The best part is that Ukraine wanted to sell us their anti-drone tech to us a year ago and Trump and co didn't see fit to pursue it.
Did they not know that the Shahed-136 has seen massive fucking use in Ukraine by Russia? Did they not think that Ukraine now being able to shoot like 75%+ of them down might be an indication that, if we are planning to start some stupid pointless war with the country that makes these drones, it might be a good idea to have that same capability?
Or did they think we have an infinite ammo cheat, and we can just launch an infinite number of missiles that cost millions of dollars to shoot down a drone that costs tens of thousands?
We had literally years of intelligence on the capabilities of these drones. The admin claims "We thought it was Zelensky being Zelensky. Self promotion" - but we know how successful their anti-drone capabilities are. We have the data! YOU JUST HAD TO TALK TO THE PEOPLE TO VERIFY IT. The sheer incompetence of these people is astounding.
Literal neo-nazis have existed within the administration at relatively high levels (and likely still do, though they've gotten better about not outright bragging about it like some of those dipshits). People at even higher levels talk about conversations with literal neo-nazis, how they listen to their podcasts, etc. I'm not using this in the "I think everyone that has even remotely fascist tendencies is a neo-nazi" manner, I am using it in the "No these people are literally self described neo-nazis" manner.
The reality of the USA post WW2 is one that is full of plenty of shame. It still might be the most harmless empire there ever was, but that's a relative statement - the US has done * a lot* of harm. Perhaps a lot of good, too. Maybe even more good than harm. But almost all of that harm was unnecessary. But the past is not the future, and the present shows us marching to a darker and darker future.
Better to raise the alarm now and stop that descent rather than letting it continue.
I was really confused by this because I've spent about 6 months of my life in Tokyo and got very very very few disposable chopsticks at restaurants a tier above, like, shokken ramen shops.
But the internet informs me that the composite chopsticks that I am used to seeing went away during covid and now disposable wooden chopsticks are the norm.
I don't exactly know the system for which restaurants pull out of the disposable chopsticks but I think that for example "normal" tempura, katsudon, or like soba restaurants will tend to be those.
I almost associate the cheapo reusable plastic chopsticks with some food courts or Matsuya at this point.
Pretty much every adult fat person has attempted diet and exercise to resolve their weight issue.
Saying they should try this first at this point in the game is like having your support case escalated 5 times already and them saying "have you tried turning it off and on again"
"Starvation mode" as people talk about it is generally nonsense - the exceedingly low bodyfat you mention for keto is the same place you would see it in a non-keto diet when we talk about actual starvation mode and not whatever you're talking about with a non-ketogenic diet.
The only real difference when it comes to the biology here is that fat mobilization into glucose is significantly slower and less efficient, which keeps your blood sugar levels more constant, which results in fewer post-meal food cravings. Which isn't nothing, but it's not muscle sparing in and of itself.
We have plenty of studies here. Keto diets are not better for sparing lbm.
In fact, if you already have significant muscle mass, it might be worse. Glycogen is hugely important when doing resistance training, and keto significantly impacts your glycogen stores. People perform worse with their resistance training on keto than regular diets.
I suspect you have no idea that your body has two independent energetic circuits - one driven by insulin and glucose, the other driver by ketones. Just please dump this to any decent LLm to give you ELI5. Muscles obviously need glucose for their best performance which is why strength training is not recommended during ketosis; OTOH ketosis is naturally muscle-sparing.
> I suspect you have no idea that your body has two independent energetic circuits - one driven by insulin and glucose, the other driver by ketones.
I am fully aware - I have spent several years of my life following a ketogenic diet. None of that is relevant for "starvation mode" and insulin within that context. I was replying to your specific points - not providing an explanation on how ketosis works from end to end.
Unless you are claiming that your body just doesn't produce glucose/glycogen and insulin when in ketosis? Which would also be incorrect.
> Muscles obviously need glucose for their best performance which is why strength training is not recommended during ketosis;
Strength training should 100% still be done in ketosis/while following a ketogenic diet. It will be suboptimal compared to a regular training, but being in ketosis doesn't magically make resistance training optional if you want to be healthy.
> OTOH ketosis is naturally muscle-sparing.
It is not and the study links in my post show consistent data here. There might be an exception if you are an endurance athlete but that is based on far more limited data than the rest of the research. So... if you're a high level endurance athlete that is also somehow fat, keto might be a better option when it comes to sparing muscle, but for the rest of us, not the case.
You keep mixing normal carbohydrate metabolism with functional starvation mode when in low caloric high carb diet, i.e. elevated insulin in a low-energy/tired mode with increased cortisol, ramping up gluconeogenesis from muscle tissue, catabolic state from elevated stress hormones, T3 thyroid hormone underproduction, adrenaline spikes leading to insulin resistance beta-andregenic sensitivity downregulation, none of which is present in ketosis from e.g. water fasting.
As for ketosis sparing muscles that comes from a wide range of effects like low insulin, preserved/increased GH/IGF-1, BHB-inhibited muscle proteolysis and low leucine oxidation.
Your super confident attitude is likely going to lead nowhere for any people following your advice and when they confront you about not reaching any fat loss goals, your response will be likely "it's you", instead of understanding the gaps in your own knowledge.
Your body doesn't enter starvation mode until you are in the 4-6% body fat range no matter what your diet is.
I linked 3 reviews/analysis of a large group of studies.
Your study also doesn't argue what you think it argues.
> A total of 33 studies were analyzed, revealing no significant differences between the KD and other diets in muscle mass
But fundamentally it is not a meta-analysis of people on weight-loss diets, it is a meta-analysis of people on keto. Look at the included studies - nearly half of them were on athletes. They weren't tried to lose weight - they were just eating keto. No one is saying that maintaining on keto is going to cause muscle loss.
Your confidence is the problem here - you're throwing around a bunch of words you don't understand and linking studies you didn't read.
Muscle loss is determined by your protein intake, muscle stimulus, and rate of weight loss. Plenty of people start lifting for the first time (or after having stopped for extended periods of time) when going on GLP-1s and actually put on muscle mass.
It might result in more loss of buccal fat than otherwise but even that is not definitive. Activating the receptors is not the same as burning fat - there are GLP-1 receptors all over your body in all sorts of organs. If you activate them in your brain you're not burning your brain for energy.
n=1, been lifting weights for 25 years and lost 40 lbs on Zepbound and counting.
I can still do my routines easily with no issues. My muscles look slightly smaller I think, but maybe that's the fat around them that's been diminished.
Sorry, you're right. I meant that I did not make significant changes to my diet. My point was I didn't really change what I eat, but how I eat. I still hate certain vegetables like carrots, kale, brussel sprouts, etc. and just added more of the nutritionally equivalent and culinarily far superior vegetables I was already eating.
That's not willpower. That's looking things up in the USDA database and tweaking my existing recipes. Why force nasty carrots onto the plate when I can eat spinach, cantaloupe, pumpkin, sweet potato, etc.?
I guess I also didn't emphasize enough that I took things super slowly? Taking 5 years to do what I did is a really modest goal. I just wanted to manage risk with minimal change. This is the pareto principle in action.
If we're really going to argue over stats, the effects of GLP-1 is meaningless noise in comparison and probably way harder to commit to. I just wanted to eat good and not feel like shit all the time. Isn't that what everyone wants? What if instead of there being "one weird trick" or a "miracle drug", we consider that basic nutrition is simply misunderstood and full of hundreds of weird tricks that are proportionally much easier to implement and they're damn tasty too?
I'm not knocking anyone meeting their goals without GLP-1s. It's obviously possible in absolute terms - people have been making great body transformations for as long as we've had fat people.
But everything you did, plenty of people try to do and fail at it. You are making it sound like this is all it takes and that it's easy. It might have been for you! But it might not be for other people.
The fact of the matter is the overwhelming majority of people that are obese and go on GLP-1s have tried other interventions before and failed at them. ~70% of all obese people have tried to lose weight in general, ~50% have recurring attempts, and while I don't have stats to back it up I am confident that the sort of people who are willing to go and inject themselves every week are the sort of people that have tried to lose weight in other ways.
> probably way harder to commit to.
A subcutaneous injection once a week is nothing. Dealing with constant food noise? I could maintain that if the rest of my life was stress free, and that's how I would drop 30lb. Once stress came back? So did the weight. Because for me, rearranging food doesn't matter if I still can't stop thinking about it even if I'm not actually hungry.
I'm on reta. It does barely anything to suppress my appetite - physical hunger has never been my issue. And I can easily eat however much I want - most days I am below 2k calories, but Saturday was an annual event with friends and I'm sure between food and alcohol I was probably at 5k calories for the day. But what reta does, is absolutely murders my food noise. I don't think about food constantly. I don't go eat because I got bored. The only thing I have to commit to for it is, once a week, put a needle on my injector pen, twist the dial to the right dosage, poke it into a spot where I still have subcutaneous fat, depress the twist top. Once a month I reconstitute a new vial.
I do at least one a day, sometimes up to four if things happen to line up exactly right.
Even four subq injections amounting to around 2ml of stuff is nothing, doing all four of them after a shower takes about as long as brushing my teeth.
If you use correct technique and good quality needles, you will feel essentially nothing. If your needles are not sharp enough, there might be very slight discomfort when initially piercing the skin.
I couldn't hit my macros on tirzepatide - couldn't get enough protein without feeling sick to my stomach. One of the reasons I swapped to reta.
(though as a general note for anyone reading, just getting enough protein isn't enough - you need muscle stimulus too. Getting enough protein will help reduce the amount lost but if you really want to stop it, you gotta do resistance training)
Did they not know that the Shahed-136 has seen massive fucking use in Ukraine by Russia? Did they not think that Ukraine now being able to shoot like 75%+ of them down might be an indication that, if we are planning to start some stupid pointless war with the country that makes these drones, it might be a good idea to have that same capability?
Or did they think we have an infinite ammo cheat, and we can just launch an infinite number of missiles that cost millions of dollars to shoot down a drone that costs tens of thousands?
We had literally years of intelligence on the capabilities of these drones. The admin claims "We thought it was Zelensky being Zelensky. Self promotion" - but we know how successful their anti-drone capabilities are. We have the data! YOU JUST HAD TO TALK TO THE PEOPLE TO VERIFY IT. The sheer incompetence of these people is astounding.
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