Does Ozempic work? Ozempic is a fairly recent drug that is being used for weight loss. If you want to know if Ozempic works or not, we have two resources for you.
The first one is a forum discussion topic chronicling a chap’s weight loss attempts over several years. The part relating to Ozempic can be found from >here< onwards.
The second is the recent experience of Jeremy Clarkson. He wrote about his experiences here in the Times, but it is hidden behind a paywall. However, you can read it below here:
I’ve had a magic jab and my giant gut’s already shrinking
Given up on dry January yet? Of course you have. And the weather’s been too awful for those invigorating walks you promised yourself, so now you’re in the pub, with a pint and a pie, listening to your shirt buttons straining against the relentless build-up of abdominal fat.
I feel your pain. I like to kid myself that my vast size is entirely down to the fact that I gave up smoking five or six years ago. But that is delusional. The real reason is that I drink far too much wine, I eat far too many slabs of Cadbury Fruit & Nut chocolate and I drink a litre of milk before going to bed every night. Unless there’s a beer in the fridge. In which case I’ll have that instead.
Normally, the spread that results as we move from middle age into the November of our lives isn’t so bad because we are no longer required to make shapes on the dancefloor or make love while standing up, and, more importantly, everyone else is in the same boat.
However, in the past few months I started to notice that various friends weren’t in the same boat. They were getting thinner. Much thinner. I ran into one chap recently who’s always been a bit of a Michelin man, and he looked like something out of a Lowry painting.
I assumed this was something to do with type 2 diabetes. This is the new plague — God’s way of wiping out the affluent and the weak-willed. Sure, go ahead with your diet of port and pork fat, but know this: when you are 60, your blood sugar levels will be all messed up and you’ll have to have your legs amputated.
I’ve had an annual finger-in-the-bottom and head-in-an-MRI medical for some time now, and in the past all I really cared about at the end of the day, when the results came through, was: do I have cancer? And after the doctor said I’d escaped its evil clutches for another year, I didn’t listen to the rest. Ten per cent chance of a heart attack by the time I’m 60? I’ll take those odds, and now, if you don’t mind, I’m off to the pub to celebrate my tumourlessness.
More recently, though, I’ve started to worry about diabetes. I have no idea what it is, but I know that when it arrives, you have to live the rest of your life on a diet of nothing but lettuce and mineral water, because if you don’t, it’s Douglas Bader time.
It’s scary stuff, so that, I figured, is why my friends were suddenly starting to look like the pipe-cleaner-thin love child of Willem Dafoe and Jon Bon Jovi. They’d had the diagnosis. But then I noticed that they were all still going to parties and enjoying a refreshing pint of wine.
It turned out they’d all started taking a new Danish drug called Ozempic, and when questioned they all raved about it. You inject yourself once a week, upping the dose each time, and it dulls your appetite. You can look at a Sunday roast, with gravy and beef and perfect Yorkshire puddings, and you think: “I’ll just have a stick of celery instead. And maybe just the one bottle of wine, rather than three.”
It was developed to help people with diabetes, but it can also be prescribed as a preventive measure. And so off I went, at an enthusiastic trot, to a clinic in London to see if I was a suitable candidate. Blood was taken. Ultrasound tests were done. Alarm bells were rung, mostly by the liver specialist, who, when he saw the results, said: “Blimey. It’s turned into coal.” But the upshot was: “Yes, you are.”
I then spoke to a doctor, who had a heavy accent and wore a facemask, so I’m not sure what she said exactly, but there seemed to be a lot of Ozempic side effects to look out for. Muddle-headedness, extreme abdominal pain, gallstones, cancer and so on. But as these seemed better than having my legs amputated, I nodded and she gave me a prescription.
There are reports that Ozempic is in short supply because of demand from all the fat-boy City types in the UK, and a TikTok weight-loss trend in Australia, but I found it at the first chemist’s I tried. And then I fainted because the first dose, which will last a month, was £140. And I’ll be on it for maybe two years. Let’s hope the price of wheat stops plummeting.
To get it into your system, you have to assemble a Star Trek-style super-future syringe and inject yourself. And to show how this is done, there’s an instruction pamphlet that could easily be understood by anyone who repairs steam engines for a living. As I can’t even open a box of matches without starting a fire, it took me quite a while, and when I finally plunged the needle into my stomach and pushed the plunger button, there was no sense that any of the drug was actually going into me.
Until later that night at about supper time. I took some lamb chops out of the fridge, popped them in the Aga and then, 20 minutes later, put them in the dogs. The next morning I boiled an egg. And had half of it that night with a sip of water, after running round the house because in my muddled head I was convinced I was being burgled. Today I’ve had nothing at all, and it’s already 3pm. Perhaps that’s why severe abdominal pain is an issue: it’s hunger pangs.
It’s genuinely incredible. I can open the fridge, where there’s half a chicken and a juicy bottle of rosé, and I want neither. Of course, I’ll have to insert some balance in the future, or I’ll, you know, die. But for now, it’s tremendous.
I never used to know what Kate Moss was on about when she said that nothing tastes as good as skinny feels, but I think, on my new wonder drug, I soon will.