Show notes
Six months ago, I bumped into my friend Bill. Bill’s a big dude in his early 60s who has the frame of a guy who might have played offensive line for the Dallas Cowboys in the 1980s. But it was clear that, since I had last seen him, he had lost 40 or 50 pounds.
“Bill, you look amazing! How’d you drop all that weight?” I asked.
“Well, diet and exercise, of course. But I’ve also been using some of the new GLP-1s” he replied.
He was referring to the class of drugs that include Ozempic, the wildly effective weight-loss drug that has become as omnipresent in Hollywood as Botox and unresolved childhood trauma. But it’s also widespread in the rest of the country. According to recent Gallup polls, about 6% of US adults—or 15 million people—have tried GLP-1 agonists to lose weight. If you know someone who suddenly shrank in the past couple of years, it’s very likely they’re taking “Vitamin O.”
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Originally prescribed to help Type 2 diabetics control blood sugar levels, these prescription injectables trick your body into feeling fuller longer, so you eat significantly less. And—follow me here—when you eat less, you lose weight. (I know, it’s a crazy concept.)
I had heard some anecdotal information about these new remedies, and Bill’s experience brought them to the top of my mind. So not long after, when my cardiologist admonished me to drop 20 pounds “or else,” I decided, “What the hell, I’ll give it a try.”
To be clear, I’m not taking Ozempic – I am on a moderate dose (50 mg/week) of compounded semaglutide. Produced by a compounding pharmacy, this generic version costs less than half of the real stuff. It’s basically Kirkland Ozempic, but regardless of the name, it really works. In less than three months, I’ve dropped nine pounds and kept off another five I had lost just prior to commencing my treatment. Its efficacy says a lot about our relationship to food.
In his excellent book, The Miracle Pill, Johann Hari explains that Ozempic utilizes hormones to increase our satiety, i.e., the feeling of being satisfied. Unlike other weight loss drugs that suppress appetite like a prison guard with an amphetamine truncheon, semaglutide changes the user’s relationship to enoughness. Indeed, I have not lost my taste or my interest in food, but I have experienced a palpable decrease in the restless, anxious urge to graze between meals or to stuff myself during them.
In his 2008 special, Chewed Up, comedian Louis CK captures this tendency perfectly. Lamenting his weight gain, Louis tells the story of a visit to his physician. After the doctor asks him if he stops eating when he’s full, Louis replies, “The meal isn’t over when I’m full. The meal is over when I hate myself.”
“The meal isn’t over when I’m full. The meal is over when I hate myself.” - Louis CK
Like Louie, I’m probably using food as a coping mechanism. Do I do this because of my shame over all the impure thoughts that have clouded my brain since the second grade? Quite possibly. But whatever the reason, Ozempic breaks me out of this appetite by inertia and creates a distance between me and my potential meal. Where previously, I’d eat something simply because it was there, I now eat mostly when I’m hungry. I wouldn’t call it “self-control,” because, well, it’s the drug that’s moderating my behavior. It’s more of a sense of objectivity where I can look at a plate of donuts and think, “Do I really need to eat three or four of those?”
Someone you love should be on Ozempic. Pleass share this post with them.
Perhaps it would be “better”—however you want to define that—if we could achieve this emotional detachment through therapy or hypnosis instead of pharmaceuticals, but it’s much less likely to happen that way. And while these drugs can help some users lose 40% of their body mass, shedding just 6% of mine has left me feeling so much healthier.
Oh sure, there are some side effects. First of all, a slower digestive process means that “regularity” as you have heretofore known it goes out the window. For a few days after your first injection, you’ll likely feel a little constipated. Then on day four, you might just find yourself sprinting for the bathroom at the Harlem DMV.
This slower digestion also leads to less extreme gastrointestinal discomfort. If you don’t keep portions modest, you will feel half-digested meals sloshing around in your gullet. Jarring movements, like running, then stir an uncomfortable reflux. So, if you want to know who at your gym is taking Ozempic, look for the guy on the treadmill who’s trying to suppress his aggressive burping.
Maybe the most important thing to consider here is that to keep one’s appetite in check, users must continue taking the drug in perpetuity. As Prince reminded us in “Let’s Go Crazy,” forever is a mighty long time—and that’s especially so when treatment costs $400-$1,000 every single month.
It makes you wonder if you can put a value of taking emotion out of our eating. In aggregate, losing weight and lowering blood sugar will drastically improve the health of our very overweight nation. It will result in a population with more energy, lower blood pressure, fewer heart attacks, and decreased wear and tear on our skeletons that will, as a result, require fewer prosthetic hips and knees over time.
But as Hari, an Ozempic user himself, points out, we don’t know what we don’t know about its long-term effects. He raises the example of patients who began long-term use of antipsychotics in the 1950s and later experienced significantly higher rates of Alzheimer's and dementia.
So, will Bill, me, and the millions of other Americans who take this drug end up losing our marbles in ten years? I wonder—might the desire to get my eating under control turn me into a murderous psychopath?
I don’t know. But let’s just say it does drive me to commit a heinous crime. At my trial, I’m going to be so skinny.
THE END (but see below)
Hey, I’ve got a show coming up in the New York Comedy Festival on November 8th. You should:
* Tell your friends who live in New York
* Buy tickets for yourself
* Get a gigantic group of friends together and come out and laugh.
Other upcoming shows:
* 9/26: Dallas Comedy Club
* 9/27: Don’t Tell Comedy, Atlanta
* 9/29: Loony Bin, Tulsa
* 10/4-5: Wise Crackers, Mohegan, PA
* 10/11: QED, Astoria Queens
* 11/6: FunHouse Comedy, Brooklyn
* 11/7: Bomb Shelter Comedy, NYC
* 11/8 New York Comedy Festival, Rodneys NYC
* 11/22: Sticks and Stones Comedy Club, Southampton, NY
To hear more, visit words.paulollinger.com 
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