I’ve now been on Zepbound for 70 weeks, and I was just looking over my notes on my progress over that time.1 For the first 35 weeks, I was losing about a pound a week and without thinking about it much. I didn’t exercise or diet more than usual (though I did and still do exercise and watch what I eat); I just wasn’t as hungry and so I didn’t eat as much.
Since week 35 (which was September 2024), I’ve lost just shy of eight more pounds– about 3 more pounds since the last time I wrote here about this— for a total of around 42-43 pounds. So on the one hand, I haven’t completely plateaued in my weight loss progress, and at least I am still heading in the right direction. Plus even with the stall, I’m still a lot less fat (and more healthy) than I was before I lost the weight– and at least I haven’t gained it back (yet). On the other hand, I ain’t going to get to my goal, which means losing about another 17-20 pounds, with Zepbound alone.
Obviously, that means I need to start doing something closer to acutally dieting and exercising more– or at least I need to shake up the routine/rut, and I’ll be doing that for the next month. Annette and I are going on a month long trip through Europe starting next week as part of a celebration of our 31st wedding anniversary, a trip that was delayed by a year because we decided to buy a new house. I won’t be dieting, and because it will not be easy to refrigerate Zepbound as we go from place to place, I’ll have to skip a week of dosing at the end of the trip.2 Still, I’m not worried because on trips like this that involve a lot of walking around, I almost never gain weight.
But enough about me (or just me). There’s been some interesting Zepbound news in the last couple of months. A few highlights:
- Access to Zepbound and similar weight loss drugs remains a significant problem. There was an article about this in The New York Times back in December, and how several other state’s biggest insurers have cut back on coverage. My insurance still covers it, but they have added additional hoops I need to jump through for me to get the drugs.
- One of the other ways that access has been reduced is new restrictions of compound pharmacy and other “knock-off” versions of these drugs. Basically, because these drugs are no longer in short supply from manufacturers, companies that make their own version of Zepbound (and there are a lot of companies like this) can no longer sell their own versions. The drug manufacturers and companies like Ro have been making deals to make the drugs a little less expensive, but they’re still expensive. I’m just happy that I don’t have to decide if it would be worth the $700 or so it would cost me a month out of pocket (and honestly, it might be).
- Still, there’s a lot of optimism about the near future of these drugs. Eli Lilly Chief Scientific Officer Dan Skovronsky gave an interview on CNBC where he talked about a daily pill as effective as a weekly injection will be available soon (maybe by the end of the year), stronger versions of these drugs, and also using these drugs for lots of stuff besides weight loss specifically: heart disease, sleep apnea, and maybe other things like addiction. Sure, this guy is trying to sell Eli Lilly drugs, but there are a lot of articles out there reporting similar things.
- Just a few days ago, there was this article in The New York Times, “Group Dining on Ozempic? It’s Complicated,” which is about the social etiquette of being on a GLP-1 drug and out to eat with others where you don’t eat that much. I am obviously not shy about the fact that I’m taking Zepbound, so when I’m eating with others at a restaurant or at a dinner party, I just tell people it’s the drugs. Annette and I went to a breakfast diner place in Detroit in April, and I ordered what turned out to be an enormous skillet of eggs, hash browns, sausage, and peppers and onions. It was delicious, but I could barely eat half. When the waitress came away to clear our plates, she seemed concerned that I might not have liked it. “No, it’s great– it’s just I’m taking one of those weight loss drugs and I can’t eat more.” “Oh yeah?” she said. “How’s it going? I have a cousin of mine who is on one of those things and has last 50 pounds.” So at least she understood.
- And then there was the recent news that Weight Watchers (aka WW International) was going bankrupt largely as a result of people shifting to drug alternatives instead. I saw this op-ed in The New York Times on the mixed messages of Weight Watchers, “Weight Watchers Got One Thing Very Right” by Jennifer Weiner. On the one hand, Weiner points out a lot of the dieting culture promoted by Weight Watchers was harmful. A lot of mothers took their slightly overweight but still growing/developing daughters to Weight Watchers too early, and a lot of their customers never succeeded and yet kept coming back, “stuck in a cycle of loss, regain and shame that didn’t ultimately leave them any thinner, even as it fattened Weight Watchers’ coffers.” On the other hand, Weiner says Weight Watchers provided its customers– especially women– a sense of community at what were (pre-Covid, of course) regular meetings. They were safe “third spaces,” a gathering that was one of the “all-too-rare places in America where conservatives and progressives found themselves sitting side by side, commiserating about the same plateaus or the same frustrations or the same annoyance that the power that be had changed the point value of avocados, again.”
I’ve written about this before, but I actually was Weight Watchers member and attended meetings (with my wife) for about three years in I believe the early 2010s. The regular meeting we attended was similar to what Weiner describes. It was at a WW storefront center in a strip mall located right next to a Chinese restaurant. Whenever I went, I always peed right before weighing in, anxious to cut every possible ounce. Then there’d be a meeting that lasted anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes where people “shared,” and where the leader (in our case, a gay man named Robert) led us through some lesson, mostly built upon stories of his own weight loss he’d repeat over and over. I was not the only man to attend these meetings, but yes, mostly women. Annette and I attended regularly enough to know most of the other “regulars,” and to also spot folks who would show up once or twice and never again. I do not remember any discussions about exercise, or really any other weight loss advice that went beyond “eat less.” In those three years, my weight did not change, and I never felt the sense of belonging to a community. It felt pretty hopeless by the end. So yeah, I don’t feel too badly about the demise of WW.
- As part of my journaling practices, I write down my weight for the morning and I also have a part where I track my weight on the days where I take Zepbound. ↩︎
- Zepbound needs to be stored in the fridge, but it can be kept at room temperature for up to 21 days. So I’ll have to skip one dose in the last week we’re gone and then I’ll be able to return to normal when we get back. That’s a good thing because if I miss two weeks, I need to start over on Zepbound with the lowest dose, and as far as I can tell from my limited internet research, people who restart with Zepbound often don’t have the same level of success the second time around. ↩︎