Comment on doctors
themeatbridge@lemmy.world 10 months agoSort of. We have drugs that can help you lose weight, but they come with their own challenges and risks, and you still need to eat right and exercise. And even then, it’s prescribed and covered for diagnosed diabetes. If you want it to lose weight, you probably have to pay for it.
Eating right is much more difficult than people pretend it is, and exercise is simply not possible for a lot of overweight people. You might as well say “don’t be poor, and also don’t be poor.”
So when you say on top of that, “we’ve made it easier for you to lose weight with this new drug, as long as you aren’t poor,” that’s not really helpful.
exercise is simply not possible for a lot of overweight people.
I’m not fat, but that seems simply untrue unless the person is fat due to a serious disability in the first place. Maybe doing intense exercise isn’t possible, but fat people can absolutely start with small, little exercises and work their way up over months or years.
I wasn’t going to get into it, but I think you’ll find disability is far more widespread than you think it is, and the other limiting factor is poverty. Obese people skew poor for the first time in history, and it’s because the working poor are limited in food choice, healthcare, and disposable time. People who say “start small and work your way up over months or years” never worked 80 hours a week for minimum wage and it shows.
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Obesity is almost always caused by other medical conditions, not the other way around.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In the sample size of the few fat people I know IRL and their family’s that’s not true, at least for the people I know. Unless we’re counting mental illness as a medical condition, which is fair because they are.
Mental illnesses are absolutely medical conditions. Many of them have physical origins; your brain is a physical organ in your body. Mental illnesses with social or experiential origins are also medical conditions that can demand both physical and mental care. The brain can have a physical impact on the body that also need care. Your brain is the main organ in your body that predicts what will happen in the future, and other parts of your body respond to it to regulate biological functions, as famously demonstrated by Pavlov’s experiments with conditioning dogs by experience to get a response from their digestive (salivary) glands.
You’re right, of course, it’s not impossible, but as someone who’s had several significant changes in BMI/body fat in my life, I can tell you exercising when you’re already in decent shape is SO much easier.
Being fat makes a lot of potential options for exercise much more difficult if not outright impossible.
Like going to a pool if there’s is one available near them.
…if there’s [a pool] available near them.
Speaking of institutional racism…
This validated a new normal across America: When legally required to share public pools with Black children, many white families decided they’d rather not go at all. Closing public pools to avoid racial integration became official policy for many cities across the U.S.
My parents and my fiancee have gotten on an equivalent of Ozempic specifically for weight loss and covered by insurance. It seems to be easier now than it was, because if my fiancee wasn’t covered we absolutely couldn’t afford it.
WeGovy?
Excellent question, but I have no idea. She tears the medicine labels off for some reason so I’ll ask her when she gets home and edit with more info. It’s a capsule and a tiny pill, taken morning and night respectively, if that means anything to you.
slaacaa@lemmy.world 10 months ago
Now it is also prescribed for obesity, not just diabetes. And I think very much worth it from a societal perspective, as the healthcare costs of obesity are extreme.