Johann Hari still remembers the strange feeling he felt two days after he first injected himself with Ozempic.
A doctor prescribed the drug for weight loss — a famous side effect of type 2 diabetes treatment — 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 44, his uncle in his 60s and his father had a quadruple heart bypass in his 70s.
Hari didn’t have diabetes and was wary of weight loss, knowing that previous options “always turned out to be a disaster,” he says. But weight loss with Ozempic appeared to be a way to reduce the risk of heart disease.
He noticed the effect of the drug a few days after the first dose.
“I woke up and thought, ‘There’s something 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 just dropped dramatically from that point on. I was so much less hungry than I had been before. I felt very full, very quickly.”
Hari ended up losing 42 pounds with Ozempic and then its sister drug Wegovy, which has the same active ingredient, semaglutide, and is specifically approved for weight loss.
He set out to find out all he could about GLP-1 drugs — which mimic at least one hormone produced by the gut to signal fullness — in his new book, “Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drug.”
Hari shared his insights in an interview with TODAY.com. His answers are edited and condensed for clarity:
TODAY: You call these diet pills “a mass experiment done on millions of people and I’m 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 so much fatter. And now I’m part of the experiment that reverses that drug use.
Over the course of our lives, we have experienced an explosion of obesity unprecedented in human history. We have been changed physically by processed and ultra-processed foods, which have completely taken over our diet and are different from the foods that humans ate before us. These foods are undermining our ability to stay full.
The other experiment I’m a part of is these drugs. They give you back your feeling of being full. But they also come with risks.
What potential risks are you most concerned about?
Semaglutide has only been used for more than two years now for people with obesity. We don’t know the long-term effects of taking them. There are concerns that they may have some long-term effects that we just don’t know.
Take an expert: Dr. Christopher McGowan, an obesity medicine specialist in Cary, North Carolina, says that when patients ask him if it’s safe to take Wegovy for years, he tells them there are no long-term studies on it. 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 encouraging track record in general with these drugs,” McGowan previously told TODAY.com.
Dr. William Yancy, MD, medical director of the Duke Lifestyle and Weight Management Center, in Durham, North Carolina, added that after reviewing the studies, he is comfortable prescribing Wegovy knowing that a patient may need to take it for years or decades.
“We’re always gathering knowledge, so it could change down the road, but at this point we have enough information to consider it a long-term treatment,” he told TODAY.com.
Asked if it is safe to take Wegovy long-term, Novo Nordisk, its manufacturer, told TODAY.com that GLP-1 drugs such as semaglutide have been used to treat type 2 diabetes for more than 18 years and to treat obesity in eight years. year.
“Semaglutide has been extensively studied in robust clinical development programs, large real-world studies and has accumulated over 9.5 million patient-years of clinical experience,” the company said in a statement.
“Novo Nordisk stands behind the safety and efficacy of all our GLP-1 medicines when used as directed and under the supervision of a licensed healthcare professional.”
The company also says it works closely with the US Food and Drug Administration to continuously monitor the safety of its drugs.
TODAY: What particularly bothered you?
Hari: For myself, the only risk I didn’t see coming was the psychological impact. It was really weird. In the first six months of taking the drug, I was getting 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 better about my feelings. If anything, I felt a little worse. I realized it was about my inability to comfort myself with eating and how bad it was making me feel.
I went to a KFC in Las Vegas and I did what I would have done before taking Ozempic – I ordered a bucket of fried chicken. I had one of the chicken tenders and I suddenly thought, “I can’t eat this.” On Ozempic, you can’t overeat. You would throw up. I remember a voice in my head saying, “You just have to feel bad.
Could you no longer use food as a coping mechanism?
Exactly. It can be a bumpy adjustment process for many. It can bring to the surface deep underlying emotional reasons why you ate in the first place.
I realized how much of my eating was about the need to comfort myself – to stuff myself to calm me down. And I couldn’t when I was on Ozempic.
The psychological effects made me want to stop taking it, but one of my friends told me, “You can find a better way to deal with your emotions than eating too much.”
You say you experienced “surprisingly persistent” side effects. what were they
The side effects weren’t terrible, but they were unpleasant. Their number gradually decreased over four months.
The day after I injected myself once a week, I felt a bit chilly. It is quite mild.
I had one of the rarer side effects – some people find their heart beats faster. It’s hard when your heart is racing not to be nervous because your body feels like something is wrong. So this was, for me, the most unpleasant side effect.
I want to emphasize that I experienced great benefits from this medicine. I went from eating 3,200 calories a day to 1,800 calories a day and wasn’t hungry.
Editor’s note: US Food and Drug Administration label for Ozempic says that in placebo-controlled studies of 0.5-1 milligrams of the drug “resulted in an average increase in heart rate of 2 to 3 beats per minute.”
Are you going to continue taking Ozempic indefinitely?
Yes, because of the risk of heart attack in my family, for me personally, the benefits of these drugs outweigh my very real concerns about 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 risk of obesity versus the risk of these drugs. Obesity makes almost every health condition we fear more likely – heart disease, stroke, dementia, cancer.
Expert opinion: When considering diet pills like Wegovy and Zepbound, each person needs to weigh the risks and benefits for themselves, including how to proceed obesity will affect their healthDr. Beverly Tchang, an endocrinologist and obesity doctor at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, previously told TODAY.com. She is a consultant for Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company that makes Ozempic and Wegovy.
“For many of my patients, I know they’ve struggled with obesity throughout their childhood and adulthood already, and the benefits outweigh the risks as soon as they start the drug,” Tchang said.
Are these drugs really “magic” as you call them in your book title?
There are three ways these drugs could be magic.
The first is the most obvious: They might just solve the problem. There are days when it feels like this. All my life I have eaten too much. Now I inject myself once a week and don’t eat too much. It feels like magic.
The second way it could be magic is much more disturbing. It could be like magic. Over time, the risks associated with these drugs may outweigh the benefits. I don’t rule it out.
The third way is, in my opinion, the most likely. Think of the wizarding stories, like “Aladdin.” You find the lamp, rub it, the spirit appears, grants your wishes, and your wish comes true – but never quite the way you expected.
Medicines are such a powerful tool. They will have enormous and unpredictable effects – positive and negative. That’s why we need to take the plunge and really think about this incredible revolution that is upon us.
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
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