Hacker News Reader

Comment by reaperman | Hacker News Reader

That sounds like the lesser of two evils to me. Get healthier now and maybe sometime later lose access to the thing that helps you be healthier...or don't get healthier now? Yeah, there are other, orthogonal, choices but I don't think they're part of this particular decision matrix.

View on HN

Yep. I lost 30lbs on it in 3 months. It took me 10 years to gain that weight.

So I guess if it takes me 10 more years to gain it back I can look into taking it again.

People usually gain back that weight much quicker. All it could take is one bad month and you could gain it all back.

Totally impossible. I’d have to be eating like way more than I ever have to do that.

I went off for three months and kept losing weight throughout.

And the data from these drugs shows they gain it back at regular rate at most.

An average person would have to eat 5500 kcal per day to gain this much weight in a month. It's probably not impossible, but I would say it is very unlikely.

I lost about 15-20 kg on Ozempic over about six months to a year, and held that weight for another year – continuing on 1 mg Ozempic / wk – until last autumn (2022). Then Ozempic was more widely approved than it had been before somewhere (for over-the-counter sales in the USA? Something like that.), and became unavailable in pharmacies where I live, in Finland. (AIUI, because it's more lucrative to sell it in the USA where prices aren't regulated like here, so all the limited supply is redirected there.) No problem, I was prescribed a substitute, a daily pill (brandname Rybelsus, forgot the active substance) in stead of the weekly injection pen. Worked the same, held my weight. (More of a hassle to take though, and tastes horribly, so on the whole I vastly prefer the Ozempic.)

Then, earlier this spring, that prescription ran out. Being in the middle of changing my primary healthcare provider I couldn't immediately get it renewed. And to be honest I wasn't at first all that bothered; I thought now that I've lost so much weight, and kept it off for so long with the help of these drugs, maybe I've got into the habit of eating less, so I can stay constant without them? Nope – in just a few weeks, ballooned back up some 8-10 kg. Had to scramble a bit to get the pill prescription renewed, been on it again for a couple weeks, but still some 6-7 kg above where I was before they ran out. Sure hope I'll get back down the rest of the way.

TLDR: Anecdata (n=1) says yes, going off the drugs even for a rather short while puts the weight back on quite quickly.

But given that the actual health benefits of ozempic(for me weight loss is not indicative of better health) have not actually been seen yet, you are quite possibly just taking on both evils at the same time.

On the contrary: GLP1 agonists show broad health benefits across the board.

Check this 24-month clinical trial with >3000 participants[0]. It showed improvements in rates of:

- Cardiovascular death

- Non-fatal Myocardial Infarction

- Non-fatal Stroke

- Revascularisation

- HbA1c

- Fasting Plasma Glucose

- Body Weight

- Lipid Profile ( total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol and triglycerides)

- Urinary Albumin to Creatinine Ratio

- Systolic blood pressure (mmHg)

- "overall health related quality of life namely bodily pain, general health, mental component summary, mental health, physical component summary, physical functioning, role-emotional, role-physical, social functioning and vitality." (each of these categories were "quantitatively" measured using a calibrated questionnaire - - and they all showed a dose-response relationship -- 1.0mg semaglutide made a bigger improvement than 0.5 mg, vs. two different placebos)

0: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/results/NCT01720446?term...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com