Ozempic Is Not The Cure For Obesity, Sorry.
Ozempic was a buzzy new trend, but now medical professionals are touting it as the solution to obesity. I strongly disagree.
I'd like to preface this article by saying I am not using this as a platform to abuse and attack people who are overweight. I've said it once, and I will say it again, you have every right to exist in a larger body and not be made to feel inferior because of it.
I know better than anyone that bullying and 'concern-baiting' people about their weight doesn't work and, in many cases, only serves to exacerbate the issue and can lead to lowered self-worth in these individuals.
This article isn't aimed at overweight people but at the medical culture and ideology surrounding them.
Disordered eating is a problem that many people face and, as usual, the medical community and Powers That Be, are only interested in throwing drugs at the symptom rather than fixing the problem.
Recently, New Scientist published an article in their July 15 issue titled "The end of obesity?" that essentially advocated for putting overweight people on Ozempic, positioning it as a wonderful solution to the world's obesity crisis.
Not to mention the NHS's plan to offer Wegovy, another semaglutide medication, to its patients as a weight loss treatment. A notion that, quite frankly, I find ridiculous.
What is Ozempic?
There are a lot of misunderstandings about what Ozempic, and similar medications, actually are.
In short, they are different formulations with the same active ingredient known as semaglutide, which is a synthetic version of a naturally occurring hormone known as glucagon-like-peptide-1 (GLP-1).
According to experts, the way the medicine works is by strengthening satiety cues and delaying stomach emptying so that people feel less hungry over the course of the day.
Other studies have concluded that the medication also helped to reduce cravings and lowered the desire for fatty, energy-dense foods. All of which contribute to weight loss over time.
Although these drugs are still under scrutiny from the scientific community, studies do appear to indicate they are an effective solution for weight loss. In the short-term, at least.
While no one can really argue that these medications are "fake news," it still doesn't make them an appropriate solution to the obesity epidemic around the world.
What is so problematic about this "solution"?
This may be my own personal bias speaking, but I'm never going to recommend drugs as a first solution to any health issue. If the MRSA fiasco taught us anything, it's that the "prescribe first, ask questions later" practice in medicine can have absolutely dire consequences.
While there is no evidence that semaglutides don't work for weight loss, there is also absolutely no proof that they provide a long-term solution to obesity.
In fact, early studies have shown that the majority of people gain back the weight within a year of coming off semaglutide. This is mainly due to the fact that most patients don't make changes to their lifestyle or do anything to combat the metabolic adaptions that usually accompany weight loss.
Based on this information, Ozempic, and its wily counterparts, are no more effective than the Cabbage Soup Diet or any other unsustainable crash diet. So, much like those Flat Tummy lollipops that the Kardashians like so much, this is yet another exercise in flushing money down the toilet.
Before Ozempic, there was the similarly controversial bariatric surgery, which to this day is offered to patients as a strategy for weight management despite its limited success.
While generally effective within the first three years, 1/3 of patients regain 30% of their original weight within ten years, and another 1/4 regain 100% or more in the same period.
I might be wrong, but that suggests this treatment is less than 50% effective. Not sure I'd opt to have major surgery based on those odds.
Why is losing weight so hard?
The reason these treatments don't work for most people in the long term is that they don't address the underlying problem, opting instead to tackle the body's mechanisms that lead to weight gain.
Unfortunately, the body is an adaption machine whose sole purpose is to keep us alive, and it sees storing fat as the most effective means to do this.
Our bodies like regulation and achieve this through a process known as homeostasis, which is what causes us to sweat or shiver as a means to maintain our core body temperature.
Similarly, even if excess weight isn't beneficial to survival in the long term, our body perceives a drop in fat percentage as a threat and will adapt accordingly. This is known as metabolic adaption.
I won't get into the science here, but Natacha Océane explains it really well in her video How Metabolism Works. Long story short, your body does basically anything to stop you from losing fat. This can result in feeling lethargic, more hungry, moody, forgetful, slower mental processing, etc.
This is the exact reason that most fad diets don't work, because our bodies fight back, and in many cases leads to weight regain and endless diet cycling. What people aren't seeing here is that Ozempic, and bariatric surgery, are essentially just medically prescribed crash diets.
Not only do they not teach patients the skills they need to manage their weight naturally, but they potentially lead to worse outcomes after treatment.
So, why on earth are our government leaders, and supposedly greatest medical minds, condoning this as a course of treatment?
Who stands to gain here?
Ozempic and Wegovy cost the NHS £107Million in the 22/23 fiscal year, making it the 11th most expensive prescription medication, according to Diabetes.co.uk.
As per Fierce Pharma, it is expected that these medications will make their patent holder approximately $ 15 billion in 2023 alone. I'm not saying there is a conspiracy here, but it does make you wonder why our leaders are opting for such a drastic option.
I don't want to pretend I'm totally against medications, some illnesses genuinely do need drugs to manage, and I'm not going to tell a person with type-1 diabetes to "walk it off."
However, I absolutely do not condone putting people on medications where there is another solution available. I'm very much of the "teach a man to fish" school of thought, not "put him on Ozempic and see how he gets on."
If we're going to be spending this much money on combating obesity, shouldn't we be focusing on a solution that is actually going to work in the long term?
That money would be better spent providing in-patient facilities for people struggling with obesity and binge eating, a common treatment option for any other eating disorder.
Imagine, instead of sending people suffering from chronic anorexia to re-feeding clinics, we just gave them a drug that would make them gain weight. Anyone who even slightly understands the pathology of a disorder like anorexia, which is classified as a mental illness, can see how absurd that would be.
Yet, when people are dealing with an eating disorder on the opposite end of the spectrum, we simply say, "put them on drugs" or "give them major and life-altering surgery" because that'll fix it. It might fix things for the NHS or Big Pharma, but it isn't actually solving the problem, is it?
How much money could be saved by referring these patients to a dietician, a personal trainer, stress management, or a therapist? How about 8 weeks at a weight management retreat that helps patients overcome limiting factors that contribute to their obesity and empowers them to change their habits?
Inferring Ozempic is the only and best option is assuming something very specific about overweight people — they're too stupid and lazy to adapt to healthy choices.
The problem here isn't laziness or lack of willpower. It is a combination of poor mental health, toxic food culture, unhealthy work environments, and hostile misinformation about nutrition and fitness. All of which are fixable.
Why do we struggle with obesity in the first place?
Many people like to pretend that obesity is caused by bad habits and our lazy inability to exert any willpower, which to an extent, is true, but that is only a tiny fraction of the story.
There are many reasons that people today are plagued by obesity, one of which is the billion-dollar diet industry, which thrives on misinformation. Add to this a food culture that is "actively hostile" towards public health, as YouTuber Kiana Docherty puts it, plus a whole host of other factors.
Hostile food culture
Firstly, looking at the food industry that has literally spent billions on R&D to make foods that override our natural satiety cues and over-activate our pleasure centres, while preying on our ignorance through misleading food labels that trick us into thinking we're making healthy choices.
Big Food has made it their business to make products that are irresistible to us and have invented foods that are even more addictive than smoking! Add to this that these companies make acquiring health-ruining junk foods as frictionless as possible through food delivery apps and drive-thrus.
That's before we even scratch the surface of the convenience food overhaul of important meals such as breakfast.
We aren't exaggerating when we say the food environment is actively hostile to public health, all because food corporations know it's almost impossible to manipulate people into over-consuming broccoli.
Who cares if we're contributing to one of the worst health crises in history? Nothing matters more than the bottom line, right?
Diet industry hacks
Next up, we have a hugely profitable dieting industry that survives by offering us quick fixes that actually get us deeper entrenched in obesity-causing habits and confused about how to lose weight sustainably.
Why would fitness influencers want to tell us the truth about how to lose weight permanently? There's no repeat business there.
This isn't true of all fitness influencers, a good portion of whom are trying their best to educate people on how to lose weight sustainably. But they are drowned out by the millions of fitness grifters who get clicks by telling you it's possible to safely lose 15 lbs in a day. News flash… it's not.
Much like fad diets, Ozempic appeals to people because of the "low effort, fast results" dream that a lot of the diet industry thrives on. However, it is this exact mindset of impatience and unrealistic expectations that gets people stuck.
Fad diets and semaglutides do work while you're on them, but what happens when we try to return to normal? Mayhem, disappointment, and loss of motivation.
It's not sexy or fun, but the ONLY solution to obesity is adopting healthy habits that we can sustain throughout our lives.
There are no short-term solutions here. Just making better choices for the sake of our health. However, unfortunately, there is knowing what needs to be done to fix obesity and actually having the ability to implement it.
Miserable working, stress, and mental health
This brings us to our final "boss" that contributes to global obesity — poor working environments.
People today are so overworked, exhausted, lonely, and miserable that they don't have the energy, time, or emotional bandwidth to make exercise and eating right a priority.
My last job was one of the most stressful I've ever had, and I could probably count the number of times I worked out during that year on one hand. That wasn't for want of trying either.
With the combination of the long days, overwork, psychotic managers, and unmanageable stress, even the days where I felt motivated to exercise were met with a lot of resistance.
Compared to most people, I have an easy life. I'm young, able-bodied, single, without children or pets, and I own my own home. Imagine being a single mother with three kids, working 60 hours across two part-time jobs just to pay the rent, with an underlying health condition.
You can cry "willpower" all you like, but prioritising a healthy lifestyle under those conditions is difficult for anyone.
Add to this the fact that chronic stress actually encourages junk food consumption, that poorer people struggle to afford healthier foods, and the detrimental effect cortisol has on fat metabolism, and you get a perfect storm for weight gain over time.
Despite the PR spin, most businesses couldn't care less about employee well-being, frequently expecting us to do unpaid overtime as a show of loyalty, foregoing holiday or family time, and as my ex-employer loved to do, set non-urgent meetings during lunch so you don't get the idea that you deserve a break.
You can give us all the gym memberships and office yoga you like, but if I don't have the time or I'm too exhausted to use them, what's the point?
Now, you might argue that work has always been difficult and that conditions for workers are arguably better than they have ever been. This might be true, but jobs also used to be a lot more physically demanding and usually didn't require us to sit down all day.
Food was harder to come by and was generally more nutrient-dense and lower in calories than the foods that are more readily accessible to us today. In fact, the worst foods for our health tend to be those that have the least friction to acquire. There aren't all that many fast-food joints that survive on selling salads, are there?
Building physical activity into our day used to be automatic and was often unavoidable, now we must not only make time in our busy schedules for physical activity, but we must also summon the energy for it.
Which, when you're already chronically stressed and burnt out, can be a monumental task.
Where do we go from here?
To end this, I'd like to say if you have done your research and come to the decision that you would like to go on a semaglutide medication, I one-hundred percent respect and support your decision.
This isn't about shaming people who have decided to take Ozempic and are aware of the risks and downsides. It's your body. What you chose to do with it is your decision.
The thing I am against is these medications being pushed as the primary form of care for people who are struggling with obesity.
I don't want patients to feel pressured into taking a medication that not only has side effects but can also result in a worse situation than they started with; unless they plan to be saddled with a life-long drug dependency.
You deserve to be given a course of treatment that actually helps you recover, not some short-term salve for the symptom. All because our leaders and medical professionals can't be bothered to address the real problem. Don't allow yourself to become another cash cow for Big Pharma.
They don't care if you're healthy. They only care that you can pay.
In fact, they hope their medication makes you even more sick so they can flog you even more drugs.
Don't feed the beast. Stop taking drugs you don't need and insist your doctors help you find a solution that fixes the actual problem.
You are not a symptom.
You are not a negative statistic.
You are a PERSON, and you deserve better than this.
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