I knew that Ozempic was popular but I didn’t know it was this popular. When I asked my Instagram followers if anyone would talk about taking the drug, within 20 minutes I had so many messages that I had to scramble to delete the request before my inbox overflowed like the Magic Porridge Pot.
Ozempic has become a catchy byword for semaglutide, (pronounced Semag-lootide, not semma-glutide), which is the active ingredient in several newish weight-loss drugs. Technically, Ozempic is only used to treat diabetes, but Wegovy – and others with less jazzy names – are also used to treat obesity. And, broadly, they work.
In clinical trials of semaglutide, patients lost up to 15 per cent of their body weight. For a chronically overweight world, obsessed with being slim, this is the golden snitch of medication. I haven’t seen such a frenzy since Botox.
Inevitably, it is not being used exclusively by diabetics and the obese. It seems anyone who wants to lose a bit of weight and can afford a private supply is merrily injecting the stuff. I see its shrinking effect everywhere: people I haven’t seen for a while are casually half the size. They talk vaguely about giving up drinking or eating better, but are they getting a bit of help?
The drug, which arrives in pre-loaded syringes, is injected into the stomach and sourced from private doctors or by fiddling a BMI online to secure a stash. Prices for a month’s supply skid around from £90 to £350.
But recently, reports have focused on a less favourable aspect of the drug: so-called “Ozempic face”, slack skin around the jaw and neck as a result of the weight loss. Is this enough to put people off? From those I spoke to, the answer is simply no, they are unbothered.
“I definitely have looser skin on my face but I thought that would be obvious once you have lost a lot of weight,” says Amy Latham, 35, who lost four stone in five months. “This skeletal look or the sagging skin on your face is what happens when you have quite dramatic weight loss.
“I think the term ‘ozempic face’ is ridiculous to be honest. I might have a thinner face but I’ve also not got the fat filling those gaps like they were before.” Put simply she says she is “happy with it, Ozempic has completely changed my life”. Her mother and husband are now on it too.
Tina, 55, agrees: “I have lost a lot of fat on my face and it resulted in some wrinkles. I lost my ‘natural’ filler. But I feel great and I feel good about how I look. When people lose weight they most likely lose it everywhere. It’s fine, wrinkles are part of the territory for people my age anyway”.
Other people from my Instagram DMs – only one of whom was clinically obese, the others wanted to shift up to three stone – feel the same. One summed it up: “It’s worth it.”
It is worth saying that “Ozempic face” can also be a sign of semaglutide mis-management: it points to losing too much weight too quickly (which a weight management programme wouldn’t allow), and not following an appropriate diet alongside the administration of the drug. According to weight-loss experts, the right diet would mitigate muscle wastage while the pounds come off.
But this isn’t stopping people from wanting to take it (or recommending it to their families). Dr Robert Kushner, who is on the American Board of Obesity Medicine, and oversaw the clinical trials for semaglutide, told a podcast that the critical difference the drug made to his patients was that they were, for the first time, actually able to stick to a prescribed healthy diet. “They tell me that they are not struggling,” he said, “they don’t feel that compulsivity to eat.”
Two users I spoke to said that the drug meant that they were now able to eat and enjoy one piece of chocolate and walk away, rather than “obsessing” about it and going back and forth until the entire pack was gone. One said that she now lived “free from the food noise”.
And modern food is so very noisy: it’s everywhere, cheap and delicious. If you drink too much, you can avoid alcohol, if you smoke too much, you can avoid cigarettes. If you avoid food, you die. “The common denominator in all the patients I see is ultra-processed food,” says Dr Saira Hameed is an Endocrinologist at NHS Imperial Weight Centre and the author of The Full Diet.
“I think to correct the path we’re going down we need to do for obesity rates what we did for Covid. Everyone pulled together and made sacrifices in the name of public health because it was an emergency. This is an emergency, too.”
So if people don’t care about Ozempic face, why shouldn’t everyone take it? What is the catch? Why shouldn’t everyone just take it? Here it is, and it’s not a saggy face: semaglutide will not fix a disordered relationship with eating. It will not break a psychological or physical addiction to ultra-processed food, (the real villain here, by the way). It will make you less hungry while you are taking it, but only while you are taking it. In clinical trials, semaglutide patients put back on two thirds of the weight that they had lost, in the year after finishing their course.
Dr Hameed also thinks that with patients using private prescriptions without medical guidance, there might be a potential to not only regain the weight they lost but then put on more. “I have seen patients come off semaglutide and experience really voracious hunger,” she says.
That sort of hormone-driven, off-kilter hunger is overwhelming and “willpower” doesn’t really come into it. In addition, there have been reports that pressure on stocks of Ozempic means pharmacies cannot fill prescriptions for diabetics.
Soaring obesity rates are a public health problem that can’t be fixed with semaglutide alone, and those looking to speed up a pre-summer diet should approach with caution. But it is undeniable that this new golden drug will bring countless people back from the brink of diabetes, heart attacks, strokes and a clutch of cancers. It’s very hard to see the downside in that.
Additional reporting by Eleanor Peake
