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Ozempic for Weight Loss: Too Good to Be True or an Effective Treatment?

By |2023-03-27T15:55:25-04:00March 27th, 2023|Categories: Diabetes, Weight Loss|Tags: , , |3 Comments

When it comes to medications, supplements, diets, and other trendy solutions for weight loss, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And as anyone who knows me is aware, I am highly skeptical about quick-fix, one-size-fits-all treatments for any medical condition.

So, when I started to hear stories about Semaglutide (sold under the brand names Ozempic, Wegovy, and Rybelsus), my initial reaction was to wonder, “What’s the catch?” Could this medication, which was developed to treat insulin resistance really be as effective for weight loss as many people claim? And could it possibly be as safe as the pharmaceutical companies and the FDA have led people to believe it is?

Then, I started to recognize some patients who had struggled with losing weight, feeling healthier, and looking the best I had seen them in years! Seeing these amazing results with my own eyes forced me to take a deeper look into the Semaglutide craze that is taking over the weight loss industry.

In this post, I share what I discovered.

What Is Semaglutide?

Semaglutide is more than what you see on TikTok! It is an injectable medication that is typically prescribed in combination with diet and exercise to help control blood sugar levels in people with type 2 diabetes to manage weight.

Semaglutide works by mimicking the action of glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) — a naturally occurring hormone that has the following effects:

  • Stimulates insulin production to help regulate blood sugar
  • Inhibits glucagon release, slowing the release of sugar into the blood causing the body to burn more fat
  • Slows gastric emptying to make you feel full longer
  • Reduces appetite (because you feel full)

Together, these effects can help slow the conversion of sugar to fat, burn more fat, make you feel less hungry, and adhere to a healthy diet, all of which make it easier to manage weight and blood sugar.

Understanding the Connection Between Insulin Resistance and Weight

The research on diabetes, weight gain and loss, and inflammation is very clear — two thirds of all Americans are on a spectrum of insulin resistance. This means that their Continue reading…

The Diabetes Cure: Is Diabetes Really Reversible?

The conventional approaches to the treatment and management of diabetes is the single worst case of mismanagement in medicine today!

Full disclosure: My family history is riddled with diabetes — uncles, aunts, grandparents, and parents all with diabetes. These were not overweight people. Not by today’s standards. They had a genetic predisposition for sure. However, each had a chance to control the disease and failed miserably.

Besides genetics, what did they have in common? They all used the conventional approach to diabetes care: Lowering blood sugar by any means necessary, including using prescription drugs and insulin injections, which increase the risk of long-term complications including heart disease and cancer. Diabetics using the pharmaceutical heavy model are destined to remain reliant on the medical system.

Diabetes treatment in the current conventional health care environment will not reverse diabetes and in many cases will actually aggravate the underlying causes of the illness, leading to more chronic conditions and long-term complications.

How can we expect to reverse something with medicine if we never address the root cause?

Asking Better Questions

Conventional medicine approaches diabetes treatment with the wrong question: “How can we lower the patient’s blood sugar?”

A better question is this: “What are some root causes of blood sugar problems and what can we do to resolve them?”

The underlying causes of blood sugar problems include the following: Continue reading…

Reversing the Course of Pre-Diabetes and Type 2 Diabetes

A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that more than 100 million adults in the U.S. are now living with diabetes or prediabetes. Counted among those ranks are 30.3 million Americans (9.4 percent of the population) who have diabetes, and another 84.1 million (26 percent of the population) who have prediabetes — a condition, if it goes untreated, typically leads to type 2 diabetes within five years.

Read National Diabetes Statistics Report, 2017 — Estimates of Diabetes and Its Burden in the United States by clicking on the link here. Please note: Clicking on the aforementioned link will automatically download a PDF file.

To put those statistics into perspective, in 2015, diabetes was the seventh leading cause of death in the U.S. By any measure, diabetes qualifies as a serious epidemic. What’s so tragic is that this epidemic is mostly preventable through changes to diet and activity levels.

The silver lining in this cloud is that pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes can be reversed. The problem is, it’s not being reversed.

Photo: ©2017 Kate Fern on Unsplash.com

Most of those affected who seek treatment from doctors who practice conventional medicine, continue to get worse, develop a growing list of health problems, and take more and more medication in an attempt to Continue reading…