Yeah it’s not great in the US :/ There are options, but they can be difficult to navigate, and there’s not always a solution for everyone unfortunately.

And if you want to DM me, I may be able to help find a potentially more affordable way of getting your friend Mounjaro. Lily, the manufacturer has a couple of options depending on insurance status and income.

You are mostly right that the weight comes back on, but at least in the time frame studied (up to a year after stopping) a not-insignificant amount of weight stayed off.

For semaglutide, participants lost ~10kg/22lbs over 20 weeks during the run-in period, then when switched to the placebo gained back ~5kg/11lbs over the next 48 weeks. Participants who stayed on semaglutide lost even more weight, leveling out around 20kg/44lbs total over 68 weeks.

And a similar story for tirzepatide.. Lose 20kg over 36 weeks, then gain 10kg back over the next 52 weeks for a net loss of 10kg/22lbs vs total weight loss in continuation group of 25kg/55lbs over 88 total weeks.

I will say that the final ~5% bodyweight loss in the semaglutide study or almost 10% bodyweight loss in tirzepatide study is still a big deal for a lot of people, and a lot of diseases and disease risk can be mitigated to some extent by weight loss of 5-10%.

If you’re interested, here are some stats from the approval studies for semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro/Zepbound), so you can see how fast participants lost weight over the course of the studies.

In the semaglutide study, participants weighed ~105kg/230lbs at the start and lost about 500g/1lb per week for the first 20 weeks, then it started to level out slowly. (You can skip to figure 1.)

In the tirzepatide study, participants started around 94kg/207lbs and lost about 400g/0.9lbs per week for 24 weeks until the weight loss slowed down. (Reference figure 2).

(These studies aren’t directly comparable to each other since they had different study populations, but this should give you a ballpark idea of how fast people on these meds lose weight on average.)

A quick google shows people estimating 500-750 kcal/hour when swimming the English Channel. And another big range, but it looks like ~15 hours is a decent estimate for a one-way crossing, so that’s ~7,000-11,000 kcal, which assuming 3500kcal/lb of fat, that’s 2-3 lbs.

This is all ignoring the fact that most of the energy burned is actually glycogen and food consumed during the swim, not fat reserves.

Not to undermine your point about forklifts being more dangerous than cars (no idea personally, I don’t have any firsthand experience, only horror stories I’ve read on the internet), but I wonder if accidents/injuries per vehicle per year is the best measurement of danger considering I would assume most cars are only driven for about an hour per day, but I would assume forklifts are operated for about 8-12 hours per day.

It looks like they were, there’s an arrow on the right side of the image as well. It must have been a screenshot from a photo album or the webcomic website.

Only one P in HIPAA actually. Common mistake. https://www.cdc.gov/phlp/php/resources/health-insurance-portability-and-accountability-act-of-1996-hipaa.html

Anyone can buy neon space cat underwear. You don’t have to be queer. 😸

Disabling watch history and deleting all previous history stops the shorts from being recommended. You can still search for individual shorts but you can’t scroll infinitely. I’m not sure if you can lock that setting with parental controls or not, but may be helpful.

Would you say that you raw-dog the buns?

To alleviate that feeling: they’re the same person.