This rage has cost me one night of sleep so I feel extra crappy today. I had hoped to take a shower today, but I am redirecting that limited energy to this blog post instead. The trade off will be worthwhile if I can get some of this fury out.
This article is what started it all. Ozempic, a drug for Type 2 diabetics, is being prescribed off label for weight loss.
Ozempic has become so popular in the last two years because it makes people lose weight fast. It’s so controversial because of the way it works: by triggering a chemical repugnance to food itself. After being injected with Ozempic, a user could try to imagine a moist slab of black forest gateau, or a calorically-dense, half-pound Baconator bacon cheeseburger from Wendy’s, and their body physically revolts, with spasms of nausea and waves of ill feeling. It’s the chemical realization of a behavioral psychologist’s wildest dream; A Clockwork Orange for junk food, an eating disorder in an injection.
When you pull back the curtain on this wonder drug, things get a little clearer.
Trish Wheeler is one of thousands of Ozempic users. For years, she had exercised and eaten right. She’d even been profiled in a fitness magazine. But as she got a little older, and her body transitioned into menopause, she found her usual habits were no longer doing the trick. “Dieting was not working,” Wheeler, 53, says, “and my joints were hurting enough that I couldn’t strenuously exercise anymore”. (ed. Italics mine)
… Ozempic. The treatment has seen drastic changes in Wheeler’s life: fatigue, dizziness and an elevated heart rate.
She says her brain is “running really, really slowly these days”, which makes phone calls and Zooms a little challenging. But she’s lost weight: a reported 47lbs more (21kg) . “Whether due to age or health,” Wheeler says, “traditional methods for weight loss can become less effective, and so far this drug has done a miraculous job overcoming those obstacles”.
This read as awfully familiar to me. And that is because Ozempic’s “magic” side effect is gastroparesis. The magic disease that will beat all of your body’s survival instincts into the ground as you unwillingly literally starve yourself.
.. the same hormone has also been shown to slow down the passage of food from the stomach to the small intestine, which can increase a feeling of satiety by making patients feel fuller faster.
Why sure, there may be some unpleasant ill effects, but hey, you can still lose weight. And that is the most important thing, isn’t it. So much better than acknowledging that our bodies simply cannot do the type of strenuous exercise that we could when we were 20. Starving your body will not reverse that. But it will cause permanent organ damage, but only after incapacitating you with severe hypoglicemia. Not to mention the dehydration and UTI’s that come from not being able to drink liquids comfortably.
Why does this one article make me so angry? I am fully aware that America is obsessed with addressing the obesity epidemic without having to address the actual causes: food insecurity, food deserts and heavily subsidized processed food that forces the low income to eat non-nutritious food because that is all that they can afford.
My rage comes from the idea of being able to stop eating for weight loss still triggers a sense of euphoria in me. Despite two years of starvation, and despite being housebound and increasingly bed-bound, with the papery, fragile skin of someone at least 20 years my senior and my skin literally hanging off my body, That is just how deeply ingrained the message is that it is no holds barred in the fight for thinness.
Over the past two years, my greatest weight loss has come when I have had a series of good eating days in a row. Because my body starts trusting that it will get the nutrition it needs and allows fat to be burnt. When I eat less, that is when my body starts hanging on to every last molecule of glucose. That is what is making me increasingly bed bound. My body is doing everything it can to survive. I am not an anomaly. It is almost a trope in the gastroparesis world. The best way to stabilize your weight is to have bad eating days.
Gastroparesis is different for everyone. Not all of us lose weight. There are also what are called “gainers.” Their disease in mild enough that they can eat only highly processed food which is super easy to digest. Here is the rub. They are still eating tiny portions and are most definitely calorie deficient. Their bodies’ survival mechanism is to hang on to all of the easy calories and they gain weight. Sounds a lot like what we see in food deserts, but I am no expert.
I am getting tired and feeling less coherent, so I will try to wrap this up fairly quickly. I was going to rant that I am still 8lbs above the ideal BMI weight listed in the many health portals that I am now part of. How can I starve for 2 years and not reach a supposed goal weight set by a measure that we have known is meaningless for 200 years? Simply: my body’s survival instinct.
I am fortunate that my GI agreed that I needed a feeding tube. But every day I see people complaining that their GI will not let them get a feeding tube until their BMI drops below 18.5 and they are officially underweight. Or until their labs show actual damage to their organs. That is because we, as a nation, have lost all sense of the importance of feeding our bodies. Even when our bodies are clearly deteriorating in front of our eyes. That subject deserves a rant of its own, but I really am done now.
One last parting gift.