ww.wsj.com/health/pharma/a-weight-loss-drug-changed-my-life-will-it-solve-my-problem-aeb79260? [click thru for the full story]

A Weight-Loss Drug Changed My Life. Will It Solve My Problem?

Americans are flocking to pricey new medicines that can combat obesity, and I lost 40 pounds on one. What happens next is a new frontier.

By Bradley Olson, published Jan. 12, 2024 10:20 am ET

In August, as I prepared to plunge the first syringe of a new weight-loss “wonder drug” into the fatty tissue in my upper thigh, I wondered: What would it feel like to stop being hungry? Since then I’ve lost 40 pounds. This week, I injected the last dose I felt I could afford, and now I’m wondering: What happens when I go back to wanting to eat normally again?  

Hunger had, in many ways, come to define so much about my life. Most days, I thought often about food, even right after eating. Fifteen years ago, just before I turned 30, I was 100 pounds overweight. I committed to a rigorous diet and exercise program and lost it all in one year, but then like so many in my situation, gradually I gave in to food cravings and began to gain it back again. Around my 44th birthday last year, just months after completing a grueling endurance hike across the Grand Canyon and back, I hit a troubling milestone. I weighed in at 233 pounds, up about 50 pounds from my low. After all those years of trying to maintain my weight loss, eventually I had gained half of it back, and now I had officially crossed the “obese” threshold in body-mass index for the first time in 14 years.

Dieting wasn’t working any more. Now and again, I would try to lay off sugar or carbs, or count calories, or try any number of new ideas to change my relationship with food, but in the end all had failed—or, I thought, my will had failed; I had failed. When I would fall short of my target weight year after year despite hours of weekly exercise, I would think to myself: I am pretty good at a lot of things, and usually, I can accomplish my goals. But not this one. Sometimes, I would lie awake at night and wish that I could find a genie who would make me thin. I knew it was absurd, but such was my state of mind.

The author in 2009 at 280 pounds, just before an earlier campaign to lose weight through diet and exercise. PHOTO: BRADLEY OLSON

While I struggled, along came a new development: a simple weekly injection, a subtle tweak of chemistry that slows the emptying of your stomach and alters the signals that move between the gut and the brain to make you feel full instead of hungry. All of a sudden, what was impossible appeared to become easy—and suggested that the problem wasn’t willpower at all, but underlying biology; that I am not a failure, and never was.

So I made the decision to turn to one of the new so-called GLP-1 drugs. [click thru URL at top to read the full story]