NOTE for readers: I am not a health professional. Everything I write here are the experiences of a normal human being, and shouldn’t be taken seriously as suggestions or diagnostics without consulting with your doctor.
Being overweight has always been one of my main life struggles. I’ve never been severely obese, but its shadow has followed me since my teenage years. For a few years during the late 2010’s I was able to overcome it, but I slowly crawled back to being overweight until now.
I’m really tall, at 194 cm, so at least I don’t get a lot of the shame of overweight. Most people are surprised to learn that I’m actually slightly obese (at ~114kg) because my height kind of compensates for it.
Also, weight used to be a big deal during my 20s, but now that I’m married and have a kid, I don’t feel the need to impress anyone. My only reasons for wanting to lose weight are purely health and, maybe, feeling better with myself.
Since I know many others are in this same journey or trying to learn more about it, I wanted to share some thoughts and experiences about this.
Is taking a med to lose weight ok?
So my first concern about this is, should I want this? Is this the right way to lose weight, or am I cheating? I think first of all you should ask yourself if you need it.
I believe that if you go to your doctor just to ask them if they can give you Wegovy you’re starting with the wrong mindset. You know perfectly why you want to talk directly about a med: it’s not the first suggestion your doctor will give you after learning about your problems.
You can’t just go to your doctor and give them a diagnostic and a treatment. That’s not how it works: you go to your doctor to talk about your issues, and then you get a set of suggestions that, normally, you don’t like at all. You already suspect most of what the doctor will tell you. You will have to do all of that EVEN IF YOU TAKE MEDS, and specially AFTER you achieve your objectives, so you don’t immediately throw your progress away. Those lifestyle changes are forever and if you’re going to medicate yourself you better not waste this shot.
After some years of back and forth with my doctor, she suggested me to try meds. The health motives behind this suggestion were a metabolism that had a serious risk of becoming diabetes in the long run, and a liver that was fatty and would also pose a risk in the long run. So weight is actually not the main reason for me to get serious with health, but it’s heavily linked to it.
All the serious health issues I have are completely reversible, and I can undo the damage with a change in lifestyle and some lost weight. So if I’m serious about it, why take the meds at all? I think it’s like an insurance, or a warranty. I don’t have the best track record in losing weight and getting serious with my health, so I’m not going to bet all of it onto my sheer willpower if I have an alternative. Wegovy provides me a much higher chance of success: if I failed, the next time I might not have the opportunity to fully revert my situation.
It’s also a medicine that interacts with the liver in ways that I don’t understand at all, so it’s not just about the weight, there are other medical reasons to take it.
I know it’s not the socially acceptable and «pretty» way to fix all of my problems, but I have the rest of my life to do all the right things, my priority right now is to get out of risk and I’ll use any tool available for it (as long as it’s prescribed and recommended by a doctor, of course)
How does Wegovy feel?
After getting my first shot I was kinda expecting to feel something, but I just didn’t. Besides the slight discomfort of the needle, there’s no immediate feeling.
During the first 24h I felt nothing at all. After that time, I started feeling slight nauseous. I actually had a family gathering that day, so I would have usually eaten heavily that day, but found myself unable to eat more than a standard serving. I was full.
So that’s it, that’s how Wegovy feels: you’re full. All the time. The following days the sensation became stronger and at some moments I was almost unable to eat even after many hours of fasting. On the worst days it’s like trying to eat something after a Christmas meal: you try to eat but feel the food going up your throat. Even though there’s no food at all in this case.
Your body adapts quickly to it and soon it becomes more like a regulator. You start eating normal sized meals and feeling full after it.
That’s why I think this med actually helps with habit forming. The first weeks, whenever I saw a massive plate my head said «I can eat this» because I would usually be completely able to take it all in and then go for another round. Now, I feel like my mind is slowly having to re-learn what’s a normal sized meal, and not desiring to keep eating even if there’s more food available.
I don’t know what will happen when I drop the medicine but I’m sure food is not going to look the same as it did before. At that moment, I will have to be careful not to do the same mistakes again, but I will have somewhere to start from.
Did it have side-effects?
Besides some nausea for the first days, I’m not sure if I can call my other «effects» a direct side-effect of Wegovy.
Apparently, amongst many other things semaglutide does two important things: decreases your body’s secretion of glucose, and increases your body’s secretion of insulin. Take that, and also lack and of hunger (i.e. you don’t eat as much as before), and you get hypoglycemia.
When you have a large meal your body compensates producing lots of insulin to lower your blood sugar. If the meal is REALLY large, your body overcompensates for it and causes what’s commonly known as a «sugar crash», causing hypoglycemia.
I had two different issues that lead to the same situation. I’m used to eat whenever I feel like it, which is just often enough for me to replenish all the nutrients needed in my body. But now I can spend full days almost not eating.
So I started feeling very tired without an explanation. It was progressive and not bad enough to worry about it, but I was getting consistently tired. I didn’t really know where it came from.
And then I went on vacation for a weekend and had a big breakfast one day. It wasn’t even big for what I used to eat, but it was huge for my new «standards». Two hours later I was absolutely wasted. That same feeling from the previous days but much much worse, and with new symptoms like headache, heart palpitations, and slight cold and tremors.
To make matters worse, I was completely full from such a big breakfast, so eating was not in my top-40 priorities. After a visit to the ER everything made sense. It was something that never happened to me before: I had low blood sugar.
I learned two important things that day: how low blood sugar feels, and that I can’t just eat mindlessly whenever I feel like it. I need to consciously mind what I eat and what I don’t eat.
Takeaways
My takeaway is that Wegovy is not only helping change my mind about how much I can eat, it’s also forcing me deeply think about it. And this would have been much harder to learn without this med. After this experience I realised what I eat has a direct impact on how I feel for the next few hours, or even days.
I found myself taking care of my carbs and iron intakes in a way that I had never before, and now I think I feel even better (less tired) than before starting, when I ate as much as I wanted. That’s something I will forever be taking an eye on: even if I fail miserably in my journey, whenever I feel tired this experience will come to my mind.
I’ve lost 4kg during this month, and my doctor has decided to stay on the same dosage for the 2nd month, mainly because we want to keep an eye on those sugar levels and make sure I am stable before going up, and also because you don’t take the dose up unnecessarily if it’s giving the desired effect as is.
Losing weight consistently is also extremely helpful to implement all the lifestyle changes that are needed. If you’re reading this, you probably know how it feels to do «all the right things» for a month just to find you weight more than when you started.
I think providing a consistent sense of progress is really helpful, and the fact that going «wrong» has consequences (like in my bad breakfast example) also helps equalize temptations out. Now I know I can indulge, but indulging big is just not an option, and it’s important for me to learn that. Without the consequences it would have taken me much longer to realize this.
Daniel Barca 
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