Today, some GPs are prescribing diabetes medications for obesity. A few months ago, they were approved by the American and European drug authorities as a remedy for serious obesity.
Tim tells in The Latest News how the drug Ozempic with the active ingredient semaglutide helped him lose his corona kilos. He had to inject the drug that lowers the amount of sugar in the blood into his arm or abdomen every week.
He was warned about the side effects. “They could be quite spicy. I felt light-headed for ten days, a bit nauseous too. If that lasted much longer, I would probably have stopped taking the medication. A friend of mine was bothered too much and Since then, he has been on another diabetes medication that he has to inject every day, luckily the nauseous feeling disappeared for me.” And admittedly: the drug helped him to easily lose about 10 kilos.
Saxenda is another popular drug. The search term reached nearly 200 million views on TikTok. “The drug has been on the market in Belgium for three years,” says Professor Luc Van Gaal, obesity expert, in Het Laatste Nieuws. “It is Ozempic’s older brother and much less efficient. If you follow a diet with Saxenda for a year and do your best, you will lose between eight and ten kilograms. With Ozempic, as Tim’s testimony shows, you lose between twelve and fifteen kilos.”
Synthetic gut hormone
What exactly is in those resources? “Semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic, is the synthetic version of a natural intestinal hormone,” explains Van Gaal. “It ‘talks’ to the parts of the brain that give us a feeling of satiety and thus suppresses our appetite. Plus, it affects our metabolism. Because this hormone functions less well in diabetic patients, semaglutide has been used to treat diabetes for some time. In those patients, we noticed a beneficial side effect: weight loss and a reduced risk of cardiovascular disease.”
Obesity patients receive more than twice the amount of diabetes patients. And it is not a panacea: it took subjects on average 68 weeks to lose more than 15 kilos. In addition, you also have to make significant changes to your lifestyle. “Those who continued to eat fat or spicy, not only achieved less results, but also had to contend with more side effects for longer and more often, because the synthetic hormone puts extra strain on the gut anyway.”
