The withdrawal experience

[jducoeur]

(Continued CW for weight and health and meds and such.)

Picking up from my last entry, which talked about what it was like going on Ozempic, this time let's talk about what it's like when it wears off.

I took my last dose a week ago Sunday, in the late afternoon. I'm trying to shift my schedule slightly, to work around holiday travel (and avoid needing to bring the precious vial through plane rides); it's early evening Monday, and I just took my next.

I woke up early Sunday morning, and found that I was hungry. That was kind of interesting, and drove home that I really hadn't been hungry for the past week. So at 6 1/2 days, the Ozempic was starting to wear off.

In general, yesterday continued to involve some hunger here and there, but it was today that it really set in. I was ferociously hungry today, almost startlingly so -- much hungrier, earlier in the day, than had been typical before starting on the Ozempic. And it's been getting worse over the course of the day.

On the plus side, yesterday I was able to constrain my eating pretty thoroughly: I was a bit hungry, but didn't have a lot of difficulty eating as if I wasn't. Which drives home one of the really interesting things -- the drug seems to make it easier to make good decisions. In a comment on my last entry, andrewducker remarked that there is anecdotal evidence that it seems to help with alcohol abuse, which doesn't make much sense physically, but does seem to line up with that odd way in which it's just easier to eat more sensibly while on it. (The just-informed-enough-to-be-dangerous layman in me suspects that the vagus nerve is going to turn out to have something to do with this.)

Today, I mostly continued that -- one of the real benefits is that it's quickly setting me in better habits than I had before -- but the hunger has been making it markedly harder. While I've eaten less than I was doing three weeks ago, it's definitely more than three days ago, and I'm still decidedly peckish.

Hopefully that will die down soon; I'm watching with some curiosity to see how long it takes to kick in, now that I'm more conscious of the effects.

But the moral of the story is that I now totally understand the reports that, if you go off semaglutide for any serious length of time, you'll gain all of the weight back. This stuff isn't addictive in the conventional sense, but I can already see how you wind up dependent on it.

Make no mistake: the benefits are quite serious. (While I'm still much too heavy, my weight is already lower than it's been any previous time this year.) But this is the perfect drug for the capitalist age -- one that (its benefits aside) if you're on it, you're on it permanently, and it's pretty important to stay on it: the perfect money-maker.

Comments

[cvirtue]

I am about to start again on Contrave, which worked well for me. It's a mix of buproprion and naltrexone, and I believe one of the reasons it worked for me is that I have a noticeable (to me) OCD component of overeating.

I stopped because the pandemic stopped my visits to the clinic that was prescribing it and my primary didn't want to prescribe it because she thought it was too dangerous/strong. I suspect she was freaked by the naltrexone component. However, my specialist doctor (same office as I got it from before) said it is approved for very long time use, so armed with that information, if I need to chivvy a primary care dr again (unlikely unless another pandemic) I will be prepared.