Obesity as a Disease - Medication

Drunkmonkey - this is a difficult one to opine on. Your sleep difficulties might well be increasing your hunger hormones and decreasing your fullness hormones, making it very difficult for you to lose weight (and therefore it's not a genetic thing, or a hormone inbalance from years of restrictive dieting). It could be that losing weight with the assistance of GLP1 medication will resolve your sleep apnea, which will stabilise your hormones and enable you to eat less calories even when you come off the medication. For most people, this isn't the case. It's the sleep apnea and the resolving of it that might make the difference here.

For the vast majority of people, this is a life long medication. While you are taking it, it dupes your brain into believing you should be a lower weight, and therefore your body releases more fullness hormones and less hunger hormones. Once you come off it, your brain stops being duped and goes right back to thinking you should be your original weight. Your body then reverses the hormone messages, forcing you to put the weight back on. To add a lovely wrinkle to the mix, it is likely that your brain will decrease your metabolism slightly - but permanently - to "protect" your body from losing weight again.

However, if you are sleeping properly your body should naturally increase fullness and decrease hunger hormones, which should offset any recalibration done by your body as a result of withdrawal from the GLP1 meds. This isn't at all clear though.

If you were to start taking them, with a view to coming off them after 3/4 months, I would spend three months titrating upwards (it might take less time if you have a good reaction from a lower dose), hope that you lose the weight you need to lose, and then VERY slowly taper down your injections before coming off them. In the trials done on people who stopped taking GLP1s after one year, 2/3 of participants put back on 70% of the weight lost when measured a year later. That said, those participants came off the medication cold turkey. There are no trials where they measured what the long term weight loss would be if you tapered down slowly. I'd taper down for as long as possible - six months or more.

I'd be asking a lot of questions from your consultant though. They should know that this isn't a short term quick fix medication, and for the vast majority you can't just come off them and expect to maintain the weight loss. 2-3 months would be far too short a time period to be on the medication and then come off it cold turkey, in my admittedly non-medical opinion.

Hi Smallgarden. The starting price for Ozempic for me was €142, last year. That was in a pharmacy on O'Connell St in Dublin. I don't know about shortages - you'd be better checking on the diabetes thread in Long Term Illness, as they will have a better idea.

You don't need any equipment or supplies to take Ozempic, it comes with the little needle pen tops, that you fit each time you take a dose.

Are you thinking of taking Ozempic for weight loss? You'd be better to be prescribed Wegovy, which is the exact same medication, just it comes in higher doses. Ozempic only goes up to 1mg, which is the therapeutic dose for diabetes, but isn't the ideal dose for weight loss. Wegovy can vary in price across the country and I do believe the high doses can cost quite a bit more than the approx €147 price for 1mg of Ozempic.

If it's weight loss you are looking for, you should strongly consider taking Mounjaro rather than Ozempic or Wegovy. It is more expensive then Wegovy, but it's likely you will get better results. The best way to get Mounjaro is to get a paper prescription from your doctor here, and order it for delivery to the South from a chemist in the North. Don't bother getting it from a pharmacy here - the prices are eye watering. I have a prescription for the highest dose of Mounjaro (15mg), which costs €220 including delivery, but I only take 9mg doses from the pen, so it lasts for about 7 weeks.