This is the blurb from the daily email I get from USA Today:



Links to the articles:

'Let's get serious': Eli Lilly slams Hollywood's Ozempic obsession ahead of Oscars

Dozens sue saying Ozempic, other weight loss and diabetes drugs cause harmful side effects

'Ozempic babies' are surprising women taking weight loss drugs. Doctors think they know why.

Even thin people can get hormone derangement from poor food choices. If they are using a hormone method it isn't going to work the same. Which usually means it isn't going to work!

Birth control pills are not nearly as strong these days as they were back in the early days. In the 70's they were strong enough that you could miss a dose (or even 2, sometimes 3) and there would still be enough of the hormone in your system that they were still highly effective and it was very unlikely you'd get pregnant, especially if you followed the directions to take a missed pill as soon as you remembered it, and if you missed 2 pills, take 2 for 2 days in a row. (I can't remember what the recommendation was for 3 missed pills - I think you were supposed to just add back up method for at least a week)

But since high levels of birth control hormones in the earlier versions of The Pill were associated with strokes and death, the hormone levels have been reduced so much that for the best effectiveness, you'd better take them at the same time each day (set an alarm if you're prone to losing track of time), and use a back-up method (again, can't recall for how long) if you're late with a dose, or miss a dose altogether, even if you take it as soon as you remember it. Same if you've had a stomach bug, because you might not absorb enough of the pill for it to be effective.

So it wasn't surprising to me either that there have been ozempic babies. Considering how much the semaglutide drugs slow down the absorption of food, it's only logical that it would also slow down the absorption of oral medications.

As for the ones who have had PCOS related infertility issues ending up pregnant while losing weight on the semaglutide drugs, that isn't terribly surprising either, since fertility tends to improve when someone with PCOS loses weight.

I just hope the Dr's are very specifically telling every female patient who is not well past menopause to test for pregnancy frequently - probably best to test before each weekly shot, and not just assume they can't get pregnant because they're on the pill or have PCOS.

Calianna, I’m thrilled that I’m not in the pregnancy risk category anymore! I hope the warnings for younger women about the possible effects of GLP-1 are loud and clear.

I just read (in the Horrible Headlines) that a terrifying buzz is going out via social media that birth control methods, including pills and IUDs, can cause infertility. Young women, lacking other sources of information, may opt to avoid them in favor of methods that are pretty likely to fail sooner or later.

I’m an old girl. There’s no pill on earth that will prevent the overwhelming urges that often make "boys and girls" careless in their intimate moments. I wonder how America will handle the arrival of so many new infant citizens without sufficient social support?

Not my problem? I think of these things when I cast my votes.

The whole point of BC pills and IUDs is to induce temporary infertility. I feel certain that the birth control failure rate with either one is significantly higher than the potential permanent infertility rate.

I knew that it was possible for IUD's to cause infertility, due to the potential to cause damage to the uterus or infection that could result in scarred and blocked Fallopian tubes - that's one of the reasons why I didn't opt for that when I was of child-bearing age.... which was of course a LONG time ago. But the IUD's available back then were different from the ones available now. I seriously doubt they're any more likely to cause infertility now than they were back then.

I knew it was possible for it to take several months after going off BC pills way back when for normal fertility to resume - but even at the much higher level of hormones in them back then, the vast majority of women were able to get pregnant within a a couple of months after stopping the pill. But with the current significantly lower dosage that's so delicately balanced that you can get preggers if you're a few hours late taking a pill? Surely you'd need to be someone who did not have normal fertility to begin with (and simply weren't aware because you'd never tried to get pregnant before) for it to end up being permanent infertility - or so close to menopause when you quit them that your normal fertility did not have a chance to recover.

And I have to wonder just how many of the women who find out they're infertile after having an IUD removed, or discontinuing BC pills are so obese that it's the obesity that's causing the infertility? (or the opposite end of the spectrum - so anorexic thin that lack of sufficient weight is what's causing infertility?)

Very likely. Because they don't blame the obesity.

It was a long time ago now, but this was a famous trial:



The practice of injecting insulin to lose weight was so common in their social circles that it created a reasonable doubt over the woman injecting herself -- that time.

I do think he did it, BTW. Her own reckless behavior opened the door for her murderer to get away with it, because it was regarded as a pleasurable and harmless way to stay slim. Even though it wasn't.

That's how desperately people want to lose weight without effort. That's always going to be a tar pit for them.

Officially, GLP-1 is a "helper" for people to change their lifestyle.

How many are using it that way when they gleefully declare this is their life's answer? As someone whose brain works well when I supplement certain neurotransmitters, I'm not knocking "better living through chemistry." When appropriate.

But isn't taking a drug so you don't have to make changes to how you take another drug... counter-produtive? Are they simply switching the drug they use, when they shouldn't be thinking they need a drug in the first place?

I’ve thought from the start that the Ozempic (et al) craze wouldn’t last long. The side effects of “off label” uses of powerful drugs can be overlooked in the enthusiasm. Lawsuits against the manufacturers are already piling up, it seems.

When it comes to weight management, individual diagnosis and personal responsibility still matter. I suppose that’s true of any disease or disorder.

At least we can now call obesity a “disease” in some cases, with a genetic component. Small comfort. You still have to do something to address it. And that something means, often, changing your relationship with food.

For me, it really clicked when I saw pictures of circus fat people from a hundred years ago. Crowd scenes from fifty years ago.

We've done the global study. We've had it run in front of us for decades.

The drastic experiment of Ancel Keyes can be stopped now.

Wait - what? How does injecting insulin make you LOSE weight?

My understanding was that insulin sends glucose to the cells, making you fatter. Having a lot of excess insulin (hyperinsulinemia), or injecting too much insulin sends more glucose to the cells, making you fatter.

Injecting way too much insulin can result in death though, if you inject so much that your blood sugar goes way too low.

(Seriously, if excess insulin made you lose weight, I should be thin as a rail, since I've always produced excess insulin. I just always got hungry when my blood sugar dropped, so I ate and brought my blood sugar back up, producing more excess insulin, making me pudgier and pudgier as the years went on)

For most people, the label "disease" means it's something you can't really control yourself.

For most people that means you need some kind of medical intervention to correct it.

They've tried surgical means for the disease of obesity - wiring jaws shut so you can't eat. Weight loss surgery. Liposuction.

And now there's the weight loss drugs.

There's drugs for almost everything these days, and the medical conditions that so far have no drugs to treat them - the ones who suffer from those conditions are campaigning for research to come up with a drug to treat it.

The last thing they think of is trying to change their diet - or they've tried it and just can't stick to it long enough to do any good, much less do it for a lifetime. That applies to low fat/calorie cutting diets as well as LC. They can't take the deprivation, and the cravings, so they cave and go off their diet.

I don't think the injections are the easy way out - they do suffer somewhat with them, some suffer a lot more than others, depending on what side effects they experience.

But whatever side effects they have have from the drugs, they still don't consider them to be as bad as trying to stick to a restrictive diet on their own. The injections are what's controlling their food intake, and it's a relief to them to no longer stress over how to avoid the foods they love, how to say no to the foods they love, how to deal with the temptation to "have just one more".

When they're on these drugs they literally CAN'T eat as much as they used to, they just feel entirely too full on about half of the food they used to eat.

Sunny took insulin for hypoglycemia. But I must have blanked on why. Sorry about that 😁

Maybe whoever wrote about it had the nomenclature confused - the terminology is similar, so I can certainly see how it's easy to mix them up.

Hyperinsulin is too much insulin, hypoglycemia is blood sugar too low.

That's what happens when the body itself produces too much insulin, driving glucose too low.

But the same condition can occur if you have hyperglycemia (blood sugar too high: diabetes), then take too much insulin, driving your blood sugar too low: hypoglycemia. When that happens with a diabetic, they immediately give them glucose tablets to bring their blood sugar back up to the normal range.

I don't know what the situation was with her though - maybe she was diabetic? Some of the symptoms of both a high and low are similar.

Definitely, it's a sign of poor control as the body compensates for an artificial diet. But I do remember reading about how celebrity/high society doctors would assent to all kinds of prescription tricks. She could have been using it to bring high blood sugar down because she'd over-indulged?

I remember reading about the case, and it was full of that circle's tricks to "not be hungry" like amphetamines. They sold caffeine pills when I was a teen. But when I tried to search engine an explanation I got 30 pages of OZEMPIC and all the others.

Can we not research things now? Is there no end to corporate monopolization? Popular studios like Disney make horrible movies and blame fans for not liking them?

Instead of, you know, acknowledging that they made a bad movie? What next, pass a law that we have to pay for so much to each entity, like taxes, so the megacorps makes more more each quarter?

This is how things got so bad. They are the rabid elephant in the room no one in power can call out, or acknowledge it's even there.

Using insulin under those circumstances would still force excess blood sugars into the cells, which would ultimately cause weight gain.

If by some chance she was a T1 diabetic, that could lead to all kinds of complications in even determining the proper insulin dosage, if she wasn't strictly controlling her diet, or not calculating the proper insulin dosage based on blood sugar readings and how much she'd eaten. (or even faulty testing equipment - it's entirely possible for testing strips and/or meters to go bad)

Teen girls who are T1 diabetic are all too often quite aware that if they want to lose weight, the way to do it is to skip/skimp on insulin dosing. They sometimes also indulge in foods they would not normally be allowed to eat - but that results in high blood sugars (which can become dangerously high in short order), and can only be brought down by injected insulin since the T1 has no other way to utilize their blood sugar.

In a T2 diabetic, there's insulin resistance - they already have a lot of insulin coursing through their bodies, but their cells have become resistant to the insulin forcing glucose into the cells. So blood sugar remains high until there's enough additional insulin injected to force the excess blood sugar into the cells. (Unless you go low enough on carbs to keep blood sugar under control.)



I saw something the other day that helps with this problem:

On the Google search page, over to the right past where it has the tabs for All, images, news, etc - over to the right of all that there's a tab off by itself for "tools''. Click on that, and where it says all results, click on that and choose verbatim. You can also choose a timeline (if you're trying to bring up something you found yesterday or last week). It's not perfect , but it does help weed out some of the junk that was not what you were looking for.

So when I googled your topic of "caffeine for weight loss", it brought up articles about caffeine. There were some ads on the side (ozempic was one of them, but there was also an ad for caffeine pills) - If I'd changed that to "history of caffeine for weight loss" or added the approximate years when you recall caffeine pills being sold for weight loss, that might have come up with the information you were looking for.

I tried, but I only got out of Ozempic land when I added "true crime" because then I got the Sunny Bulow trials, but I'd read books back in the day, nothing I didn't know before.

The fact that she injected insulin were known. And this was back in the day. It sounds pre-diabetic to me, and perhaps why she did it won't make sense to us then or now, anyway.

The crime hinged on WHO had injected the large dose that put her into a permanent coma. He was acquitted with a second trial.

Still on the topic of doing dangerous things because we want the end result so much.