Ozempic (and drugs like it) were created to help control blood sugar in type-2 diabetics, which by the way is a 100% lifestyle based disease, meaning folks acquire type-2 diabetes via their funky nutrition, movement and sleep habits and fortunately it is reversible in most if not all cases via SOLID nutrition, movement and sleep habits!
Ozempic is what’s called a GLP-1 receptor agonist and GLP stands for glucagon-like peptide and we actually produce glucagon in our bodies naturally (in the gut specifically), however these drugs are typically administered via an injection and obviously in much larger amounts than what we would naturally produce.
How do they work or in other words, how do folks lose fat via taking them? They do a number of different things, however the main mechanism is that they reduce appetite in a dose dependent fashion meaning, if you take a very small amount of the drug, you get a small appetite blunting effect and as you scale up the dose, the more and more the appetite gets suppressed.
How do they suppress appetite? This is where things get interesting…they actually slow down digestion quite literally, they slow the actual movement of food from your stomach to the small intestine, which means that you feel more full for longer and therefore eat fewer calories and as you know, a calorie deficit is required for fat loss in every single instance without exception…so it’s not like you eat the same amount of food that you would normally eat and just lose weight, no…
You take the drug, appetite is suppressed, you consume fewer calories because you feel full and you lose fat…oh and by the way, if you try to eat what you normally would portion wise, you’re almost certainly going to be sick, I’m talking nausea, acid-reflux, vomiting…more on that in a second…
Now, you hear me say it all the time, there is no free-lunch in biology and so what are some of the side effects associated with these drugs…
First of all, it’s important to mention that there is no such thing as a ‘side effect,’ there are only effects…the pharmaceutical industry came up with the word side-effect to describe effects that are undesirable, so make no mistake, even though the things that I’m about to mention don’t happen in every single instance in every single person to the same degree, they are effects of the drug itself…
Because it’s like saying that a hangover is a ‘side-effect’ of drinking too much alcohol, but it’s not, a hangover is an EFFECT of drinking too much alcohol…it’s just what the drug does. Folks get varying levels of hangover-like symptoms depending on the individual and how much they drink, but we can’t pretend that feeling like sh*t after drinking is a side-effect…it’s an effect, it’s baked into the cake of ingesting booze! Okay, so…undesirable effects of these drugs include…
Constipation, diarrhea, nausea, stomach pain, vomiting, pancreatitis, gallbladder issues, kidney damage, thyroid tumours, pancreatic tumours and you guessed it, cancer. There are also folks reporting gastroparesis, which is a fancy way of saying paralysis of the stomach and digestive tract…not cool! We don’t want any of these things and this is yet another example of how you cannot trick the body, it’s simply too smart!
Those effects are listed on the Ozempic website by the way and drug companies have to list this stuff for legal purposes, so if you’re thinking about taking any drug or medication, for the love of god look up the potential undesirable effects first because they can often be worse than what you’re taking the drug for to begin with!
Humans really like to think that we can develop a drug, take said drug and only impact one single thing (in this case, bodyweight) and that’s just not how physiology works…the body is like dominos in the sense that when we knock one block down, it takes a whole bunch of other blocks down with it for better or for worse. An example of better would be…
All of the awesome things that happen when we eat well, move a bunch and get great sleep…there is a cascade of processes that happen when we do said things that benefit our physiology as a whole!
Now, we just talked about some of the short term issues with Ozempic, what about some of the long term considerations. The most obvious one is rebound weight gain or in other words, when folks stop taking these drugs, the vast majority of them regain the weight, shocker right!?
Their appetite comes back with a vengeance, they most likely learned little if anything about implementing a healthful lifestyle and boom, they’re back to square one. Now someone might say, well what if they just stay on the drug permanently…?
One, what if there are supply chain issues for whatever reason? Two, it’s extremely expensive, but to be fair, the cost will go down assuming that production continues to ramp up, however the third consideration is the most pertinent in my opinion…
The longer that you take any drug and therefore the more of it that you put in your body, the more likely you are to create complications and experience undesirable effects and this is a wild stat that I just came across the other day and it is…in the last 10 years there have been 14,000 drugs that have been taken off the market, meaning…
The FDA approves a whole bunch of drugs but, each year for the last 10 years on average 1400 of those are recalled and taken off the market…now I’m not saying that this is necessarily going to happen with these specific drugs, but it is possible and boy, 14,000 drugs in 10 years…that’s a big number…
We don’t have long term data on these drugs, plain and simple!
Another medium to long term issue is the risk for nutrient deficiencies and this is because if your appetite is reduced like crazy, you are going to eat less and if you eat less it’s actually exponentially more important to eat REALLY high quality food because your body needs what it needs in terms of protein, fat, vitamins, minerals etc. and so it’s crucial to make your calories count when you’re working with fewer total calories…
But the kicker is, what is the mindset of a typical individual that is going to follow through on taking a weight loss drug like this? It’s almost certainly going to be someone that doesn’t eat healthfully and so sure they’re going to eat less total unhealthy food, but they’re also going to put themselves at a higher risk for nutrient deficiencies. These usually aren’t the folks that are eating single ingredient whole foods and emphasizing high quality animal protein because if they were, they likely wouldn’t have a weight issue to begin with.
Now, is there someone that may actually be a good candidate for a weight loss drug like this? Potentially under the following conditions…
They are overweight, diabetic, unwilling to change their habits and decide that the potential risks of taking said drugs are outweighed by the potential benefits.
Would I take one of these drugs or would I want one of my clients to take one of these drugs, no and no!
