Ozempic Quotes

But as I learned, we've had several moments in the past where the new diet drug was hailed as a "magic pill", and then had to be yanked from the shelves because it was more deadly than obesity itself.

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Huang was skeptical when his doctors told him there was a new drug option called semaglutide (sold under the brand name Ozempic). The doctor had seen some astounding results from this new drug, including a 50 percent drop in HbA1c levels and a weight loss of as much as 50 pounds. What’s more, these dramatic improvements could happen quickly—sometimes within a couple of months. Huang’s doctor mailed him some Ozempic pens, which he would use to inject himself with this groundbreaking drug once a week. He started on a low dose, which was then slowly increased. In the past, Huang had experienced almost every side effect under the sun from his medications. But you know what? With Ozempic, he experienced no side effects at all.

83 In the 1990s scientists studying the Gila monster, a stocky lizard, discovered a hormone in its venom that allowed the reptile to go months between meals. When they synthesized the hormone in a lab, they produced a medicine called a GLP-1 agonist, which was shown to reduce blood sugar levels in some people with diabetes.84 Today GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic, seem to treat not only diabetes but also obesity and a dizzying range of maladies, including heart disease, alcoholism, and drug addiction. The most famous pharmaceutical breakthrough of the last decade is thus built on the foundation of a most delightfully peculiar obsession: lizard spit.

The new weight-loss drugs are vastly more effective than anything that Jessica or Noelle could get their hands on. So what will happen when people with eating disorders get hold of them? One of the people who has been most vocal in warning about this is Kimberly Dennis. She is a psychiatrist and the chief medical officer of SunCloud Health, a group that runs eating disorders clinics in Chicago. She believes these new weight-loss drugs are like “rocket fuel” for people with restrictive eating disorders. Every day in her clinic, she sees people who are trying to starve themselves—and now these new drugs give them the most effective tool for self-starvation that has ever been discovered. Ozempic arrived at a time when there was already a rising eating disorders crisis. “During the pandemic,” Kimberly said, “rates of adolescents admitting to ERs and inpatient units for eating disorder treatment tripled. Skyrocketed.” Now, she thinks, it is going to soar further. This is not, of course, the intention of the companies manufacturing these drugs, who instruct doctors not to give them to people with a BMI below 27. But the sieve through which these drugs are being prescribed is very leaky. To get them, you can see a doctor online, and many of those medics are not checking your BMI effectively via Zoom.

The truth is that seven months into taking Ozempic, I was banking the benefits of the weight loss, but making almost no other changes in my life. I was eating much less, but I was, frankly, eating smaller portions of the same old shit. Instead of having a whole chicken roll coated in mayo for breakfast, I had a third of one. Instead of having a Big Mac, fries, and nuggets, I just had fries. My diet still consisted overwhelmingly of processed and junk food, just less of it. It was progress—but of a limited kind. Robert Kushner told me that many of his patients were in the same position. “Some people come in thinking the medication is working and they don’t go any further than that. So I force them to reflect. What are you doing with these new sensations? Are you choosing and consuming less ultra-processed foods? Are you having more fruits and vegetables? What is your pattern of eating? Are you having a more plant-based diet? Equally, are you more physically active? Are you doing resistance training? Are you going for hikes? Are you walking your dog?” When I told him I was still eating badly, he smiled sympathetically, and said: “We know diet quality impacts health. Forget about the drug. We know there’s mounds of data that shows that a nutritionally balanced diet, high in fruits and vegetables and reduced in saturated fat and trans fat and meat products, leads to a heck of a lot of [good] health outcomes…To improve your health, you have to go the extra mile. You have to now look at the quality of your diet and your physical activity.” Whenever I heard this advice, I both knew it to be true and felt totally at a loss about how to implement it. How would I even begin? I find this embarrassing to say, because I think of myself as a competent person—I can travel all over the world investigating complex concepts and making sense of them for large audiences—but when it comes to the basic skill of feeding my body, I had no clue what to do. I had never cooked anything that wasn’t made in a microwave. Literally never. Almost everything I ate, unless it was cooked by somebody else, was a takeaway or eaten in a restaurant.

As the drugs began to be used widely across the world, financial analysts started to figure out what this would mean for the global economy. Strategists at Barclays Bank urged investors to move away from the fast-food and snacks markets. There’s already been a decline in the value of the stocks of the doughnut company Krispy Kreme, which analysts directly attributed to the growing popularity of Ozempic. Similarly, Mark Schneider, the chief executive of Nestlé, said that “food and snacking-related categories are the most impacted. In our case that will be the frozen food side of things, confectionary, and to some extent, ice cream.” Morgan Stanley calculated that, because people drink less alcohol when they’re on these drugs, there will likely be $3.5 billion knocked out of the market for booze in the US over two years. The effects are rippling out into unexpected parts of the economy. Companies selling devices for hip and knee replacements have seen their values plunge, because obesity causes so much damage to those parts of the body. An analyst for Jefferies Financial said that airlines are poised to save millions of dollars a year because less jet fuel is burned when you are flying slimmer people. Even jewelers have seen a shift in their business, because people’s fingers are shrinking as they shed weight, so they need their wedding rings to be refitted.

The seven deadly sins were first spelled out by Pope Gregory I in the sixth century—and one of them was gluttony. He said overeating is a sin, and sin requires punishment before you can get to redemption. It is very deep in our culture to believe that obesity is a sign a person is greedy, so suffering is the just and necessary response. The only forms of weight loss we admire are ones that involve pain—extreme exercise programs, or extreme calorie restriction. If you go through that, we’ll just about forgive you. But if you’re suddenly thin at no cost in pain and sweat to you? We are outraged. I realized I had internalized this. I felt ashamed of being fat, and at some unconscious level, I believed I deserved to be punished for it—and taking Ozempic was skipping the punishment, a get-out-of-jail-free card. But when these ideas were brought to the forefront of my mind—once I had to say them out loud—I began to question them. I thought about this more deeply when I read an essay by the Irish journalist Terry Prone, who wrote about how a similar debate had played out two hundred years ago. When modern anesthetics were first introduced, many doctors resisted giving these painkilling options to women going through childbirth, believing that suffering was a crucial part of delivering a baby. Christ had suffered on the cross, and women should suffer when delivering a child. Suffering was ennobling. (I suspect there was also a strain of misogyny and Puritanism to it: a woman delivering a child has had sex, and that, too, should be followed by the infliction of pain.) To have a child without pain was cheating the laws of nature. The beliefs around this only changed very slowly. A key moment came when Queen Victoria revealed she had used anesthetics during her childbirths. Today, few people would say that a woman was “cheating” if she dulled the agony of childbirth with meds, and you would regard me as crazy and misogynistic if I told you that a woman giving birth deserves to suffer. So I asked myself: Why should recovering from obesity involve pain? Do I really think Jeff deserves to suffer? Or my late friend Hannah? Or my grandmother, who was obese for most of her adult life, ruining her knees and likely contributing to her dementia? Do I think they are sinners who deserve punishment—or have I moved beyond the ideas of a sixth-century pope?