A Year on Ozempic Taught Me We’re Thinking About Obesity All Wrong https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/07/opinion/ozempic-weight-loss-drugs.html
“Drugs like Ozempic work precisely by making us feel full. Carel le Roux, a scientist whose research was important to the development of these drugs, says they boost what he and others once called “satiety hormones.”
Once you understand this context, it becomes clear that processed and ultraprocessed food create a raging hole of hunger, and these (GLP-1) treatments can repair that hole. Michael Lowe, a professor of psychology at Drexel University who has studied hunger for 40 years, told me the drugs are “an artificial solution to an artificial problem.”
Yet we have reacted to this crisis largely caused by the food industry as if it were caused only by individual moral dereliction. I felt like a failure for being fat and was furious with myself for it. Why do we turn our anger inward and not outward at the main cause of the crisis? And by extension, why do we seek to shame people taking Ozempic but not those who, say, take drugs to lower their blood pressure?“
I also have taken Ozempic and I agree with the description that it quiets the “food noise” in my brain that formerly drove me to obsess on my next meal, my next snack. It also doesn’t hurt that everytime you consume sugar, it causes projectile vomiting. I call it the chemotherapy of dieting. You will lose weight, but you sure won’t enjoy the nausea, the inability to eat more than a handful at a time, or your injection site hurting for 2 days of the week.
Did I gain the weight back? Well, some. But even 2 years after my 6 weeks on Ozempic, it’s left me with a 15 lb lower weight setpoint and almost a food aversion. For me that’s a win.
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