Johann Hari still remembers the strange sensation he felt two days after injecting himself for the first time Ozempico.
A doctor prescribed the weight-loss drug — a famous side effect of treatment for type 2 diabetes — in 2023, when Hari weighed 203 pounds and had a body fat percentage of 32 percent.
Hari’s grandfather died of a heart attack at age 44, his uncle at age 60, and his father underwent quadruple heart surgery at age 70.
Hari didn’t have diabetes and was wary of weight-loss medications, knowing that previous options “always ended up being a disaster,” he says. But weight loss with Ozempic seemed like a way to lower the risk of heart disease.
He noticed the effect of the drug a few days after the first dose.
“I woke up and thought, ‘Something’s strange. What is it?’ I couldn’t figure out what it was. And then I suddenly realized that I had woken up and I wasn’t hungry. This had never happened to me,” Hari, 45, a journalist who lives in London and Las Vegas, told TODAY.com.
“My appetite decreased drastically from that point on. I was much less hungry than before. I felt very satisfied, very quickly.”
Hari finally lost 42 pounds with Ozempic and then its sister drug Wegovywhich has the same active ingredient, semaglutide, and is specifically approved for weight loss.
He decided to find out everything he could about GLP-1 Medicines – which mimic at least one hormone produced by the gut to signal satiety – in their new book, “Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of New Weight-Loss Drugs.”
Hari shared his insights in an interview with TODAY.com. His responses are edited and condensed for clarity:
TODAY: You call these weight-loss drugs “a mass experiment, carried out on millions of people, and I am one of the guinea pigs.” Why?
Hari: I’m part of two experiments, not just one. I was part of the experiment that made us much more obese. And now I’m part of the experiment that is reversing drug use.
During my lifetime, we have had an explosion of obesity unprecedented in human history. We have been physically altered by processes and ultra-processed foods, which have completely taken over our diet and are different from the foods humans ate before us. This food is undermining our ability to feel full.
The second experiment I’m part of is these drugs. They return the feeling of being satisfied. But they also bring with them some risks.
What potential risks concern you most?
Semaglutide has only been used for just over two years for people with obesity. We don’t know the long-term effects of taking them. There is a concern that perhaps they will have some effect that we just don’t know about in the long term.
Expert opinion: Dr. Christopher McGowan, obesity medicine specialist in Cary, North Carolina, says that when patients ask him if it is safe to take Wegovy for years, he says there are no long-term studies on the subject. But he notes that GLP-1 drugs have been used for more than a decade to treat type 2 diabetes, “so we have a very reassuring track record overall with these drugs,” McGowan said. previously told TODAY.com.
William Yancy, medical director of the Duke Lifestyle and Weight Management Center in Durham, North Carolina, added that after reviewing the research, he feels comfortable prescribing Wegovy, knowing that a patient may have to take it for years or decades.
“We are always accumulating knowledge and this may change in the future, but at this point we have enough information to consider this as a long-term treatment,” he told TODAY.com.
Asked whether Wegovy is safe for long-term use, Novo Nordisk, its manufacturer, told TODAY.com GLP-1 drugs such as semaglutide have been used to treat type 2 diabetes for more than 18 years and for the treatment of obesity there are eight. years.
“Semaglutide has been extensively examined in robust clinical development programs, large real-world evidence studies, and has cumulatively more than 9.5 million patient-years of clinical experience,” the company said in a statement.
“Novo Nordisk guarantees the safety and effectiveness of all of our GLP-1 medicines when they are used as directed and when they are taken under the care of a licensed healthcare professional.”
The company also states that it works closely with the US Food and Drug Administration to continually monitor the safety of its medicines.
TODAY: What specifically bothered you?
Hari: For me, the only risk I didn’t expect was the psychological effect. That was very strange. During the first six months I was on the medication, I got what I wanted – I was losing a lot of weight, my back pain went away, all kinds of good things happened.
But I actually didn’t feel any better in my emotions. In fact, I felt a little worse. I realized it was about my inability to comfort eatingand how bad it was making me feel.
I went to KFC in Las Vegas and did what I would have done before taking Ozempic: I ordered a bucket of fried chicken. I ate one of the chicken drumsticks and suddenly thought, “I can’t eat that.” In Ozempic, you can’t eat too much. You would vomit. I remember a voice in my head saying, “Then you’re going to have to feel bad.”
Could you no longer use food as a stress coping mechanism?
Exactly. This can be a difficult adjustment process for many people. It can bring to light the deep underlying emotional reasons why you ate.
I realized how much my eating was about comforting me – gorging myself to calm myself. And I couldn’t do that when I was at Ozempic.
The psychological effects made me want to stop taking it, but one of my friends told me, “You might find a better way to deal with your emotions than overeating.”
You say you experienced “surprisingly persistent” side effects. What were they?
The side effects weren’t terrible, but they were uncomfortable. They gradually decreased over four months.
The day after the once-a-week shot, I felt a little sick. It’s very light.
I had one of the less common side effects – some people feel their heart beat faster. It’s hard when your heart is racing not to feel anxious because your body thinks something is wrong. So that was, for me, the most unpleasant side effect.
I want to emphasize that I have experienced many benefits from this medication. I went from eating 3,200 calories a day to eating 1,800 calories a day and not feeling hungry.
Editor’s note: The US Food and Drug Administration label for Ozempic states that in placebo-controlled trials, 0.5-1 milligrams of the drug “resulted in an average increase in heart rate of 2 to 3 beats per minute.”
Do you plan to continue taking Ozempic indefinitely?
Yes, because of the risk of heart attack in my family, for me personally, the benefits of these medications outweigh my real concerns about the long-term effects. Studies show that Wegovy (which contains the same active ingredient as Ozempic) reduces the risk of heart attack or stroke by 20%.
You have to weigh two sets of risks – the risks of obesity versus the risk of these drugs. Obesity causes almost every health problem we fear more probable — heart disease, stroke, dementia, cancer.
Expert opinion: When considering taking weight loss medications such as Wegovy and Zepbound, each person needs to weigh the risk-benefit for themselves, including duration obesity will affect your healthDr. Beverly Tchang, endocrinologist and obesity medicine physician at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, previously told TODAY.com. She is a consultant for Novo Nordisk, a pharmaceutical company that manufactures Ozempic and Wegovy.
“For many of my patients, I know they have struggled with obesity throughout their childhood and adulthood, and the benefits outweigh the risks once they start medication,” Tchang said.
Are these drugs really “magic,” as you call them in the title of your book?
There are three ways these drugs can be magical.
The first is the most obvious: they could simply solve the problem. There are days when it feels like that. All my life I ate too much. Now, I inject myself once a week and don’t eat too much. It looks like magic.
The second way this could be magical is much more disturbing. It could be like a magic trick. It may be that, over time, the risks associated with these medications outweigh the benefits. I don’t rule it out.
The third way is, I think, the most likely. Think of magical stories, like “Aladdin.” You find the lamp, rub it, the genie appears, grants your wishes, and your wish comes true – but never in the way you expected.
Drugs are a very powerful tool. They will have huge and unpredictable effects – positive and negative. This is why we need to stop and really think about this incredible revolution that is hitting us.
This article was originally published in TODAY.com
