What Occurs When Sufferers Cease Weight-Loss Medicines?

On this video, Ania Jastreboff, MD, PhD, a professor at Yale College of Medication and director of weight administration and weight problems prevention at Yale Stress Middle in New Haven, Connecticut, discusses what to anticipate when stopping weight problems medicines like semaglutide (Wegovy).

The next is a transcript of her remarks:

Semaglutide, like different medicines which might be used for weight problems remedy, should be taken long run. Simply as for some other continual illness, if a drugs is stopped for any cause, the illness is not being handled. So, for instance, if someone is taking a drugs for hypertension, when you cease that anti-hypertensive treatment, the blood strain goes up and we’re not shocked.

In the identical approach, if somebody is taking a drugs for weight problems remedy, when it’s stopped, weight acquire happens — or weight regain happens, extra precisely.

Why is that this? Weight problems is a continual illness. It is a neurometabolic illness, that means that our physique and our mind discuss to one another. What occurs is our physique could be very, very good. It needs to hold a certain quantity of gasoline, and the best way that our physique does that is by carrying fats. Our physique doesn’t need to carry too little fats as a result of then we might starve, and our physique additionally does not need to carry an excessive amount of fats as a result of then we might not be capable to do the issues that we have to do and have our physique perform effectively.

So there is a candy spot, and we name that candy spot the “defended fats mass set level.” It is mainly the quantity of gasoline or the quantity of fats that your physique needs to hold.

Now, throughout the context of our present obesogenic surroundings — an surroundings with all of those extremely palatable and extremely processed meals, the shortage of sleep, the shortage of motion and bodily exercise, stress — all these various things in our obesogenic surroundings has pushed up the defended fats mass set level on a inhabitants degree.

What do these medicines like semaglutide do? They lower that defended fats mass set level, and a consequence of that’s that we drop some pounds.

So what occurs when somebody takes an anti-obesity treatment after which stops taking that treatment? For instance they’ve misplaced 40 or 50 kilos and the treatment is stopped. Effectively, what occurs is that the defended fats mass set level goes again up and the load follows.

Throughout the course of our physique eager to regain that weight as a result of the remedy was stopped, sufferers may be very hungry, they’ll have cravings, and mainly their physique is wanting to return as much as that larger defended fats mass set level once more as a result of the remedy was discontinued.

The important thing and the take-home message right here is that in an effort to preserve that decrease or re-regulated defended fats mass set level, the treatment needs to be continued. With the intention to preserve that weight discount, the treatment needs to be continued, and that’s as a result of weight problems is a continual illness. For any continual illness, now we have to deal with it lifelong.