The reason I opened Everest Medical Weight Loss was to help patients not only lose weight, but also to keep that weight off. With medications, we can get most patients to lose weight. I wanted to find a way to keep it off. There’s no magic pill that will do that unfortunately. Believe me, I’ve been looking for it. It’s understanding our bodies and understanding obesity. It’s a disease like any other. It can be helped though. Losing weight is so hard because the body keeps setting up road blocks. Your body will become accustomed to a certain weight and when you lose it too fast, your body wants to put it back on. This is called metabolic adaptation. When you eat less, your body’s response is to regulate your hormones to increase hunger and decrease satiety (feeling full). Therefore, you want to eat more. We're constantly battling with ourselves and trying to swim against the waves as seen below.
Combining medications with intermittent fasting and eating foods which make you feel fuller, can be very helpful and trick your body into allowing you to lose the weight and keep it off. Keeping track of calories and increasing our activity will help us to maintain calorie neutral.
There are other ways to overcome this including medications. Obesity is impacted by hormones and can be hormonally treated. Similar to native GLP-1, GLP-1 agonists such as semaglutide, liraglutide, and tirzepatide work in the brain to decrease appetite and thereby reduce food intake. They work by making us feel full and satisfied. We prescribe these medications daily at Everest. Liraglutide is a daily injection while semaglutide is available as a weekly injection or as a pill. I've blogged about semaglutide in January. The newest medication is tirzepatide which was just approved a few months ago. A recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed that after almost a year and a half, the participants lost on average of:
5 pounds on the placebo
35 pounds on the lowest dose of tirzepatide (5 milligrams)
49 pounds on the medium dose (10 milligrams) and
52 pounds on the highest dose (15 milligrams)
The results are comparable to those doctors see with gastric bypass surgery and higher than what has been observed with other drugs currently available on the market to treat obesity.
We want to help you get there! Call us and we will get you on the right path at 814-283-4655