I both agree and disagree with that.
I was extremely overweight at 145kg in 2022, at that point I believed GLP drugs were impossibly expensive, but had read the research.
I got from 145 to 75 kg in about a year by eating 1600-1800 kcal/day , and mostly lean meat fruit and vegetables and salad, generally low calorific density , with an absolute restriction on any high calorie/ highly rewarding / high glycaemic index foods , and very high protein 40-50%. In the past I had found eating small amounts of rich high calorie food triggered extreme uncontrollable hunger an hour or 2 later, and this was much worse after weight loss, and once started was very hard to stop. presumably something to do with blood sugar spikes then dips then some brain chemistry gone wrong, causing extreme hunger. But still food addiction or binge eating disorder. I got from 65kg in 2014 to 145 in 2022.
I stayed at that weight ( 75kg ) or thereabouts for a year or so, but it was hard and I was nearly always hungry despite eating a diet I had designed around minimising hunger. So in most respects I had solved the problem, using diet and behavioural strategies on myself to control eating, but there is no way it was sustainable long term. I had got to normal weight in the past but could never stay there for more than a year or 2. At some point I would give in and eat too much after being just too hungry for too long.
I found out that ozempic at low dose was not super expensive in Australia at about $40/w aud, and it helped me be less hungry , but also caused nausea that did not get better over a year. And then found this forum and cheap peptides, and tirz 15mg/w plus reta 5mg/w plus cagri 0.5mg/w, do a much better job of controlling hunger and cravings for not allowed foods, I am still sticking to the no high calorie foods approach and have for 3.5 years now, but it is nowhere near as hard on GLP drugs as it was without them and feels like it might be sustainable. This absolute avoidance of high calorie trigger foods is not going to be for everyone, but it worked for me. And I got to 65kg recently at a BMI of 23.
The way I see GLP drugs is they modify appetite , so you are less hungry, they make you feel full after eating less calories, they have some food aversion effects making high calorie foods seem less appealing, reduce cravings for high calorie foods and reduce thinking about food overall, and most importantly of all they still do this after you have lost a lot of weight, where normally hunger is massively increased.
GLP drugs also do work regardless of diet or lifestyle changes, the studies that gave the drugs alone or with diet and exercise interventions did not really show much difference in weight loss, and they improve diet choices unconsciously, people are more likely to eat and buy fresh fruit and vegetables and less likely to buy and eat ultraprocesssed food when they are on GLP drugs. They temporarily modify the functioning of some brain reward circuitry to do this.
GLP drugs are being considered as therapies for binge eating disorder, for the simple reason that they work. Most therapies for that disorder are psychological, mainly cognitive behavioural therapy , which can help, but is not very effective. In general there is a bit of an issue with a psychologist's way of viewing the disorder and a more medical therapy viewpoint. Until GLP drugs the only approved therapy was amphetamines, which help a bit but not a lot. But this field issue is a problem, in general psychologists are going to view it as a problem that needs therapy, not something fixable with drugs, so a lot of what I have seen is from their perspective which does not view them as a solution regardless of how well they work. From what I have read GLP drugs are probably the most effective therapy for binge eating disorder yet found, but this is far from the current consensus, and I would argue this is because of the way it is seen by the people who usually treat it, psychologists, who view it as a problem to be managed with therapy, usually cognitive behavioural ( which in general is a very useful and effective treatment for many psychological and psychiatric disorders, and is often better than medication )
Just from my experience GLP drugs do reduce impulsive or otherwise poorly controlled eating behaviours. Mainly by rewiring the reward circuitry so that the underlying impulse or desire for the food is weaker, and this effect works on other addictions, for alcohol, cocaine amphetamines and opioids, to the point where they are also being considered seriously as therapies for these problems and being actively researched. In my case I had decided to exclude a wide range of foods from my diet totally to bypass this problem, so it is not as easy to say how hard it would have been to start doing this on GLP's, but I can definitely say it is much much easier to stick to it long term with them , and requires a lot less mental effort fighting those impulses, because they are not as strong.
For me GLP drugs are literally lifesaving , were I to regain the 80kg I lost I would be at very high risk, well over 50% of serious cardiovascular disease over the next decade, with a risk reduced to 10-20% with GLP drugs, weight loss and statins etc. Despite having lost the weight without GLP drugs, I do see them as the closest thing there has ever been to a long term solution to obesity, short of surgery which is not without adverse effects. In general all of the research ever done on reducing obesity with diet and exercise shows initial successes with very poor long term results, with single digit percentages ever maintaining major weight loss long term. So as far as I am concerned diet and exercise , as a treatment for obesity do not work, or at best help a bit or temporarily. GLP drugs so far show weight loss and maintenance up to 5 years from start to end of study, with no trend to increased weight over time if the dose used to lose the weight is maintained, and depending on which drug, can cause an average of 15-29% weight loss, much more than diet therapies could ever achieve. And after that 5 years , when the GLP was stopped weight started going up immediately.
In people especially with severe obesity including those with binge eating or food addiction disorder, GLP drugs help to fix the problem. The appetite regulation system in long term obesity gets broken somehow, in a way that is not fully understood as the appetite regulation system is extremely complicated, redundant and full of all sorts of feedback loops. Until GLP drugs there was nothing that really worked , best previous drugs had at best 5-8% weight loss, and weight loss surgery is no picnic. And weight loss , good diet and exercise do not fix the broken appetite regulation system. After weight loss , especially massive weight loss, energy expenditure is quite a bit lower than would be expected for a person of that age and activity level, and hunger is higher than normal. This is the impossible state of trying to maintain weight loss without GLP's. Having to stick to a lower than normal, low calorie diet long term, despite your body telling you it is hungry all the time, which is exactly what I have experienced, requiring 1600-1800 kcal/day to be weight neutral. Which is why so few people succeed in long term weight loss from diet and exercise, so it does not really help to develop excellent eating and exercise patterns, a very small percentage can do it, and develop unconscious habitual patterns of new behaviour with exercise and diet , so that weight can be maintained without constant mental effort in controlling eating, but even then the basic energy equation is fighting you , requiring less calories in at the same time as more hunger. The only fix for this problem that exists so far is GLP drugs.
And taking them long term benefits health, reducing risks of many diseeases related to obesity, so it is not a trade off of weight control for bad health outcomes, you get both better health and lower weight. So long as side effects do not reduce quality of life while taking them, there are very few downsides to GLP drugs. Apart from the extreme cost if you are using the legit versions.