Fasting vs. Weight Loss Drugs Ozempic, Mounjaro, & Wegovy

Taking responsibility for our actions--its something that everyone eventually needs to learn. Weight loss drugs delay the inevitable and make it more difficult later.

Jul 04, 2023

If a gun were put to my head and someone demanded an immediate answer to the question of why I write this Substack, I would blurt out one word:

FREEDOM.

That’s what I want most for my readers.

I see a world that is closing in on us and taking more and more freedom away. It happens so gradually that you might not see it happening until someone snaps his fingers, and you jolt from your trance. But once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

I want you to be on the lookout for something. As you read the news, scroll through websites, watch TV, etc, notice how many ads you see for the new weight loss drugs.

Rumor has it that the drug companies can’t manufacture the new drug semaglutide fast enough to keep up with demand. Semaglutide goes by the name brands Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro.

Bloomberg writes:

The medicines’ success so far puts them on track to be some of the pharma industry’s best-selling drugs, causing supply shortages and forcing Novo to ration starter doses to favor existing users over newcomers. The market for obesity alone could reach $44 billion by 2030, according to Bloomberg Intelligence.1

A moment hardly goes by before I see a new article promoting the stuff. And it is expensive! Wagovy costs $1,627/per month before insurance. Different insurance plans will cover different amounts, but Bloomberg writes that three-quarters of private insurers don’t cover weight loss drugs.2

Welcome to the new slavery.

First, we have a food system overrun with highly processed and addictive items filled high fructose corn syrup and toxic soybean oils that cause rampant obesity. Next, we lab rats are offered pricey prescription drugs to control our body’s reaction to the highly processed junk diet.

I want to give you an example of the kind of news article you can expect to see everywhere as the push for the semaglutide drugs ramps up.

The Washington Post published this article on June 29th: “Whose Fault is Obesity? Most of the Blame Rests with One Culprit” by Tamar Haspel.

The article was so well-written and I so thoroughly agreed with most of it that I felt that I could have written it myself.

Because the article is beyond a paywall, I’ll summarize the main point for you: the food industry is so powerful with its marketing, influence, and positioning of our food choices that everyone is woefully unmatched to withstand it. Most people simply cannot survive this food climate without becoming obese and/or diabetic. This would explain why 1 in 2 Americans is prediabetic, and it is during this “pre” stage that the damage to the body begins (kidney disease, heart damage, high blood pressure, neuropathy, etc.)

Here’s a quote from the article:

Food manufacturers didn't start off trying to make people fat and sick. They just wanted to sell more food; that's their job. But as they got better at it, it became clear that weight gain was a byproduct of that business model. Now, the people who run those companies are caught between their fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value and their social responsibility to not contribute to a large and growing public health problem.
Fiduciary seems to win out, particularly since the food industry doesn't just put the food out there; manufacturers also commission research and fund lobbying arms to make sure consumers are given every reason to eat more of their product. Marion Nestle's books "Food Politics" and "Unsavory Truth" detail how the industry has influenced the government-issued Dietary Guidelines and the body of evidence on the health effects of foods.

So far, so good. I’m reading along and I’m cheering. That’s right WaPo. Tell it like it is.

Then I reach the end of the article.

Which brings us to the new weight-loss drugs. I am optimistic that the safety will pan out, and they will eventually become affordable and accessible for all who want them.
An objection I'm hearing to these drugs is that they don't tackle the root cause of obesity, but I think that's exactly what they do. We've been undone by industrial-strength temptation, and the new meds confer industrial-strength resistance.

Of course. The mainstream media is only willing to admit how corrupt the food industry is in the context of a thinly-veiled ad for big pharma’s new blockbuster drug. Cha-ching.

Bloomberg writes:

Analysts at Jefferies Financial Group Inc. predict that GLP-1s for diabetes and obesity could become the biggest blockbusters of all time, bringing in as much as $150 billion a year globally.3

I can’t but help wondering if journalists get bonuses directly from pharmaceutical companies for such pieces.

Wegovy for Life?

So what is the end game for people who go on these weight loss drugs? Do they stay on them for the rest of their lives? Wagovy was approved by the FDA last year for obesity and Ozempic in 2017. Therefore, there’s not a lot of long term data on weight regain but the short term data doesn’t look good.

This randomized trial of 1961 adults had them take semaglutide for 68 weeks and then stop the drug. The study conclusion found:

One year after withdrawal of once-weekly subcutaneous semaglutide 2.4 mg and lifestyle intervention, participants regained two-thirds of their prior weight loss, with similar changes in cardiometabolic variables. Findings confirm the chronicity of obesity and suggest ongoing treatment is required to maintain improvements in weight and health.

They gained back two thirds of the weight they had lost after stopping the drug!

“The body fights back,” says Gary Wittert, an endocrinologist and professor of medicine at the University of Adelaide. “The drug is only effective as long as you take it.”4

This is the ultimate cash cow for big pharma. One of their most expensive drugs is one that people have to stay on for life.

Perfect. More money flowing to the globalists who own the pharmaceutical companies.

Let’s just pretend that the European Medicines Agency didn’t issue a warning here about the link between semaglutide and thyroid cancer. Presumably, the longer one is on the medication, the higher the risk will be. But how else can one get thin?

How the Drugs Work

When you eat, you release a hormone called glucagon-like peptide 1 or GLP-1. The release of this hormone suppresses hunger. The drug semaglutide mimics GLP-1 by binding to the GLP-1 receptor making your body think you ate. Medical literature refers to semaglutide as a GLP-1 agonist (not to be confused with an antagonist). An agonist is a substance that initiates a physiological response when it binds with a receptor. Because the drug tricks your body into thinking you just ate, it reduces hunger.

A second mechanism causes the stomach to greatly slow its release of food. A close friend of mine who was on the drug had no movement in her digestive tract for seven days and had to quit taking the drug to avoid going to the hospital. Both she and another friend of mine had frequent throwing up while on it. They both stopped.

Fasting vs The Competition

I understand the plight of the person who has tried every diet and then failed. I can see how a miracle skinny drug could sound like the ultimate savior. I’m surprised the pharmaceutical companies took this long to forge it in their caldron since they’ve been trying since modern medicine was founded.

This concoction is so new, the side effects are not fully known, the long term data is not yet in, and the end game is nonexistent. But more than all that, I want people to know that they have another option besides either drugs or counting calories.

It’s an option that actually works.

It does what semaglutide does but it does but without hospitalization.

Fasting reduces your hunger. It gives you freedom from cravings. It allows you to lose weight and regain the health that obesity takes away without you having to feel deprived. After you fast well, you get to eat well, to full satiety, without counting calories, without feeling deprived, without the guilt.

Fasting and feasting is freedom. Drugs are bondage. Processed food is bondage. Sending money to the globalists who own the big food corporations and the pharmaceutical companies is bondage.

Whenever I feel like I’m slipping a little by having eating windows that are too long and more processed food than I know I should, I always remind myself of the bigger picture here.

The bigger picture is that humanity is under attack. Two of our most basic needs are food and medicine. Both of those are being centralized by big industrial complexes that profit from us being sick and fat. I want to opt out of that system in any way I can. I want to keep my money out of the hands of a few billionaires.

A year ago I was on several prescriptions and today I can proudly say I am on ZERO. I haven’t filled my migraine prescription for Imitrex for 6 months. I used to take ibuprofen weekly, bladder pain sometimes daily, meds for upset stomach, and I forget what else. I need none of it now.

And that is what freedom looks like.

I can walk into a grocery store and gladly pass up 95% of the items which didn’t exist 100 years ago and humans never put into their body. I eat eggs, milk, butter, meat, fruits, and vegetables—things that people used to called “food” before the word was appropriated by a thousand industrial food-reminiscient products.

If you listen to Gin Stephen’s 300+ episodes of Intermittent Fasting Stories, you’ll hear the same story over and over again: people who had tried every last diet under the sun and failed. But fasting.

It finally worked for them.

Fasting is so different.

Fasting can finally be the magic change for so many. It can be everything people hope from a drug, but free, permanent, and without the side effects.

Not always right away. There are some false starts and some tweaking to find the right fasting window. But for those who found success, they never want to go back.

I want you to have something that no one can ever take away from you. People on Wagovy say that it took away constant food cravings. I contend that Wagovy has nothing on the clean fast for correcting appetite.

Be an example to those around you that it is possible to take responsibility for your health the free way.

I don’t have the marketing budget of the pharmaceutical companies but I have this old-fashioned idea that truth is its own defender, and if you set it free it will defend itself.

So have a nice long fast, have a nice long feast, throw some pharmaceuticals in the trash,

Leslie

Fast Well | Feast Well

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