From the article quoted in the first post in this thread:
Quote:
Bishay said weight loss “should not be just about a drug” and it was important patients taking Wegovy also changed their lifestyle — or the weight would bounce back on as soon as they stopped the medication.
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The friend who is on Wegovy - Still on it - I think 5, maybe almost 6 months now.
They were increasing her dosage every month for the first 4 months, but the 4th increase in dosage made her really sick (that'll kill your appetite), so she asked not to have it increased right then.
Well, now that the holidays are over, it seems she's regained weight on the dose that had made her sick last month.
Why? Well, it seems the repetition of the same dose for another month means the effectiveness has worn off, especially since she was making lots of holiday treats. (AKA: sugar and starch bombs with plenty of fat in them) I don't know how many of those treats she was actually eating - doesn't sound like it was a lot of it, just sampling each batch she made to make sure it turned out ok before gifting it to others, because considering how foods with that much sugar or fat in it was making her so sick to her stomach a couple of months ago, I can't imagine that eating more than a tiny sample from each batch would NOT maker her sick, even without increasing her dosage.
In other words, what she was eating shouldn't have been enough to cause weight gain (at least according to the ever reliable
calories in/calories out principle)
Now she's upset because the dr prescribed an additional full 4 months of the dose she was on that made her so sick, but obviously no longer makes her sick (at least not sick enough to lose weight) since she's managed to re-gain some weight on it.
If her appetite is no longer being controlled by that dosage - and it's not just a matter of not continuing to lose weight, but to the point that she managed to GAIN weight - her insurance is going to stop paying for it.
Which would be a good thing as far as I can see, because she already has enough serious health issues - she doesn't need to add the long term side effects of wegovy to those. But she's sort of panicking that she won't be able to get Wegovy any more.
She's already looked into the possibility of Tirzepatide, in the hopes that if the insurance company rejects continuation of the Wegovy, she can switch to that instead.
[My theory is that if she regained weight from a little sample from each batch, then it's either just water weight gain from the sugar/starch combo - or else her metabolism has learned to very efficiently conserve calories after being on a semi-starvation diet for the last few months, probably a combination of the two effects]
So back to the quote above - as far as I can tell, despite the way that the semaglutide users think it's creating a lifestyle change (since it theoretically changes their thought processes about food), that thought process/lifestyle change is really only happening while taking the drug - and may not even be effective while on the drug if the dosage is not high enough to leave them feeling semi-nauseous all the time.