Is Ozempic an Artificial Solution to an Artificial Problem?

In case you’ve been on the moon for the last few years, Ozempic is a drug used successfully in the treatment of diabetes (although in a much smaller half size dose). It’s manufactured by a Danish drug company called Nova Nordisk and is now being touted as the game changer in obesity and weight loss. 

The purpose of this article is not to encourage you to take or not take Ozempic but to inform you of all the relevant data (which you won’t find easily) so you can make an informed choice. We completely understand that when you are suffering, any solution can seem enticing, but the old adage still rings true: if something seems too good to be true, it usually is…

BodySlims Initial Take on Using Ozempic

At BodySlims, we like to help people, and we do believe this drug can help certain people but we believe these people to be a tiny percentage of the population. These are people who, through a natural chemical imbalance, are unable to experience satiety, and so feel hungry all the time. This normally presents as a problem in very early childhood and continues throughout the person's life. This drug can be a game changer for them and, for that, we welcome it. 

Nova Nordisk Seeing the Potential

However, that tiny percentage of the population is not what fuelled Nova Nordisk to become the richest company in Europe virtually overnight. This company was previously modestly successful but to suddenly have surpassed all the gigantic European multinational corporations is strange. Stranger still, when we realise this has nothing to do with previous years' balance sheets or trading figures but rather down to just potential - the potential to have every person with a weight issue using their drug. One country that is particularly appealing to them is the USA, the richest economy in the world with one of the highest rates of obesity at 42%. 

Classifying Obesity as a Disease

So, what’s behind Nordisks’ staggering share price numbers? In 2013, the American Medical Association recognised obesity as a disease with other health departments around the world following suit. It’s important to say at this juncture that huge numbers of physicians firmly disagree with this labelling, but this designation is important because, being prescribed as a disease means it can be prescribed for. And the manufacturing and prescribing of this drug has been described as the next great gold rush…

Is Obesity Really a Disease? 

Obesity is a rather crude tool for measuring overweight. Basically, it’s height over weight to create a number, and that’s your Body Mass Index (BMI). Generally, anyone with a BMI of 30 or over is classified as obese, so they have a disease, but at 29.5, do you not? 

It also takes no count of muscle to fat ratio in your body, so many of the fittest athletes you may admire are actually classified as obese. It does have a place as a rule of thumb, but using it for classifying a disease is borderline laughable. 

When most of us think of a disease, we may think of viruses such as COVID-19 or bacteria-induced disease, but there are other diseases such as cancer, which we can’t catch but are intrinsic within our own bodies. Indeed, when we look back at ancient skeletal remains, we can find traces of cancer in some bones. In other words, these intrinsic diseases don’t just develop overnight or suddenly spread within the population overnight. 

How Obesity is Actually an Artificial Problem, Not a Disease

1. Obesity’s Reluctance to Travel

This “disease” has shown a great reluctance to travel. In the USA in 2024, over 42% of the population is classified as obese. In Japan, a similarly rich economy with high living standards, there is a 3.6% obesity rate. Allowing that the USA is made up of a lot of migrants, let’s look at some other examples. We all know of a great many Italian Americans, but in Italy, the obesity rate is 10.4%, while in Germany, one of the largest contributors to the US population, the rate is 19%, less than half that of the USA. Just across the border in Canada, the rate is 26.7%. So, how can obesity be a disease if it doesn't migrate with the migrants? 

2. Obesity Being Classed as a Disease for Funding Treatment

We also have to realise that this designation as a disease was done based on the symptom (overeating) rather than any real cause. Which is kind of like designating a cough as a disease rather than Covid! Despite a decade of providing massive funding to researchers at some of the world's leading universities and medical centres, no actual biological causal findings were made to support obesity being classified as a disease. In the UK in 2019, the Royal College of Physicians designated obesity as a disease, describing their reasoning as being based on getting funding to treat obesity.

3.  Replacing Fat with Sugar Caused the Acceleration of the Obesity Crisis

Remember,  obesity isn’t like COVID-19; it’s not communicable from person to person. So, how might we best explain the below graph? 

This all may seem like a very philosophical discussion, but it’s anything but. Even the least enquiring mind looking at the above graph may ask the rudimentary question: What else happened in the 1980s that could have played a part? We’re glad you asked because what the world is being asked to do is pretend this didn’t happen. 

During the 70s, we saw the mass production of processed foods, and they started to become a part of our daily diets. This had been made possible (and impossibly cheap) by removing fats from the food and replacing them with sugars. Now it’s true to say in previous years people had been eating too much of the wrong types of fats in their diet but, rather than try to change to healthy fats, we went the route of low fat or no fat and we loaded sugars into everything and processed them to produce foods. 

The Sugar Effect 

This is where it gets really silly. This was marketed as healthy food on the basis that a gram of sugar has fewer calories than a gram of fat. So it’s numerically lower in terms of calories, but there’s a problem here: unlike fat, which is a good fuel for our bodies, we were never meant to be eating sugar like this. Sugar is a quick-release fuel, and when you eat it, your body has only two choices: 

1. You must immediately burn it, which would mean after eating your slice of pizza, you go out and run for about a mile; otherwise, your blood sugar rises, and your body recognises this as a danger (too much sugar in the blood would see you lapse into a diabetic coma) and so releases insulin to lower your blood sugar level. 

2. It converts it to body fat; it has no other choice. And this is not a fuel you can easily access later as your body is very resistant to burning from your fat stores. In fact, getting your body to burn its own body fat is no easy task. This is why, although you may be eating plenty of calories, you constantly feel tired; you’re loading up on the wrong fuel. This has been likened to putting diesel in a petrol car and expecting it to perform. As if this wasn’t tricky enough, when the insulin has worked its magic, and your blood sugar level starts to fall as it’s stored in your fat stores, it creates cravings for you to have more. For the food companies, this is the gift that just keeps on giving! 

The Destroyed Food Pyramid 

So, how come no one but us knew about this? A great question, the answer to which might surprise you. Back in the 80s, when that graph started to rise in correlation to this new processed diet, American physicians petitioned the US Department of Agriculture (which controls this area) to do something, and they did. They brought in Louise Light, an academic, practitioner and the foremost nutritionist of the day, and asked her to work with the best minds in the field to produce guidelines for what they should be eating to try to stop this. Luise Light and her team worked diligently and produced a guide called The Food Pyramid. 

Had this been adopted as presented, we would not have the problems we have today, but the Department of Agriculture showed it to their lobbyist donors: big food, big drinks, big dairy, etc, and they didn’t like it. It would have reduced profits hugely in the original format, so they took their red pens to it. Foods that had been at the top, like grains, processed crackers, and cereals, became the base of the pyramid, suggesting that you eat up to 11 portions a day. It was as if they turned the pyramid upside down. When they showed Light the revised version, she was horrified and predicted this wouldn’t make matters better but worse. Objections ignored, the revised food pyramid was promoted as optimal health by every hospital, medical practice, and doctor. It’s worth noting at this point that at the upper end of the medical profession, many of the specialists who were pushing for obesity to be labelled a disease and proclaiming this wonder drug as a saviour are the very same people who were telling us all to use the food pyramid. It’s true to say that in this area the only thing they have been consistent with is being wrong. 

4. US Obesity as a Disease Supporters Skewed Results 

So, jumping forward in time to 2024, the average American diet is 80% processed foods, which is pretty much the highest in the world, alongside the obesity rate. But reading the early snippets of the report of 31st May 2024, this is not what the US Dietary Guideline Advisory Committee (DGAC) found. Apparently, they could find no link between obesity and processed foods (it’s worth pointing out here that a new term called ultra-processed foods is now being introduced, causing even more confusion for people. But this is a term no one can even agree what constitutes it, like cooking is processing a food? For simplicity's sake, we will ignore the term in this article) They claimed all the very many independent reports - which clearly showed the correlation - were biased. 

And so, to the sleight of hand by the DGAC (along with the processed vs ultra-processed confusion), they only looked at reports as far back as the 90s, conveniently ignoring the 80s, the decade in which the real change happened and was the start of the ski slope in the obesity graph. This meant the baseline comparison would not involve the decade in which the jump came about but rather from the decades when the numbers were already high, so the difference between the decades could be minimised. 

Over in the UK, a well-known doctor, Chris Van Tulleken, who’s worked with the BBC TV channel on many health programmes in 2021, decided to test the average American diet himself under medical supervision for the BBC's “What are we feeding our kids” TV programme. His normal diet was analysed and he was found to have a more European processed food intake of 30% of his diet. For one month, he switched to the 80% American processed food consumption, and the results were staggering. Within just one month, he had gained 14lbs. He also reported poor sleep, heartburn, unhappy feelings, anxiety, sluggishness, and a low libido. He also had piles from constipation. “I felt ten years older”, he says, but “didn’t realise it was all [because of] the food until I stopped eating the diet”.

So what we can be sure of is this: we changed our diet to this processed food, it was cheaper, people started to eat more of it, and obesity levels rose in direct correlation with the percentage of the national diet made up of processed foods. In other words, we created an artificial diet that caused major weight gain. And now we have designated the sum of this weight gain as obesity as a disease, so we can be prescribed an artificial drug to deal with our artificial diet; you couldn’t make this stuff up really again. It would be funny, except it’s true. 

5. Thirst’s Effect on Obesity is Ignored

So, if rampant hunger is being touted as the problem causing obesity, can we ask a question? What about thirst? In the early days of BodySlims, we reached out to a number of people who had booked to come on a programme. We asked them to record their daily calorie intake before starting, and we were startled to find that over 50% of calorie consumption was coming in liquid form. From the fruit juices in the morning to the coffees (a mocha Frappuccino, as an example, has over 500 calories), of which people often had two or three, to the cans of coke and other soft drinks right through to that very full glass of wine or a couple of beers in the evening to unwind. Think of it like this: if you consumed a diet only made up of beer, while you would be consuming many calories, you would ultimately die of starvation. These are known as bankrupt or empty calories as they provide little to no nutrition, but as sugars, they will add endlessly to your fat stores. While our study wasn’t scientific, it certainly raises a huge amount of doubt about hunger being the root cause of this problem and the answer being an appetite suppressant. 

Does Ozempic Work for Everybody? 

And so onto Ozempic. First, it’s important to note that Ozempic doesn’t work for everybody. These figures are very approximate as we have yet to see long-term results of Ozempic (because we have no long-term studies on this dosage) when used by large numbers of people, but so far, the estimates are it doesn’t work at all for between 15-30% of the population. About 30% of people will suffer quite extreme side effects, including tiredness, nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea or constipation. So, for a large group of people, it won’t work at all, and for another large group, it will have side effects that may, depending on the person, prevent them from using it. 

How Does Ozempic Work?

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, in a half dose, this drug has worked well with diabetics for controlling their diabetes. However, when the dose is doubled, it’s now being championed as a wonder drug for weight loss. So, let’s have a little look at what it actually does. 

1. Ozempic Reduces the Hunger Hormone

Ozempic essentially mimics a naturally occurring hormone that tells your brain you’re full. So, basically, it’s an appetite or hunger suppressant. 

At this juncture, it's a valid question to ask: were you eating too much because you were actually hungry? When people are hungry, they’d eat pretty much anything they were given, but if you’re sitting on the couch watching TV and decide you want something, it’s unlikely you’d be happy with a fish and cabbage (if you were truly hungry you would). Rather, you’re eating to enjoy the taste, which is less about hunger and far more about the pleasure chemical dopamine. 

2. Ozempic Treats the Symptom, not the Underlying Cause 

So your first point of call should be to define why you’re overeating; is it hunger with an inability to feel full (in which case Ozempic may be helpful), or is it habitual behaviour of enjoying the taste of certain foods like sweets, chocolate, biscuits or cracker and cheese? If it’s the latter you should give serious thought to the route of your problem. Ozempic does not distinguish between the two; in other words, it does not address your underlying problem, only the symptom (overeating). If you lose weight, you will still have the underlying cause unaddressed, which will mean a lifetime on Ozempic. 

3. You Still Need Exercise and a Diet Low in Processed Foods

Where it gets really funny is we’re told Ozempic works best with a diet low in processed foods and with increased exercise (seriously, again, you couldn’t make this up). Are we really to believe that someone with a reluctance (without taking an appetite suppressant drug) to eating healthy, natural foods like fruit and vegetables now with a lower appetite will suddenly find themselves willing to eat the foods they previously avoided? It simply makes no sense.

4. Ozempic Causes Decreased Body Muscle —> Ozempic Face

Ozempic face is one of the most commonly searched-for terms relating to Ozempic, and most people will have seen the pictures. But what’s behind that? The answer is muscle. Our bodies were designed for a time when we were hunter-gatherers. We had to be able to survive famines and times of severe food shortage. So, the body has mechanisms designed to keep you alive. In times of shortage, your body will cannibalise its own body muscle, the reason being unlike fat, your body muscle requires calories on a daily basis to keep it intact. So to your body, it makes sense to reduce this calorie-consuming muscle and use those calories to keep your essential organs working. A good example of this is the pictures of people after a famine when those poor, unfortunate people appear to be little more than skin and bone. 

When we see these Ozempic faces, what we are seeing is a reduction in the normal facial muscle which previously held our face in place. This is similar to the process used in facelifts as we age, the muscle becomes weaker naturally, and so the face starts to drop; some people opt to have a facelift so the stitches can now do the job the muscle once did. 

This muscle loss will be going on all over the body and it’s extremely difficult to replace that body muscle once it's gone. Again, figures on this are approximations as we have no actual data for long-term use yet, but the initial findings suggest that using Ozempic creates a somewhere between a 50/50 ratio of body fat to body muscle, up to a 25/75 percent - the 75%, unfortunately, being body muscle. 

The only way to minimise this effect on the body is to exercise on a daily basis. This need to move as our body perceives it stops us from entering this survival state. The body becomes reluctant to burn your body muscle as you are using it constantly, maybe to walk to an area where food is more plentiful. The mere idea that someone who’s obese and has an aversion to exercise is now, when taking Ozempic (one of the major side effects being tiredness), more likely to engage in daily exercise is again frankly laughable. 

5. Ozempic Promises a 15% Drop in Starting Bodyweight  

Ozempic’s big claim, when it does work, is to lose 15% of your starting body weight within three months. In the BodySlims programme, all our starting clients are given a goal of 10% weight loss over ten weeks. BUT over 80% of our participants reach or surpass that. When you factor in many of our customer base return to the programme having lost weight previously with us, and using the course to support themselves in maintaining their new weight, the number would be even higher. So the wonder numbers being attributed to Ozempic are not actually that wonderful but rather the same as other weight loss programmes already out there when used over the same time scale. 

6. Ozempic Affects Our Serotonin  

One area in which no study has been conducted is Ozempic's effect on our gut chemicals, particularly its impact on serotonin production. If you’ve ever been on an antidepressant medication, it’s likely caused by an inability to produce enough serotonin. It may be genetic, your body just doesn’t naturally produce enough, or it may be episodical, related to an event like the death of a family member, a breakup or the loss of a job. If it was one of these, you can probably clearly remember your first feeling on hearing the news: your gut tightened your stomach felt like it was cramping up. Now, serotonin is essential to all humans for us to be happy, and 90% of our serotonin is manufactured in the gut. Interfering in any way with this mechanism is dangerous in terms of mental illness, and anyone who has ever suffered from depression will attest to just how debilitating this awful illness can be. So we are now faced with the very real prospect of humans eating an artificial diet which leads them to obesity, taking an artificial drug to try to stop them eating. And if they suffer depression as a result of taking the Ozempic, we’ll be prescribed an antidepressant drug. We now entering the territory of the woman who ate the fly, then ate the spider to kill the fly, then ate the bird to kill the spider. We really need to wake up here. 

7. Ozempic Turns a Three-Month Trial Period into a Reliance 

The last point about Ozempic is this: For many years, big pharma has been trying to own this area. Along with some medics, there has been a rush to suggest obesity is not your fault (a sentiment we agree with; it’s squarely the fault of the processed food industry, those who supported it, and all the governments too weak to be honest about the greatest fraud ever perpetrated on humanity) but this is not the take of these medics and pharma corps. No, they say you have a disease, that you are a victim of this disease and that you yourself will not be able to do anything about this. You need to be prescribed a drug to give you an aversion to food artificially. In other words, they disempower you, saying you can’t but buy our product because we can solve this for you. So, your appetite has been artificially suppressed. Imagine you lose the weight, what are you going to do now?  What new skill have you learned? The answer is nothing, and you’ll go right back to the behaviour you engaged in previously. You’ll put the weight back on, and you’ll be back on Ozempic. 

“I need my drug” -  this is not the first time this has been done, as the current court cases relating to the opioid epidemic in the USA attest to. It’s also worth noting that although the initial suggestion was for Ozempic to be taken for a 3-month period, there is now a rush for studies based on long-term usage, the idea seeming to be that people will stay on this drug for life. This disempowerment of people is a dangerous step psychologically, as, soon, we will have a generation convinced they can’t lose weight without a drug because they have a ‘disease’. In contrast, when someone does the BodySlims programme, it empowers them. We are guides at best; they do the work, they come through for themselves, and if they can do this, what else can they do that they previously thought impossible? 

Ozempic Key Takeaway 

To conclude, Ozempic can be an amazing drug for those who have a genetic inability to feel satiety and are always hungry. For that, we welcome it. For the rest of the population, we only seek and share the above to inform you of the facts that you won’t get easily or on any labels. 

But the real point of this long article is that you shouldn’t take our word for it either. Do your own research on the points we’ve mentioned and inform yourself to the point of making the best decision in your own long-term interest. We understand just how inviting Ozempic may seem; it’s easy, you may think. But how many of the good things in your life came easy? Your education, your degree, your career? Having children may be the highlight of most of our lives, but few would suggest the birthing process or, indeed, the sleepless nights as being easy, but the result is the best moments of our lives. When something seems to be too good to be true, it usually is too good to be true. You’ve probably already experienced this to your cost. If you’re still reading this article, at least a part of you already has your natural warning alarm going off. 

Try the BodySlims Programme, a Natural Solution, First

At BodySlims, we have sincere respect for the medics, but not each and every one of them. The medical profession is a reflection of society at large and includes the good, the bad and the ugly, as all professions do. Some of the people who should have been safeguarding our health sold us out and were complicit in creating a health disaster in the form of obesity. Those self-same people are now telling us Ozempic is the answer - which brings to mind the old saying: ‘The sheep spend their entire lives being afraid of the wolf only to be eaten by the Shepard’.

We only suggest that before you take the artificial solution for an artificial problem, try our programme. Dare to dream with us; you have nothing to lose other than the cost of the programme and a few pounds. But whatever you choose to do, we totally respect that and offer you our sincerest best wishes, whatever route you decide would be best for you!