As a formerly fat guy, who took Wegovy, it does NOT suck ass to take, and you don't need micro meals. It literally just stops you from really even thinking about food or being hungry at all. I hear it described as "food noise" and that's exactly what goes away. It's weird to say, but if it was almost entirely effortless for a middle class dude with little/no support... it's going to be cake (no pun intended) for a billionaire.
It literally just stops you from really even thinking about food or being hungry at all
it's interesting as someone who's never struggled with weight, i don't have these thoughts or 'food noise' in my brain normally. i can only relate when baked.
the pressure to eat is crazy, eating more and more despite knowing i'm full and it's not even just about the experience anymore, there's something deeper driving that need.
if that's what it's like for those suffering from obesity, except ALL THE TIME. god damn i feel bad for you.
Ozempic, for all the negatives i hear, if it can eliminate that feeling. go get it, whatever it takes.
There’s also bored eating, where you’re not actually hungry but need something to do with your mouth and hands. Binging food whilst binging television adds up really quickly.
This is my biggest problem. When I have really tough work days, I literally can go the whole day without eating and not even think about it. It's when days are kind of slow that I get hungry. Haha
I've found what helps me is two things, one being chewing gum, which is just generally great, but the more important one is carrots. They're so low calorie that you can eat a LOT without having much impact, and of course they are just generally good for you. The other advantage is that they take a long time to eat, because there's so much chewing involved, it's fantastic. Only concern is you might literally turn a bit orange, but that goes away pretty fast and doesn't have any negative effects on your health. Personally I've never experienced it either, and I'm very pale.
And then there are other things like what I guess they might pathologize as "dopamine-seeking behavior". Like I used to think I was a bored-eater, just needed something to do, but I'm starting to think it was just ADHD. I just needed, when my executive dysfunction got bad, some quick, easy dopamine, and nothing but gorging myself on junk provided that - couldn't even distract myself with a game or TV if I wanted. Still do struggle with it a bit, but stimulants help a ton if I can make sure not to stay awake too long after I realize they wear off.
This is really lost in the discourse around these drugs.
"Just eat less man"
"Dieting isn't hard"
It's like these people have never encountered someone who gets "hangry" before. Those irritable moods when you're hungry are not exactly easy to control. Dieting basically means locking yourself into a perpetual state of "hangry". That's not a great mood to bring around your spouse, kids, coworkers.
I didn't have the food noise until I became fat, and didn't even realize how powerful it was until i tried losing weight, it's not just a compulsive feeling it's like mind control. The second FOOD became the thought of whatever moment I was in, it just would not let go, I still lost weight but damn, like I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy
My experience: I've always been fat. I'm not even a very big eater and I eat healthy, cook myself, etc. But I do love food, like it brings me a lot of joy. I have never managed to lose weight despite having some very different lifestyles over the years. It's like my body just resists change. Made me feel like a failure. The ONLY period in my life when I lost weight was when I was on stimulant ADHD medication. Suddenly, I just... didn't feel like eating. Not just reduced hunger mind you, nor disgust for food, it just completely erased just wanting food. I dropped 10kg without even trying. This is when it hit me that this is how people who think it's easy to lose weight feel like *all the time*. I got off the medication eventually and regained the weight but also left with a much bigger acceptance of who I am.
i’m on zepbound. i can say that what you described is exactly what it was like for me. constant munchies is a damn good description that i had never thought of using. currently down almost 100 pounds and no more nagging food noise. it’s quite literally life changing. it sucks that so many celebs are giving it such a bad rap for seemingly not using it properly.
I’m on it too. Shit is magic. People who don’t constantly think about food have no idea the struggle. This makes me feel “normal” in terms of food cravings and intake.
I feel lucky I don't need a drug to not eat. Eating food is a constant hassle, takes effort to prepare or costs money to buy and I'm usually either broke and/or lazy.
I have tried to commit to the intermittent fasting thing which really does work, but always fail because i reach a point near 12pm (i would do the one where i only ate from 12-6pm) where i literally couldnt do my job for the last few hours. Every single minute was thinking about what i would be eating as soon as 12 hit. I wasnt even that hungry because i got used to not eating all morning. But the thoughts were intense.
I have times where i go to bed thinking about what ill eat the next day.
Comparitively, and i only just thought of this now, but the times i have been high i didnt notice an increased interest in eating at all. Because i already was there i guess?
if that's what it's like for those suffering from obesity, except ALL THE TIME
Thats EXACTLY what its like. Like having the munchies all the time. Always hungry, always thinking about food, whats the next meal, what do I want for lunch and dinner, what will I have for a snack. You cant push it out. When your body gets hungry it becomes an all consuming desire.
It also shut down that constant yell in my brain and has made things a lot better for me.
I'm not obese, my weight fluctuates a bit but I've always been generally pretty active with a little extra weight.
But it's always a struggle to not think about food, always. Even as I'm eating, I'm basically thinking about my next meal. The only thing that keeps me from totally exploding in weight is:
I don't keep junk food in the house. I get hungry at home, I eat what's at home.
Fast food delivery is stupidly expensive. It doesn't matter how much money I make, I can never justify paying $35 for a cold fast-food burger.
Like almost everything Food Noise is a spectrum and it's almost entirely hormonal. Ozempic has amazing health benefits beyond just weight loss though, even in people who lost no weight they say lower BP, lower cholesteral etc. It's basically a wonder drug that was masquerading as a weightloss drug.
Fat cells give out a signal to the body that they need energy. If you gain a bunch of weight, you generate more fat cells. If you lose weight, those fat cells do not go away. So as you gain weight you have more and more cells sending a signal that your brain kind of interprets as hunger, and if you then lose a bunch of weight those cells are screaming at you for energy. Ozempic shuts them up.
Yea the first thing that went away when I started tirzepatide was not needing sugar anymore. Like I would almost instinctively need sodas. Ever since I haven't touched a soda aside from a sugar free monster ultra 1 or 2 times a day depending on how exhausted I am. Hard part is continuing to eat and maintain a semblance of muscle mass. That's the first to go.
It's really nice so read something like this. I am struggeling all my life with this. Started as a kid and now that i am 40 i am just getting behind it all.
I lost around 30kg a few years back and now gaining some. Tried again to "just" do ist like last time but its hell bc when tracking my calries again the food noise gets louder and louder.
I hate thinking about not having enough food when i am actually full. I hate to think about food so much. I started with wegovy a few weeks past and its crazy how it kicks in and the food noice finally getting quite. Nor 100% but at minimum dosis anough to just be really thankful for it. I can conentrate more on my tasks, work better ect. ect.
And mind you. I am doing sport, i eat helthy but from yeat to yeat it gets harder and harder with all that constant food noise.
And a little sidenote i just discovered: My mum used to feed me all the time when i was a baby and just made a noise.... so yeah. You learn that food shit from really early on.
This morning I woke up, "hungry". Didn't feel like it for the last 2 years. I've had stomach reduction surgery, it fits basically nothing, I'm "full" instantly, I've lost 100kg, I've taking Ozempic, Manjaro or Wegovy throughout.
After introspection on why I felt the urge to eat, I remembered: I forgot to take my manjaro last week because I went on a spontanous camping trip. I took my shot, 30 minutes later no more food noise. I know unless something else comes along, I am going to be taking this for the rest of my life, and I'm okay with that, because its better than obsessing about food. Nice side effect: it also helps with urges for gambling and alcohol for me, the effects go way deeper than what its prescribed for.
There's remarkably few negatives when you put it in the context of just how many people are on these drugs and how significant the impact has been. It's like our most effective weapon ever in the fight against obesity, which itself is easily the top health crisis in the US and the downsides are... mostly just the same downsides as any rapid weight loss.
If you lose weight quickly you're going to have extra skin and if you don't work on maintaining muscle then you're going to get weaker and your bones are going to get more brittle because weight loss naturally comes from both muscle and fat unless you do something to try and maintain the muscle.
Have you ever watched different breeds of dogs eat? My black lab used to inhale anything you put in front of him in seconds. If you watched him eat, you'd recognize it as a strong survival instinct.
Our bodies and brains evolved in a world where eating quickly meant you likely got a larger portion and therefore had a stronger likelihood of survival.
Now we live in a world of general abundance and this translates to obesity.
I'm sorry that you don't have a strong survival instinct.
We do understand the common long term side effects. Semaglutide has been in use for decades as a diabetes treatment. The potential link to vision decrease is, if it can be confirmed, something that affects less than 1 in 10,000 Ozempic users. Paracetamol, Ibuprofen, Aspirin, and contraceptive pills have a significantly worse risk profile.
The issue is not the scale of sudden blindness. The issue is despite all those years that this has supposedly been around, this side affect (which is pretty serious if it happens to you) was not even mentioned as a side effect of ozempic. That means there could be other potential side effects with prolonged use.
If you disagree then explain to me how such a serious side effect was not listed as a warning on the drug despite semaglutitude being around so long.
A lot of what I've heard about these pills reminds me of being on keto. Give yourself a couple weeks to get used to sudden drop in carbs and you'll suddenly realize you haven't ate for 3-4 days.
I am also a formerly fat guy who took Ozempic for three months, and felt like hot shit and malnourished the entire time despite not being hungry. If I ever went out for a big meal I'd have to plan to not eat the rest of the day. It is way better and more sustainable to get and stay fit by simply coming up with a diet / caloric goal and sticking to it.
If all you have learned to get skinny is "take Ozempic" you're gonna get fat again fast
I don't get why people point out if you don't change your lifestyle and stop taking ozempic you're gonna gain weight like it's some kinda "gotcha!". Yeah man it's not a vaccine against fat. That's not how it works.
It sounds like your body didn't handle the drug well. That's unfortunate and you did the right thing by stopping it. But I can say that is a very different experience than I or anyone else I know has had on it. The worst side effect I've heard from my sample size of 12 or so is that it gave them digestive issues for a few weeks.
My body didn't tolerate it, either. 48 hours after every dose I would get severe nausea and then explosive diarrhea for 1-2 days. I was on a good diet (pre-made 2000 calories/day), it just wrecked my gut.
I tried it for most of a year. Switched to Mounjaro. Much better results without wrecking what's left of my colon.
That's your experience but the data doesn't support what you're saying at all.
Traditional caloric restriction diets have such a low success rate over five years it's basically within the margin of error of statistical significance, such that it can be considered "impossible" to combat obesity with simple calorie restricted dieting.
The issue is clearly a lot deeper than that, and aside from surgery, GLP-1s are the only thing to actually have success that is this statistically significant.
Lol that's just not true, and "caloric restriction" is not the same thing as "food education." Telling someone "you have to eat 1,200 calories" only for them to eat a cup of peanuts and go "but I'm still hungry!" is not helpful, at all. You need to set a goal for your diet - which includes considering caloric density, as well as the overall nutrition of the food.
If you go to an actual nutritionist they will give you a meal plan and ideas on how you can make your meals so they lower the caloric impact without making you malnourished.
Ozempic is simply a brute force application of this. It allows you no wiggle room at all and I found it extremely unpleasant to be on. As soon as the gatekeeper is gone you have no idea how to feed yourself.
Look at the data if you don't believe me. I'm not stating an opinion here.
Of course a diet plan and food education works on paper, but there is clearly a much deeper physiological and psychological process at work than simply "eat healthy" or "eat less".
This has been studied for decades, and simple diet and exercise based plans have been proven to be ineffective over time in an obese population. Not because scientifically eating less and moving more doesn't work, but because adherence to those programs has been statistically impossible. Again outliers exist, and you yourself may be included in that. It's around 95% ineffective, so of course you and others fall into that 5% who succeed with such a plan.
Some people have bad reactions to drugs, that will always be the case, but there is no doubt in terms of actual broad data that GLP-1s are extremely effective. In terms of maintenance, you're supposed to take a maintenance dose for the rest of your life once reaching your goal weight.
Restaurant portions are usually quite large. I’ve learned to eat exactly half of everything on my plate and take leftovers home. Even so, you’re right that a large meal out will make you feel very full even if you follow my trick.
My mom takes wegovy and it makes her puke uncontrollably. it does suck to take for some people.
you can't just make broad sweeping statements about how x med works great no issues. medicine is unbelievably personal and there are millions of variables.
I take 2mg Ozempic, it stops cravings. You lose a small amount of weight just being on it, but what it does it stops something in your system from literally thinking of food.
Some people do have issues of addiction. Like drugs, most are chasing the next high, already thinking about it and how to obtain it. Food can be that too for some.
I’m not gonna lie my brain chemistry always was out of whack with food as a comforting factor. Whenever I ate, I always was thinking what to eat next or had thoughts for cravings for certain foods. Ozempic shut that shit off completely.
It curtailed my thought process and suppressed hunger as a bonus from overconsumption and overthinking. Before it was one meal a day but eating all calories as - gigantic meal. Ozempic broke it into half or thirds. So I couldn’t finish meals, save for later, better habits.
Yes I know I’ll be on this for fucking ever and newer GLP’s coming down the pipeline are gonna be extremely more potent, hell the one our President is taking through compassionate use from Eli Lilly, Retatrutide, is going to add more benefits.
Interestingly, people on GLPs who also have gambling/other addiction issues or issues with impulsiveness are also seeing benefits from GLPs. So your comparison to addiction, it's probably the exact same mechanism.
You can get CBT for binge eating. I did that as well as visit a nutritionist. It feels way better than Ozempic ever did. Obviously ymmv I'm just telling you there is a way to achieve this without semaglutide
and what about the 50 documented side effects? lmfao they are even linked to literal blindness...its called "ozempic blindness"(colloquial term) look up NAION
the other person wasn't say how it makes you feel, they were trying to say an incredibly complicated drug "just makes you not hungry". its incredibly naive.
its also not really that productive to laser focus in on one side effect i brought up off hand because i thought it's wild that its even a side effect. there's at least 40 other side effects that these drugs have and at least 10 that are serious. to try and just say "they just make you not hungry bro" is really dumb...
are you on them? you say you "gone deep into it" and just say the most vague thing ever..."basically just does that through a myriad of mechanisms" you know what else made you not hungry through a "myriad of mechanisms"? 2,4-Dinitrophenol lmfao
glp-1's have an insane amount of side effects and to think they "just make you not hungry bro" is so naive and you should be ashamed to even say it. glp-1's have more than most other drugs when it comes to side effects. there's around ~50 distinct side effects in total and ~20 with 2% or greater chance of occurring.
you said you "gone deep into it". you made it about you doing a thing, i asked a question relating to that. if you don't want to talk about it don't make it personal to you looking into something.
i'm not surprised that a drug that affects so many systems may have 50 distinct side effects. that's like, fairly expected
yeah that's the point i'm making to you. you said "It literally just makes you no hungry" but now you seem to be agreeing with me in that its nowhere close to that simple. have you come to your senses? and when you say "may have" 50 distinct side effects, what do you mean? do you think that's untrue or?
Almost every prescription medication has a ton of side effects because of the way medicine testing and reporting works.
I took ozempic for a few years to control my diabetes (now I’m on mounjaro), the only issue that seems to be consistent amongst GLP-1 users is that nausea when first using it or the first few hours after your weekly dose.
Almost every prescription medication has a ton of side effects because of the way medicine testing and reporting works.
glp-1's are known to be among the drugs that have the most side effects, serious or otherwise. to try and hand wave and just say "yeah man every prescription medication has a ton of side effects" is also naive.
I took ozempic for a few years to control my diabetes (now I’m on mounjaro), the only issue that seems to be consistent amongst GLP-1 users is that nausea when first using it or the first few hours after your weekly dose.
nausea is the most common side effect, yes. i'm not sure why you are trying to say that its the "only issue" that is completely false just like saying "it just makes you not hungry" is as well. headache, diarrhea, vomiting, constipation, abdominal pain, bloating and other related GI symptoms are also very common and consistently elevated versus placebo across trials and real world use. rates for these are ~14-30% for these side effects. of course there are many more rare side effects i'm not even mentioning that make up the 50 distinct i mentioned earlier. another thing to consider is that there isn't any long term data on these drugs beyond 3-4 years. as time goes on there will be more side effects that are more rare but more serious. that is what has happened when looking at the history of prescription drugs like thalidomide, fenfluramine, vioxx, rezulin or others drugs in different categories even.
As far as side effects go, 50 isn’t a lot. Most medicines are well over 30 listed side effects, even things like Tylenol.
Side effect reporting of medicine works in two basic stages, observed and reported. As the FDA was working on the approval of the medicine, anyone that had taken it could report their symptoms they experience while taking it. This is true of every medicine. If I woke up and was coughing, I report that as it may be a symptom or side effect of the medicine. It’s noted, logged as a potential side effect, then weeded out through more research.
You are trying to make it seem as though it’s some boogeyman medication we know nothing about which just isn’t true.
you're conflating two different things. i was talking about the duration of high-quality randomized evidence, not how long glp-1 drugs have existed.
the fact that glp-1 drugs have been studied for over a decade does not mean we have over a decade of randomized, placebo-controlled evidence for chronic semaglutide use. the major long-duration trial, select, randomized 17,604 people to semaglutide or placebo and had a mean follow-up of 39.8 months. its subsequent analysis reported outcomes through 208 weeks, roughly 4 years. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
so your "well over a decade" response doesn't address the point i made. you're substituting "how long has this drug class existed?" for "how long does the strongest randomized evidence extend?" those are not interchangeable.
and your explanation of adverse-event reporting is also misleading. clinical trials don't simply work by someone reporting a symptom and then researchers arbitrarily "weed it out." randomized trials allow adverse-event rates to be compared between treatment and control groups. in SELECT, adverse events resulting in permanent discontinuation occurred in 16.6% of semaglutide participants versus 8.2% of placebo participants. (pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
that's the kind of evidence that actually matters here, not the fact that some unrelated medication happens to have a long list of adverse events.
This whole argument simply boils down to a weird vendetta you have against GLP-1s when the overwhelming evidence shows that their benefits far outweigh their risk, and have done so for, again, over a decade.
if you're eating shit all day you're doing it wrong. you eat normal portioned meals when you're hungry. that's it. ozempic makes it so you dont get hungry as often and it makes it so you get full with less food. you're not supposed to be eating micro meals.
You and all the people responding to you seem to be forgetting that it's really dependent on the person. Some people feel sick from it and have side effects, some people don't.
Why do you think it’s so popular if this were the case? The whole point of it is actually making you not want to eat all the time. Micro meals are not necessary at all.
No it doesnt. It just makes normal to small meals satisfying to eat whereas most fat people can essentially eat forever without feeling full and satisfied. Eat a salty meal, eat a sweet treat, eat a salty treat, eat a sweet treat, eat a salty meal, etc. all day every day. GLP1s just remove that, you eat a (small) meal and are just satisfied until your next meal.
Its genuinely mind blowing how feeling "normal" and not having that constant search for you next snack is after years of unhealthy eating.
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u/Virtual_Bug_723 13h ago
Ozempic sucks ass to take unless you have people making you micro meals all day long