My Insane Ozempic Story

Is Ozempic a big deal? Buddy, let me tell you a story…

by Justin Rosario

I have a sort of journal my mother kept from when I was born. It has interesting info about where I was born, how much I weighed at birth, how adorable I was, that sort of thing. It also has several amusing and snarky notes about the first several months of my life. I treasure this book. It is one of the few links I have to my mother and her wit shines through on almost every page. I’ve shown it to Anastasia and Lila a few times and they were delighted, neither of them having had the opportunity to meet my long-departed mother. 

One of the earlier notes has to do with the doctor who delivered me. During one of my first feedings, he casually noted that I “could really pack it in.” And this has been the story of me for my entire life. As far back as I can remember, I have never been what the doctors would call a healthy weight. Not once. Ever. 

It wasn’t really a problem when I was younger. I was tall, strong, and fast despite my weight. But youth doesn’t last and while 230 in your 20s wasn’t so bad, 250 in your 30s was. Then 280 by the time I was 40. Then 300. I finally peaked at 330 back in 2020. By then, I had been trying to deal with my weight and its consequences for literally decades with mixed results, mostly bad. Then my doctor prescribed Ozempic for both my not-quite diabetes and my weight and things got really interesting, really fast.

Big deal, just another diet drug, right?

Nope. Ozempic is still relatively new on the market but it’s qualitatively different from previous weight-loss drugs. I should know, I’ve been on two of them for a couple of years. I had been taking a pill called Topiramate, an appetite suppressant. It worked. Sort of. I wasn’t as hungry as I had been previously. I didn’t lose a lot of weight but I did climb down from the 330 mountain.

Several months later, I started an injection called Trulicity, the precursor to Ozempic. That was pretty good. I was much less hungry and with a lot of effort, I was able to get down to 300. It took the better part of two years but I got there. And then I got stuck. More annoyingly. My A1C, my blood sugar level which is used to determine how close I am to going full diabetic, was not dropping as much as it needed to. I was floating around 7.2. That’s officially diabetes but not “time for insulin shots” diabetes. On a good visit, I would drop back down to 6.8 - 6.9 which is, depending on which doctor you talk to, pre-diabetes. Still, not where I wanted to be.

Not that I wasn’t happy to be back to 300 after being way up at 330, but 300 is still much higher than I wanted to be. Aside from the borderline diabetes and the problems that would eventually bring, I already had high blood pressure I was controlling with medication and pretty severe sleep apnea which I was using a CPAP for. Sleep apnea, if you’re unfamiliar with it, is a condition that causes you to stop breathing while you sleep. Some people only stop breathing a few times an hour for a few seconds at a time. I stop breathing dozens of times an hour for several seconds at a stretch. Untreated sleep apnea is a fast track to an early grave.

So back in May, I talked to my doctor about options. I had flirted with the idea of gastric bypass but had read about too many problems with it. To start with, it’s a surgery and there’s always a risk. The adjustment is difficult, to say the least, and it’s more or less permanent. I say “more or less” because patients can put weight back on and the loss they experience didn’t seem enough to put up with that much discomfort. So…maybe not the surgery route.

But Dr. Sridhar suggested this new(ish) drug called Ozempic. I had heard of Ozempic but didn’t know diddly squat about it. She said it was good for bringing down my A1C  but also really good at weight control. Potential side effects were the usual stuff: Nausea, vomiting, gastric distress (pooping my brains out). That didn’t sound like fun but if nothing happened after the first shot, I’d probably be fine and why not give it a whirl? How different could it be? Short answer? Very. I’ll give you the long answer next week as I describe what it’s been like to be on Ozempic for the last several months.

In the meantime, let’s take a look at some of the issues surrounding Ozempic and its use.

That’s cheating!

There’s this weird strain of thought that people on Ozempic are cheating. Cool story. Those people can take a long walk off a short pier. Preferably one with sharks in the water.

I’m currently 50 years old. By the time I was 30, I was already pretty comfortable ignoring what other people thought about me and what I do. The very last shreds of all that evaporated when Jordan had his first public autism meltdown and I had to decide what was more important: Focusing on Jordan’s needs or caring about strangers’ opinions. After that, the field in which I grew my fucks became quite barren indeed. If Ozempic worked, then I was going to take Ozempic.

I, personally, have not had anyone, stranger or otherwise, give me any shit for taking Ozempic. Deb, Claudia, and the kids have been nothing but supportive as I hit each new mini-goal. But I knew people had been shamed for “taking a shortcut” or, worse, felt shame for using Ozempic. I didn’t realize how bad or how pervasive it was until I started doing a little more reading to prep for this article. Wow.

Look at this nonsense reported by Healthline.com about a guy named Christian Miller who took Ozempic for type 2 diabetes and lost weight in the process:

“He’s now 170 pounds and says he’s proud of his progress. Though even as he began to lose weight, people still made negative remarks. Only now, the comments weren’t about his weight but how he was going about losing it.

Miller says he got unhelpful comments such as, “You should just eat less” or “exercise more,” implying that his use of medication to help treat his obesity was somehow “cheating” and that he was failing to lose weight the “right” way.

Miller’s experience isn’t unique. Ozempic use has become a punchline on social media platforms and in pop culture, including at the Oscars, where host Jimmy Kimmel quipped about the drug and Hollywood’s use of it.

Aren’t fat people funny? And fat people losing weight, that’s funny, too! It’s so easy to mock people for something you, personally, have never had to struggle with and do not understand. “Just eat less!”. Brilliant. Why didn’t I and the 100+ million other overweight Americans think of that!

And why don’t alcoholics just stop drinking, drug addicts just stop using? It’s so easy. Just like flipping a switch. But Ozempic actually can be that switch. It’s been working for an awful lot of people. So why the hate? Why is it so bad that people literally lie about using Ozempic to avoid the stigma? Why is there a stigma to using Ozempic at all? 

My guess, because people are assholes and they think you should only succeed if you’ve suffered. This would be the same mindset that keeps us from putting the homeless in houses. It works and it’s cheaper than shelters and prison and all the other hardship we put them through. But since the homeless didn’t “earn” a house, we’d rather spend 10 times as much money and make them suffer rather than just help them in the most direct and simplest way.

In the United States, we spend an estimated $147 to $210 Billion a year in healthcare because of obesity-related issues. Heart attacks, strokes, diabetes. The list goes on forever. We can spend a fraction of that on Ozempic, reduce the amount of medical complications from obesity, and save lives. But this is bad because…it wasn’t really hard? 

You might as well argue that we should get rid of paved roads because driving in mud to get the groceries builds character. Yes, arguing that we have to “earn” weight loss sounds exactly that stupid. But it’s not just Ozempic-shaming. There’s scare-mongering, too. Here’s an article in The Guardian grossly overselling the “downside” of Ozempic:

When Trish Wheeler started taking the drug, she found her physical reactions to food shifted almost immediately. “It started off making me nauseous and after eating or drinking a very small amount, I felt full,” she recalls. “If I tried to eat a few more bites it felt like everything was backing up my esophagus.” Even drinking water felt daunting, leading to a feeling of constant dehydration.

Online, forums are chock full of stories from Ozempic users whose relationship with food has changed, not only physiologically, but psychologically. “I miss enjoying food and going out to eat,” says one. Another is even more blunt, lamenting: “I hate food.”

There is, perhaps, something sinister, and even a little sci-fi, about a wildly popular weight loss treatment that works, whether in whole or in part, by making food itself disgusting.

Ozempic does not “make food itself disgusting.” You know when you’re full? Like, really full? And the idea of eating another bite makes you feel ill? That’s what these people are experiencing. I went through the same thing and, annoyingly, my doctor neglected to mention this would happen. Food tasted the same, I just got full very quickly and stayed that way for a very long time. Not wanting to eat because you’re full is not making “food itself itself disgusting.” That’s “you’re full and your body is telling you to stop eating.” Except now you can hear it and you’re listening. That was a novel experience for me and I’m going to really get into that next week.

It’s true that some people have side-effects but that’s true for any drug. Ozempic is not unique in that regard. For the overwhelming majority of its users though, me included, it has been a tremendous boon. Let the haters hate.

Is Ozempic a big deal?

I’ve only been on Ozempic since June so I can’t say it’s been life changing. Yet. I’ll need a year or two to make that determination. But so far, the signs are very promising. 

Now that I’ve set the stage, next week, you’re invited to come with me for a stroll through my first 6 months on Ozempic. I’ll tell you what the physical and psychological effects were, how much I lost and how quickly (or slowly). I’ll describe how my relationship to food changed, the mistakes I made, and what happens next. It’s quite a ride.

Is Ozempic a big deal? Buddy, let me tell you a story…

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