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hollow laughter
I wish it worked like that. I'm on one for nearly a year now. Helps with the blood sugar levels, but nothing about weight. I'm around the same weight as ever (and it takes me effort to maintain that and not balloon up).
The magical "you won't feel hungry, you will feel full, it helps with all sorts of willpower, weight just drops off" results? I'm not seeing any of them.
Never have with any drugs that were supposed to be "and a side-effect is weight loss". One time I was on some medication and the doctor laughingly said "one patient I prescribed this to lost so much weight, he had to come off it". "Won't be a problem with me", I replied, and it wasn't, because no. goddamn. drugs. stop. me. feeling. hungry.
The only time, the only time, I lose even a small amount of weight is when I am literally too sick to eat anything and it's hard even to keep down water. Again, for one of those times, I went to the doctor (for antibiotics) and they did a routine blood sugar test because I had all the shaky symptoms, and the nurse made me eat something to bring up my blood sugar because it was too low to measure. In fact, I couldn't even eat the chocolate biscuit she gave me, so they had to dig out an energy drink.
I still remain embarrassingly fat.
The drugs don't work, indeed.
I am glad that you and others replied with something to this effect. My mom and my aunt are both on Wegovy, and neither of them seem to be losing weight. Mom gets horrible nausea from it a few days after each shot, so she'll sometimes skip injections. I expected a lot more out of them from what I was reading self_made_human claim about them.
Well, "miracle cures" aren't, by and large (except maybe in the early years of antibiotics when it was the Silver Bullet that cured damn near everything, and then eventually we got drug-resistant strains).
For some people, it will work fantastically. Cuts down hunger, makes you feel satiated, weight comes off, general boost to willpower, even claims that it's an addiction cure for smoking, drinking, lack of moral fibre, and so forth. For most people, it'll help. For some people, we'll be there looking at all the "no excuse to be fat now that GLP-1 drugs are there" posts and wanting to drop a flowerpot on poster's head. Definitely it's helping with my blood sugar levels, and since I got prescribed it for Type 2 diabetes that's the main concern. But the main weight loss is from the initial "this will have you running to the bathroom every five minutes until your digestive system adjusts", for me at least. Nausea and diarrhoea mean no eating, and naturally no eating means water weight loss, which shows up on the scales. As for your mother skipping injections, either try and keep on a regular injection schedule even with the nausea until it passes (and that will take a few weeks), or if it doesn't pass, ask to be put on something else.
The major effects are supposed to be "this slows down digestion, that means food passes more slowly, that means you feel fuller for longer and so won't eat as much". It's had a very weird affect on my appetite. Yes, when I sit down to eat a meal, I don't eat as much as I used to before (I will leave food on the plate instead of eating every scrap). But then half an hour to an hour later, I'm hungry again. And I'm constantly grazing. Small bits here and there (a bowl of cereal, two slices of toast, some cheese, some sweets, so forth) but small bits add up.
Mainly I'm maintaining my current weight, so not packing on more pounds is good, but not seeing the magic weight loss yet. Though I'm on Ozempic and not at the maximum 2mg dose yet. Maybe when my doctor moves me up to that, there will be a visible result? Or maybe not. I'm not holding my breath hoping for a miracle.
As ever, the only thing that works is cut out all junk and snacks, cut down on carbs, eat much fewer calories in total, and exercise for muscle toning and retention.
She's been on it for 1.5 years and she's at 1.7 mg a week. The nausea is still there for a couple days after each injection. But she does keep going off of it for eating events, her birthday, for going to a Brazilian steakhouse, for going to the State Fair and eating a ton of street food... I do wish she would stop doing that so that we could see if it can actually work. But she says her weight is trending down, despite this.
Yeah, if you stop taking it and go on eating binges, that defeats the entire purpose. That is the psychological element of weight loss, which gets ignored in the simple "calories in, calories out" model: if someone wants the gratification and pleasure of eating a ton of stuff and won't take the medication for fear that "but I won't be able to eat all the different things I want to eat", that's not a problem of 'is the drug working to stop you eating so much?' because plainly it is (even if it stops you by making you throw up).
That is the "it replaces willpower so you don't have to consciously think about reducing food intake" glowing review that people like to share, and it's the exact thing that is not happening in your mother's case.
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Ideally, perhaps this enables long-term research to separate out multiple causes of weight gain / aberrant appetite by analysing differences between those who respond to GLP agonists and those who doesn't.
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