A pricey weight loss hack is making the rounds in certain social circles. It works, but is it worth it?
Jennifer Straughan struggled with her weight for decades. By her mid-forties she had tried everything: diets, journaling her food intake, and exercising constantly. “It controlled my life,” she says. “I would obsessively work out. I’d get up in the middle of the night if I forgot to enter something I’d eaten into my tracking app.” Worst of all, looking good was more than a vanity project. Straughan is a fitness instructor. At five-foot-three and hovering around 175 pounds, she found her clients becoming skeptical.
About four years ago Straughan went for a regular checkup in her hometown of Toronto to a doctor who specialized in weight loss, and her stress all came pouring out. “For some reason, at that moment I just lost it and blurted out everything I’d struggled with for 20 years—the addictiveness of it. And he said I was a good candidate to try Ozempic.” Now she’s down to 130 pounds. If you spend enough time at the right dinner parties or on TikTok (search #MyOzempicJourney), you’ll eventually hear about Ozempic. It’s a brand name for semaglutide, an injectable insulin-regulating drug developed by Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk to treat diabetes. When doctors began noticing that their Ozempic patients were losing weight, the manufacturer conducted clinical trials on overweight and obese people and found that using the drug did indeed lead to significant weight loss. Alongside its insulin-promoting effects, semaglutide slows down digestion, so patients feel full for longer after eating. Novo Nordisk also started marketing a higher-dose treatment of semaglutide for obesity, calling it Wegovy.