I agree, I fast regularly and I’m fit for most of the year but comes the holidays and I don’t restrict myself which causes issues comes January, I have to train myself to regulate my appetite Ava hunger. It takes a bit and it goes back to normal by February and March but it takes some work.
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.
The other option which people seem to shy away from is to simply embrace the act of feast and famine. I'll regularly go through binges, colloquially known as "Christmas" and "Summer", and to be honest I don't sweat about it. Either the fire is on and we're all celebrating with family and friends with a beer and a roast dinner, or the sun is out and we're having BBQ and cocktails doing the same.
If you can master the skill of dietary control, and go a month or two with really spartan fasting routine between celebration periods, life becomes a lot less stressful. I always enjoy watching Paddy Pimblett (UFC fighter well known for radical weight transformations:https://www.bbc.com/sport/mixed-martial-arts/62135535) bounce between weights, but always get in shape before a fight. It's a skill that only gets easier with practice.
