New weight loss medications like Wegovy and Mounjaro are meant to be taken long-term, experts say
For years, Artemis Bayandor found it impossible to lose the 25 pounds she gained after her pregnancy. But when her doctor suggested she start taking the weight loss drug Wegovy in August, 2021, she lost 15 pounds in six months.
“I felt good. It was easy, it came off and it was making me feel better,” she tells The Messenger.
Bayandor, 41, a mom of one who works in customer service for United Airlines, had her heart set on getting below her pre-pregnancy weight and easily went from 230 pounds to 215.
“I just didn’t have an appetite,” she says. “If I normally ate two slices of pizza, I was only able to eat one.”
But quickly becoming full with those smaller portions came to an abrupt halt when she discovered that the manufacturer’s coupon she used to get Wegovy for $25 a month had stopped.
Her pharmacist said she would have to pay $1,400 a month out of pocket — a sum Bayandor could not afford. Her health insurance would not cover it.
Bayandor, who had not been warned by her doctor previously that the prescription could become expensive, went cold turkey from Wegovy and soon put on more weight than she’d lost.
Within a month she gained back all 15 pounds. “The weight started coming on like never before,” she says, and soon gained another 10 pounds.
She was 10 pounds more than when she started Wegovy, a 25-pound upward swing and the most she’d ever weighed: 245.
“I was insatiable. And I’ve never been that way. I was so hungry,” she says. “It was crazy the way it felt.”
“It was awful, it’s still awful,” says Bayandor, of Naperville, Illinois, who has not been able to lose any weight since her Wegovy stint, and now weighs 246.
She is far from alone. A study published in 2022 in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that users of semaglutide, found in Wegovy and the diabetes drug Ozempic, regain around two-thirds of lost weight after stopping the injections.
And a new study on tirzepatide, the main ingredient in Mounjaro and the newly-approved weight loss drug Zepbound, found a similar result.
‘Patients need to stay on these weight loss medications indefinitely’
“I’m not surprised that people have gained the weight back when they go off the medicines,” Melanie Jay, M.D., director of the N.Y.U. Langone Comprehensive Program on Obesity, tells The Messenger.
Patients need to stay on these weight loss medications indefinitely to keep the weight off since obesity is a chronic disease, as well as make healthy lifestyle changes, she says.
“When we treat other chronic diseases such as high blood pressure or high cholesterol, we don’t get surprised if people stop taking the medicine and their blood pressure goes up,” Dr. Jay says. “These medicines are not curing obesity, it’s a really effective treatment.”
Semaglutide is a long-term weight loss treatment
The active ingredient in Wegovy is semaglutide, which essentially mimics a hormone called GLP-1 that acts to make us feel full.
“And if you stop giving the medication, then that effect is gone,” Supriya Rao, M.D., a gastroenterologist and obesity medicine expert at Integrated Gastroenterology Consultants at Chelmsford, Massachusetts, tells The Messenger.
Taking one of these weight loss drugs “is not like a diet that you start and stop,” she says. “Taking it for a long term is what you’re supposed to do.”
The out-of-pocket cost that Bayandor faced is one reason people stop. Some others experience extreme side effects.
Source: https://themessenger.com/health/women-stopped-taking-ozempic-wegovy-gained-more-weight
