[stantaylor]

My wife, age 60, has battled her weight her whole life, and my son-in-law is currently taking one of the GLP-1 drugs. When I listen to them discuss all this, the one thing that stands out to me is "The drug quiets the voices in my head about food." If there are sweets in the house, for instance, my wife can possibly resist eating them, but she cannot stop thinking about them. For them, and I think for many people, it's not just a matter of hunger but hunger and learned behaviors. My wife can tell you how those voices were activated by her mother when she was a child. It's really complicated.

If there are sweets in the house, I may eat more than I would like, but I don't really have those voices, and after being married to my wife for 40 years, I can't pretend to even understand what her thoughts are about food. I can get a brownie from the kitchen, eat it and forget about them until I come back into the kitchen again. I suspect you also don't have those voices.

(For reference, I've never been particularly overweight, but twice in my life my weight crept up, and I managed to lose and keep off for years 10-25 pounds through diet changes alone; yes, my weight did eventually creep up, but I think the number of years before that happened would qualify medically as a successful weight loss)

To get back to this discussion, my son-in-law has lost 50 pounds since he started taking the GLP-1 drug, but he has also changed his diet and he exercises regularly. He was trying to do those things with mixed success in terms of weight loss before he started taking the drug, so I would say he would probably stand a higher chance of keeping the weight off if he were to stop the drug, but his doctor talks about him always being on a low maintenance dose.