Kathy Bates, 76, shows her incredible 100ib weight loss at CBS Curtain-Raiser after revealing the moment that her Ozempian journey has fueled

In the summer I was lucky to be invited for a 60th birthday in which entertainment after dinner was a private performance by one of the leading male pop stars of the UK. More striking than the actual show, however, was how incredibly said that star looked. He was only a shadow of his former self and walked around the stage in a silver Catsuit. His secret? Semaglutide, or Ozempic as it is branded, A new diet medicine that everyone – But everyone, darling, including one of the world’s most famous super models – apparently assumes.

Originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes, It is used off label (For a purpose other than for which it had a permit) in both the US and the UK to treat obesity. In research carried out by his billionaire manufacturer, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk, patients lost an average of 17 percent of their total body weight for 68 weeks. This is compared to five to nine percent for ‘Oldschool’ Anti-Obesity drugs such as metformin.

Only available in the UK on the NHS If you have type 2 diabetes, Ozempic can be obtained through a private doctor, and if you are willing to take it without medical supervision not recommended by doctors (see panel) you can get it online via various weight loss programs. It is sometimes taken in tablet form, but more often as an injection.

Originally developed to treat type 2 diabetes, Semaglutide OFF label is used. It is branded as a new diet medicine that apparently everyone is taking

Hollywood was aware of Ozempic for much longer than Wij-Various Magazine recently joked that the medicine earned its own thank you from the Emmy’s, because so many stars on stage had taken it clearly. Elon Musk Lyrisch about his more powerful sister drug, Wegovy, on Twitter; Kim Kardashian, it is bright rumor, used semaglutide to lose 16 pounds to fit in with Marilyn Monroe’s dress for the Ball. On Tiktok, the hashtag #zempic has had more than 285 million views.

Thanks to the hype, there has been an increase in the question that causes shortages on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, with a recoil against influencers and celebrities who wash up stocks for desperate diabetes patients. Big Pharma is predictable an alternative – Tirzepatide (brand name Mounjaro), made by Eli Lilly – but it still has to be approved by the US Food & Drug Administration for Weight Loss.

Novo Nordisk has issued a statement to say that his stocks will be supplemented by the end of the year, but it has not suppressed fear. At least two male friends of mine of middle age who started using it in September get in a turn to be briefly caught before the holidays. As a private doctor in London noted: “It is just like the H RT panic last spring.”

So what exactly is this medicine? Semaglutide belongs to a class called GLP-1 agonists, who not only regulate blood sugar levels, but, as was discovered about ten years ago, also mimics the intestinal hormones that regulate our appetite to tell the brain when we are hungry or full. There are of course side effects: sour reflux, nausea, worsening of IBS symptoms and fatigue (but much less than in earlier GLP-1 agonists such as saxenda), as well as pancreatitis, gallstones and, in very high doses, caused thyroid tumors in rats. In the meantime, when you stop using it, the effect proceeds immediately and in some cases it does not work at all.

“I would describe Semaglutide as an example of very smart science,” says leading adviser -Docrinologist Dr. Effhimia Karra from her private practice for Harley Street in London. “But it’s not a panacea for everyone. About one fifth of the users do not respond to it. This is because the human body promotes the supporter of weight gain, so if you lose weight, the body will do everything to return to the highest BMI. The heavier you are, the harder it is to lose weight. If a patient has not made progress in three months, I will remove them. ‘

The wife of banker Laura, a native New Yorker in her mid -1950s who was floating between decades, started using it in January. “The Paleo Diet, 5: 2, CBT, NLP, Bootcamp, Diet Delivery Services-I have tried them all,” she says from the parental home in Hampshire, “and I am always back immediately. After my last annual check, I considered giving up seriously. Then my doctor introduced Semaglutide. ‘

After just a month, she noticed that her clothes had become looser. From that moment on the weight started to lose weight. “The strange thing was that I didn’t eat anything else. I just couldn’t have a seconds physically, and the idea of ​​pudding after a full meal had lost its allure. ‘Three months later she is two stones lighter – although she occasionally suffers a stomach acid if she eats or drink alcohol late at night – and when we spoke in the fall, she looked forward to losing a stone against Christmas.

‘There is a huge voice that tells me that it is both risky and lazy to take a medicine to lose weight, and I am worried that it all stacks up again when I stop taking it. But if so, I will seriously consider taking it indefinitely. ‘

Private London GP Dr. Martin Caly has been prescribing semaglutide for about a year to customers who cannot lose the weight that they have gained in the menopause. He has also seen it a transformational effect on many younger women who suffer from polycystic ovarian syndrome. “PCOS patients are difficult to treat, and you can imagine how the body image plays a very important part when it comes to self-respect.”

But according to Tom Sanders, professor of Nutrition and Dietetics at King’s College London, it is not a magical bullet. Responding to a study of semaglutide published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2021, he says: “The challenge after the weight is to prevent a recovered weight,” he wrote. It may prove to be useful in the short term, but ‘public health measures that encourage behavioral changes such as regular physical activity and the moderating energy energy -intake are still necessary’.

That said, given our emerging national obesity statistics and the escalation in associated health problems such as heart failure, cancer and obstructive sleep apnea, we need something. Semaglutide is perhaps the drug of the rich person today, but can it be approved for more widespread use? Only time will learn it.