Johann Hari still remembers the strange feeling he felt two days after injecting Ozempic for the first time.
A doctor prescribed the drug for weight loss — a famous side effect of treating type 2 diabetes — in 2023, when Hari weighed 203 pounds and had a body fat percentage of 32%.
Hari’s grandfather died of a heart attack at 44, his uncle in his 60s, and his father underwent quadruple heart bypass surgery at 70.
Hari was not diabetic and was wary of weight-loss drugs, knowing that past options “always ended up being a disaster,” he says. But losing weight with Ozempic appeared to be a way to reduce his own risk of heart disease.
He noticed the effect of the drug a few days after his first dose.
“I woke up and thought, ‘There’s something weird. What is this?’ 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 was significantly reduced from that point on. I was so much less hungry than before. I felt very full, very quickly.
Hari ultimately lost 42 pounds with Ozempic, then its sister drug Wegovy, which contains the same active ingredient, semaglutide, and is specifically approved for weight loss.
He set out to find out everything he could about GLP-1 drugs – which mimic at least one hormone produced by the gut to signal satiety – in his new book, “Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss”. Drugs.”
Hari shared his insights in an interview with TODAY.com. His responses are edited and condensed for clarity:
TODAY: You call these weight-loss drugs “a mass experiment, conducted on millions of people, and I am one of the guinea pigs.” For what?
Hari: I am part of two experiences, not just one. I was part of the experiment that made us even more obese. And now I’m part of the experiment that’s reversing that trend by using drugs.
In my lifetime, we have experienced an explosion of obesity unprecedented in human history. We have been physically altered by processed and ultra-processed foods, which have completely taken over our diets and are nothing like the foods humans before us ate. This food undermines our ability to feel full.
The second experiment in which I am participating concerns these drugs. They make you feel full again. But they also carry certain risks.
What potential risks are you most concerned about?
Semaglutide has only been used for a little over two years in obese people. We do not know the long-term effects of taking them. There is concern that they may have an effect that we do not know in the long term.
Expert opinion: Dr. Christopher McGowan, 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 reassuring track record in general with these drugs,” McGowan said. previously told TODAY.com.
Dr. William Yancy, medical director of the Duke Lifestyle and Weight Management Center, in Durham, North Carolina, added that after reviewing the research, he was comfortable prescribing Wegovy, knowing that a patient might have to take it for years or even decades.
“We’re still accumulating knowledge and this could change in the future, but at this point we have enough information to consider this a long-term treatment,” he told TODAY.com.
When asked if Wegovy could be taken safely long-term, Novo Nordisk, its manufacturer, told TODAY.com that GLP-1 drugs such as semaglutide have been used to treat type 2 diabetes since over 18 years old and for the treatment of obesity for eight years. years.
“Semaglutide has been extensively investigated in robust clinical development programs, large real-world evidence studies and has a total of more than 9.5 million patient years of clinical experience,” the company says in a statement.
“Novo Nordisk guarantees the safety and effectiveness of all our GLP-1 medications when used as directed and when taken under the care of a licensed healthcare professional.
The company also says it works closely with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to continually monitor the safety of its drugs.
TODAY: What particularly bothered you?
Hari: For my part, the only risk that I did not see coming was the psychological effect. It was really strange. In the first six months I took the drug, I got what I wanted: I lost a lot of weight, my back pain went away, all sorts of good things happened.
But I didn’t really feel better about my emotions. If anything, I felt slightly worse. I realized it was about my inability to eat comfortably and how bad it made me feel.
I went to KFC in Las Vegas and did what I would have done before taking Ozempic: I ordered a bucket of fried chicken. I ate a chicken drumstick and suddenly thought, “I can’t eat this.” » On Ozempic, you can’t overeat. You would vomit. I remember a voice in my head saying, “So, you’re just going to have to feel bad.”
Could you no longer use food as a stress management mechanism?
Exactly. This can be a difficult adjustment process for many people. This can bring to the surface the deep underlying emotional reasons why you ate in the first place.
I realized how much my eating was tied to the need to comfort myself – to gorge myself to calm myself down. And I couldn’t do that when I was on Ozempic.
The psychological effects made me want to stop taking it, but a friend of mine said, “You can find a better way to manage your emotions than overeating.”
You say you experienced “surprisingly persistent” side effects. What were they?
The side effects weren’t terrible, but they were uncomfortable. They gradually decreased over four months.
The next day I injected myself once a week, I felt a little sick. It’s pretty sweet.
I had one of the less common side effects: some people feel like their heart is beating faster. It’s hard when your heart is racing not to feel anxious because your body feels like something is wrong. So that was, for me, the most unpleasant side effect.
I would like to point out that I have experienced many benefits from this medication. I went from eating 3,200 calories a day to 1,800 calories a day without feeling hungry.
Editor’s Note: The United States Food and Drug Administration label for Ozempic states that in placebo-controlled trials, a dose of 0.5 to 1 milligram of the drug “resulted in an average increase in heart rate of 2 to 3 beats per minute.”
Do you plan to continue taking Ozempic indefinitely?
Yes, due to the risk of heart attacks in my family, for me personally the benefits of these medications outweigh my very real concerns about the 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 risks of obesity and the risks of these medications. Obesity makes almost all the health problems we fear more likely: heart disease, stroke, dementia, cancer.
Expert opinion: When considering weight loss medications such as Wegovy and Zepbound, each person should weigh the risk-benefit ratio for themselves, including the duration of their treatment. obesity will affect their healthDr. Beverly Chang, an endocrinologist and obesity medicine physician at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, previously told TODAY.com. She is an advisor to Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical company that makes Ozempic and Wegovy.
“For many of my patients, I know they have already struggled with obesity throughout their childhood and adult life, and the benefits outweigh the risks once they start taking the medication ” said Chang.
Are these drugs really “magic”, as you call them in the title of your book?
There are three ways these drugs could be magical.
The first is the most obvious: they could just fix the problem. There are days when it’s like that. All my life I have eaten too much. Now I inject once a week and don’t eat too much. It’s like magic.
The second way it could be magical is much more worrying. It could be like a magic trick. It may be that over time the risks associated with these medications outweigh the benefits. I don’t rule that out.
The third way is, I think, the most likely. Think about stories of magic, like “Aladdin.” You find the lamp, rub it, the genie appears, grants your wishes, and your wish comes true – but never quite the way you hoped.
Medication is such a powerful tool. They will have enormous and unpredictable effects – positive and negative. This is why we must take the time to seriously reflect on this incredible revolution that is hitting us.