What if You Don’t Lose Weight On Ozempic?
Danielle Rosas had tried all the usual avenues to lose weight—modifying her diet, increasing her exercise—but the weight always came back. In 2020, she turned to Ozempic. She was 225 pounds at the time. “My weight has fluctuated a lot throughout my adulthood,” says Rosas, now 36.
After three months of injecting the drug once a week, she’d lost about 5 percent of her body weight, around 15 pounds. She was disappointed. She had hoped to lose more—in trials, patients had lost three times as much, although over a much longer period. What’s worse, she felt nauseous and generally unwell a lot of the time. She thought the side effects weren’t worth the little weight she had lost, so she decided to go off the drug.
Rosas’ case illustrates the reality of new anti-obesity drugs: They don’t work equally well for everyone. Semaglutide, which goes by the brand names Ozempic and Wegovy, has shown around 15 percent weight loss in clinical trials, while tirzepatide—sold as Mounjaro and Zepbound—has achieved around 20 percent. But those are averages, and in the real world, drugs don’t always perform as well as they do in carefully controlled trials.
Excerpted from Wired
