably prediabetic anyway.

Control said:

Not sure of the compounding regulations, but you can buy from the peptide shops (my previous screenshot) if you trust them and don't mind reconstituting and injecting manually. Also, just because you're on a HDHP doesn't necessarily mean you're paying full price. I know a few people taking it, and $20/mo wasn't theoretical. Shittons of people are taking this, and most of them aren't shelling out the sticker price. Insurance may be bitch about covering it for weightloss exclusively, but if you need it, you're probably prediabetic anyway.

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Well, if you are able to get it covered and it's $20/mo that's a no-brainer.

Cad said:

I know girls are very averse to it but I'd lift weights rather than do elliptical for an hour.

You can do everything you need to with dumbbells and never have to do barbells or anything dangerous for anything. If you've never really worked out before, just google up some dumbbell workouts for women.

Elliptical will do nothing really besides burn calories, what you really want to do is build at least some skeletal muscle which is what gives your body its shape. If you see old ladies even when they are skinny, they just look like a bag of bones? Thats what you don't want, your muscle wastes away as you get older unless you take positive steps to keep it.

I'm not talking about getting big or being a bodybuilder. You should be doing heavy enough weight to almost fail at 10-12 reps (which will be light). You're not going to get big. You just not going to waste away into a bag of bones.

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I think we underestimate a lot the amount of muscle you can build by just walking.
My plan to get back in shape was in 3 steps :
1) lose weight (from I had a BMI of about 33 at the worst...); as mentionned by everyone, it's just diet, it was obvious that exercices were even on the way of losing weight at the point.
2) Once I get below 30, gradualy increase the walking, to slowly increase the calories out per day, to get back in shape.
3) Once I reach 26 BMI start working out.

Basicaly, everyone went according to the plan, last september I was like, ok I'm going to move onto the last step in january, so I started to monitor the muscle mass, to get a "baseline" before starting to workout in january.

And it looks like this :
Muscle mass :

Fat mass :


And it was a satisfying amount of gain to me, gaining about 2 pounds of muscle mass in 6 months, while losing about 4 pounds of fat, so I postponed workout for another 6 months (at least) to see if the trend continues.

If the accuracy is probably somewhat low on the actual number, the trend are most certainly accurate, this data is collected with my galaxy watch, if anything it probably underestimate my muscle mass, as my legs are significantly more muscular than my arms. But oddly, just by walking, even my arms have gotten visualy more muscular. At first my wife was joking at my "workout" and now that she's seen the result, she's walking with me...

Still according to my watch, I'm in the top 5% in muscle mass for my size , and bottom 25% in fat mass; and that's just walking. Walking on average 10 miles a day for the last 12 months, over 7,000,000 steps in the last 12 months.

The downside is that it takes a lot of time to walk 10 miles a day, but you get better at getting "free step" as time go by, like doing the groceries, picking up the kids etc.. walking, sometimes when you compute it, you realise that you get 5k step for 5 extra minutes, compared to using the car. But there are ups : you can probably keep walking 10 miles per day even when you're very old, and the risk of injury is close to 0, and it seems to be increase muscles in a lot more places than just the legs.

I mean, I'm just lazy and don't like to workout, so I'm glad this walking stuff works a lot better than I thought it would, I thought it would just help me lose weight, but it seems it helped me steadily increase my muscle mass.

Now I wish I'd started recording this data 3 years earlier.

Cad said:

I'm not hating but I don't think there's any chance you gain muscle mass in the arms by walking. I think you're just noticing that you look leaner and that makes you look more muscular. It's good changes either way but I also don't think any smartwatch app has any way of knowing your muscle mass/fat percentage.

If you want a good baseline you need a Dexa scan, all of the conduction-based fat estimates are guesswork at best.

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The accuracy isn’t great, but if it says your muscle mass increased, it most certainly did, and the relative variation is probably okayish. If it says you gained 10% muscle mass, it's probably close to the truth. It's really simple, muscle and fat conduct electricity differently.

It's not great at comparing 2 different people, but it's decent at tracking evolution in the body composition.

There is no doubt that I gained muscle in the shoulders / arms areas.