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With weight loss injectables like Ozempic and Mounjaro taking the world by storm, the diet industry is being left in the dust.
In interviews with the Daily Mail, weight loss experts say that this new class of drugs known as GLP-1s, which mimic the body’s feeling of satiety, have utterly changed the diet game — and a major part of that shift is that the drugs are chipping away at the narrative that losing weight is primarily a feat of willpower, with all the moral baggage that view carries.
Take, for instance, the experience of obesity thought leader Sarah Le Brocq. Aside from working with England’s National Health Service and starting her own advocacy group, All About Obesity, Le Brocq has tried every fad diet under the Sun — and says that Wegovy, Ozempic’s sister drug made by Novo Nordisk explicitly for weight loss, is the only thing that’s really worked.
“I’ve tried WeightWatchers, Slimming World, LighterLife, The Cambridge Diet, Atkins, and various juice cleanses,” she told the newspaper. “It’s been a lifetime spent looking for that magic bullet.”
“Due to my own experience with weight loss and gain, I’ve studied obesity in-depth,” Le Brocq continued. “You can’t ‘[behavioral] change’ your way out of it; you need to look at the physiological response in the body, and that’s what these drugs do.”
As with many others who’ve taken GLP-1s, the obesity expert discovered when she began taking Wegovy that she no longer experienced hunger in the same way — and she believes that that difference may be the beginning of the end for the other weight loss schemes she’s tried before.
“The other diets make you feel you are missing out,” Le Brocq said. “I don’t feel like that on Wegovy. I eat what I want but way less.”
While organizations like WeightWatchers advertise a “social aspect” that helps people feel connected to others on their body change journeys, the physiological and psychological differences offered by GLP-1s are often too tempting to resist.
“When it comes to people who have a [body mass index] of 30 or above — meaning they’re obese — then, yes, I think they’ll turn their back on the traditional diet industry,” the expert told the Mail. “The drugs make far more sense than [programs] that can never work long-term for them.”
Indeed, it seems that WeightWatchers is responding to the writing on the wall after Oprah resigned from its board earlier this year in the wake of her own embracing of weight loss injectables.
In a striking reveral, WeightWatchers itself is now offering its own GLP-1 program that provides a compounded version of semaglutide, the active GLP-1 in Ozempic and Wegovy. Although it’s far from the first company to do so, it’s a sea change for the organization that until recently was the most well-known diet firm in the biz.
Even the UK-based Slimming World, a WeightWatchers competitor that Le Brocq previously tried, is admitting just how different things are now that GLP-1s have taken their market by storm.
“We have complete confidence in our tried, trusted, evidence-based methods,” Carolyn Pallister, a registered dietician and the company’s head of research and nutrition, told the website. “We also [recognize] that the new generation of drugs are an important innovation within the weight management industry.”
At this point, it’s impossible to ignore how much these drugs have changed the diet industry — and, perhaps, the way they are revolutionizing the medical world.
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