I was put on Ozempic a few years ago for diabetes reasons, like back when that was the only way you could get it on NHS.
The introductory kit came with so much toxic bodyshaming bullshit, all over the instructions, the "weight loss diary" that came with the pack, all of it. It pissed me off because I had only agreed to it when the diabetes specialist nurse pushed it if there'd be no talk of weight loss...and then of course from week one she started asking me about weight loss so I had to remind her that I do not and will not own a scale at home.
The medication itself started off okay but by week three it made me really ill, like REALLY SICK. And it didn't get better, it got worse, so bad that my diabetic specialist nurse took me off of it.
It made my blood sugar go up, not down, even though I ate hardly anything while on it, in part because I got so sick that all I could eat was bananas and toast, like when you have a stomach bug.
It took over 5 weeks after stopping it to recover, and my hba1c reflected a rise in blood sugar during that time as well.
Since then I've been convinced that - given how the makers of this and similar drugs keep downplaying how sick it makes some people, and how everyone seems to forget that it's limited-use and then weight will come back - that this is going to turn out to be this generation's fenphen, and in 20 years people will look back and think, "WTF, all those people did that harm to themselves just for a couple years of thinness?"
FWIW this was all before the diabetic nurse was willing to try me on actual insulin. When we'd gone through all the various torture drugs first, then and only then she let me start insulin. She warned that I'd have to be careful about what I ate with insulin, because "most people gain weight with it."
Guess what? As my PCOS (PMOD) and perimenopause have stabilised and as I've been using insulin, my hba1c finally fell, my insulin use could finally be lowered, and without even trying I lost some weight, which I only found out at my last diabetic checkup. I don't even care about the weight loss, because it might come back anyway, but the medical people are all like, "Good job!" and I'm like, "Stop giving me credit because I also don't want blame."
Turns out when you treat diseases as diseases instead of reasons to kick sick people for their symptoms, you can get better results.
