477-Beyond GLP-1 Series: Anhedonia & Health Behavior Change in the Ozempandemic Era

So I'm going to open us up on a kind of a broader question.

So you've been, this has been your career, the intersection of health psychology, behavioral science, nutrition.

What do you think about this GLP-1 era? What are we missing from your angle of expertise in

today's world? Well, I mean, it's fascinating, isn't it? Firstly, I want to say I've seen the work you're doing and thank you because it's just brilliant.

I love seeing this work globally.

I think it's so important.

And probably like me, you've noticed that the sort of, I was thinking about this today, the momentum of GLP-1s.

is just shining a light on so much, but also is leading to so many questions.

So, I mean, the reason that I got into behavioral science and the reason I went into psychology is, you know, going right back, is I never really understood, well, personally, when I was younger, I just never understood why dieting didn't work.

I'm like, if you change your behavior, Why don't you lose weight and why doesn't it stay off? And I was really cynical that we could ever do things to make a difference to our health.

And then I noticed that it was the same thing for everybody.

Everybody's been told to do these behaviors, take these actions, and nothing's working.

And so I sort of went through this journey through nutrition and psychology.

If it wasn't the nutrition, maybe it's the psychology.

And then I realized that actually I had that epiphany moment that so many of us in this space have, which is, oh, hang on.

there's weight critical science here and actually weight management is probably harmful and oh dear what have I been exploring all these years and how could I got it so wrong and why haven't I learned this earlier why haven't I realized that it's not about trying to lose weight why are we focusing on that when all the forces are against us and then I met people like Angela Meadows who I know I've listened to a bit of your podcast with her and she's just amazing

I realised that actually it's our

biology.

We're not programmed to change our behaviour to do certain things.

It won't work.

But what fascinates me about GLP-1s really is what it's shining a light on in terms of behaviour.

So the behavioural science fascinates me because I think it lets us ask questions that are really quite simple and it lets us ask the questions that we feel we should already know the answers to and we're a bit too frightened to ask.

Nobody is asking questions and nobody has the answers, really, although lots of people have started to have them.

So I'm really interested in, from a behavioural point of view, the behaviour of the individual, which I think we're going to talk a bit about today in terms of...