I started a GLP-1 in February of 2025. Lost a bunch of weight, etc.
What I wasn't expecting was that I'd have such an easy time dropping the daily drinking habit. I'm not convinced GLP's will help if you're truly addicted to alcohol to the point where you need AA and structured programs to break free. But I do think GLP's have the potential to give you the initial "kick" you need to drop the habit if you're otherwise motivated to.
In the first few months of starting the GLP-1, I remember losing enjoyment for eating (and drinking) a lot of things, especially unhealthy stuff (unhealthy foods/drinks tend to not combine well with GLP's). The taste of a cocktail wasn't as appetizing or appealing as it used to be, hard to explain.
I'd love to see more research around this.
Looks like we posted around the same time, but see:
Are you doing the action because you want to do it, or because your body is responding to that mild trigger that occurs, but your pavlonian response is so strong you can't differentiate.
The thing is, those trigger mechanisms break after weeks without doing them, whereas it is very hard to break them normally without some more extreme measure.
There is a point you made here "losing enjoyment for eating (and drinking)" that I think is The Key, but also not what people think when they hear it without experiencing it. Someone hearing that line might think it makes food "unenjoyable," as in "bad." That is not the case. It is "unenjoyable" as in "lacking in a joyful experience."
After talking with friends of mine who are similarly aged to me but have not had the major weight struggles I've had, I realized one of the biggest differences between us is not our drive or discipline (they envy me in many of these areas), it's in the sheer level of enjoyment that I get out of food and drink that they do not.
There are certain foods that, if I have them, they make me more hungry. I can't physically fit enough spaghetti or chocolate pudding into my mouth to satisfy my craving for it. My favorite beer feels glorious all the way down my throat and into my stomach; I can go from depressed to happy in 10 seconds just from that first gulp. And it's just those specific things. I'm not going to scarf down hard on lasagna or chocolate ice cream. While I enjoy whiskey, wine, cocktails, and other beers, I can have one in a night and be done.
There are also foods that are the opposite. I physically cannot stomach muscles or cuccumber. Putting cauliflower--in any form--on my plate is likely to start an argument. All leafy greens feel like a punishment; I can choke them down, unlike muscles, but I'm not going to like the person who made me do it.
But my friends without weight issues have never had these experiences with any foods. Food is just a way to avoid hunger. Booze is just a way to get drunk. There's no strong emotional connection to any of it.
And GLP-1 agonists completely remove that. I've heard it called "The Food Noise." It's basically a re-baselining of my relationship to food back to what should be "normal." Nothing has a feedback loop of pushing me to consume more anymore. Nothing gives me such strong revulsion that I can't eat it anymore. It's just food, on my plate. I don't even feel hungry, the only reason I'm eating it is because I understand at an intellectual level that I have to in order to not pass out in the middle of the day.
The only way I found to reduce cravings is to be a hermit because there is food absolutely everywhere all the time
And as for cure rather than suppression - yes, according to that definition, no medicine that is intended to be taken indefinitely to manage a condition is a cure. But nevertheless, high blood pressure medicine, statins, anti-inflamatories, HIV antiretroviral therapy, and many other drugs have saved many millions of people from an early death. We should keep looking for one-off "cures" for all conditions, but let's not limit ourselves to them.
But forming habits / making lifestyle changes is hard. And when people hear they can just take an injection instead of make lifestyle changes they're like oo, easy!
But for many it's considered a shortcut and there's a big network of dubious online shops and weight loss clinics that sell it. It's not unlike crash / fad diets in that regard.
Most people would already benefit from lifestyle adjustments, but those are hard to do for most people - for starters, most people don't even have regular eating habits to begin with, no baseline to even make adjustments to.
That said, there are some that have reported it also lessens desire for things they want to desire.
Did a writeup on this back in summer '25:
https://glp1guide.substack.com/p/glp1s-vs-addiction-a-quick-...
Paywalled so direct links to notable papers through the years below:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8517504
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8820218
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36031011
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10684505
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39764175
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39032839/
https://www.science.org/content/article/obesity-drug-cuts-op... https://www.statnews.com/2024/02/17/opioid-cravings-glp1-wei... (The science.org article is paywalled IIRC)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39535805/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39937469/
Addiction comes up in anecdata all the time so I've written about it a few times but these papers are a good place to start to find more rigorous data points.
Eli Lilly has taken to calling GLP1s "anti-hedonics" as well
Meaning, it is performance-degrading to be overweight. When you remove that? you sleep better you breathe better you move better and therefore think better.
If they are directly performance enhancing, it is in an extremely subtle way- far less than a soda’s worth of caffeine.
A major part of this story I think is especially important, the last time this sort of thing happened was about a decade ago, when I lost 90 pounds without any medical intervention. At that time I learned to code, fixed up my credit, and went from being front line technical support to junior software engineer. Quite a transformative time in my life.
I think curing my sleep apnea due to substantial weight loss means I sleep better, so I just feel more ready to tackle the things the world throws at me. Weight loss is a skill I had, but it required absolute commitment to avoiding sugary foods, eating right every single day, and as soon as I strayed the weight would creep back up over the course of a year or two.
It makes me think of the huge immeasurable economic costs that are happening in the shadows because of obesity, how many people like me are there other aren’t achieving our full potential because we’re just too tired and have too much brain fog to seize the day?
It IME doesn't act like an anti-depressant/SSRI which can affect your enthusiasm/desire for your job.
Absolutely life changing drug for me.
(I'm just concerned; I've seen many people good at and super into their job end up with burnout, often multiple times because they keep thinking "I used to be good at this!", "I enjoy this!", etc instead of accepting that it was never sustainable in the first place. I suspect people's nervous systems etc are more resilient in their 20's, which is why most people with burnout only start to run into it in their 30's)
What GLP-1 did (initially) was give me horrible insomnia that peaked a couple of days after taking the injection so I had to time my dosage so that I suffered through that on the weekend. That got better over time and eventually went away after about 6 weeks.
Regardless, as another poster mentioned, it's a weekly injection and if you don't like the effects you can stop taking it.
This was largely portrayed as a great result in the popular press although personally I think it was a bit of a disappointment given all the amazing anecdotes https://dynomight.net/glp-1/
Seeing such an effect in just 9 weeks, 90% of that time being at low ramp up doses, is astonishing.
Where people on GLP-1s -- in a randomized, double-blind study, notably -- chose to partake of less. I cannot fathom how you dismiss this.
It's a 9 week study at very low doses, and already a significant measurable effect was seen. Now if this wasn't a double-blind study I would dismiss it, but otherwise yeah, it matters.
People who have drinking habits will take a long time to adopt new habits. I would never expect to see baseline behaviour changes in so short a time. But their non-habit desire for alcohol clearly was diminished, hence the lab outcomes.
I've been smoking on and off for 20 years. I have stopped (and relapsed) many times, so I believe I can compare. This was a lot easier. I mean, I had cravings, but they weren't really that bad, and while the first week is generally the difficult part, I only had a couple of days with issues. I did not lose weight that month, though, which is fine as I would normally gain a lot due to compensating for cravings.
I increased the dose again and started losing weight. I guess some people gain weight when they stop using GLP-1. Even if that happens, I'm fine with stopping smoking without weight gain.
Congrats. Smoking is a bitch of a habit and extremely hard to quit.
now, alcohol has become the least interesting thing in the world, I just can't make myself drink it, it is so strange
- Intermittent fasting (16x8 or at least stop eating after sun down)
- Daily morning pranayama (or 'breath work' if you prefer that term)
- Daily morning intake of copper utensil stored water (~8 hours or overnight)
- Weekly oil pulling for gum health.
This approach feels a bit stoic and neanderthal initially, less attuned to our modern and progressive society, but as effective as Ozempic in long-run (minus the side-effects or addiction).
During this same period, I left an abusive marriage and started exercising extensively. While the causes are complex, I attribute the loss of desire to drink primarily to the GLP-1. Subjectively, I now see drinking as a distraction from programming and other things I enjoy. This feels like my early 20s, when I saw getting drunk as a waste of time, rather than later years when I pushed for another round.
I saw a thread on reddit where a GP chimed in and mentioned that he was giving urusodiol to all his patients at the same time as GLPs, to help prevent the associated issues.
Either way, modern science is great. Just do your research.
Since I already knew that rapid weight loss is very unhealthy, I intentionally eat very nutrient dense foods in order to keep my weight loss in a reasonable range.
xdkyx•1h ago
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t-3•6m ago
Handprint4469•1h ago
>> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
>> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#:~:text=Are%20payw...
llm_nerd•1h ago
9 times out of ten it's because sites use cloaking and serve up all of the contents to search bots, but then paywall out end users, so it's kind of a hoisted by their own petard kind of situation.
And, I mean, people can choose to not follow those links. To the rest of us they're often very welcome, and we aren't subscribing to every random site for the once in a millennia worthwhile article.
nullc•57m ago
The site existed for most of a decade before it had any particular paywall bypassing. It's an ondemand archival site that saves the DOM in such a way that redisplay is faithful, unlike archive.org.
It's a key resource in court cases for purely archival purposes and the fact that it bypasses paywalls is essential for its archival purpose to function.
llm_nerd•53m ago
The site/org has no office and is anonymously run virtually. Exists on random, essentially free for all TLDs, does not honour take-down requests, does not respect robots.txt, masquerades as the Googlebot...
...yeah, I happen to have not been born yesterday so I'm not going to play along with a fiction.
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