Research Suggests GLP-1 Drugs Could Be for the Long Haul

Last month, the World Health Organization updated its guidelines for GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy. Among the guidelines were several conditional recommendations, as well as a perspective that took the long view, temporally speaking. “Our new guidance recognizes that obesity is a chronic disease that can be treated with comprehensive and lifelong care,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the organization’s Director-General, said in a statement.

That “lifelong” isn’t said lightly. As Dani Blum noted in a recent New York Times article, a growing amount of medical research suggests that if you’re taking GLP-1 drugs now, you’re going to be in it for the long haul lest you risk regaining some or all of the weight that you lost along the way.

There’s already been some anecdotal evidence of this — including, as Blum points out, Oprah Winfrey’s comments about her own GLP-1 usage. But now there’s also research that backs the idea that GLP-1 medication may be a lifelong committment. The authors of a paper published earlier this month in The BMJ explored the effects of people who had been on weight management medication (WMM) stopping its use.

What did they discover? That “that cessation of WMM is followed by rapid weight regain and reversal of beneficial effects on cardiometabolic markers.”

A New Study Explored the Pros and Cons of Drugs Like Ozempic

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This doesn’t mean that stopping the intake of a GLP-1 medication automatically means regaining lost weight — but it does suggest that people planning to do so should have a plan for doing so, and have an idea of how they plan to keep their lost weight off. There may soon be other factors at play here — including GLP-1 drugs that can be ingested rather than injected — but for now, as with anything relating to your health, it’s useful to take multiple factors into consideration.

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Tobias Carroll

Tobias Carroll lives and writes in New York City, and has been covering a wide variety of subjects — including (but not limited to) books, soccer and drinks — for many years. His writing has been published by the likes of the Los Angeles Times, Pitchfork, Literary Hub, Vulture, Punch, the New York Times and Men’s Journal. At InsideHook, he has…