This article was first published on April 6, 2023, and was last updated on August 26, 2026.
GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs cause fat and muscle loss, premature aging in your face, and increase your risk for a number of serious health problems, including blindness, autoimmune diseases, stomach paralysis, anemia, and possibly cancer. And multiple studies have found that most of the weight comes back after you stop taking the drug.
GLP-1 drugs include semaglutide (Ozempic, Rybelsus, Wegovy), tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound), dulaglutide (Trulicity, Victoza), liraglutide (Saxenda).
I first heard about Ozempic from a TV personality who messaged me privately to ask my opinion. She said, “Everyone in LA is taking these $1000 a month shots for weight loss.” I had no idea what she was talking about, so I started researching, and what I learned was alarming.
Ozempic is approved for type 2 diabetics. Wegovy is approved for people who are overweight. Both drugs, along with the oral version Rybelsus, are owned by the same Danish drug company: Novo Nordisk.
Do semaglutide injections cause healthy weight loss?
There was a double-blind placebo-controlled trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine in October 2021 in which 1961 obese adults, mostly women, who were not diabetic, and who weighed an average of 232 lbs, were given weekly injections of semaglutide or a placebo for 68 weeks. That’s one year and four months. Both groups also received instructions for a reduced-calorie meal plan and increased physical activity.
7% of patients left the study due to the drug side effects.
The average change was a 12.4% loss of body weight (about 29 lbs) after 68 weeks of injections, compared with the placebo group. Some people lost more. Some lost less, but the average semaglutide user lost less than half a pound per week, which is easily achievable with diet and lifestyle changes.
And guess who funded the study… Novo Nordisk.
It’s worth mentioning that at the end of the study, almost a third of participants who received placebo injections had lost at least 5% of their baseline body weight, 12% of them lost 10% of their weight, and…
5% of the placebo group lost 15% of their body weight, more than the average Ozempic user, just from following the diet and lifestyle recommendations!
But it wasn’t just fat loss…
In semaglutide’s primary clinical trial. Participants lost an average of 10.4% of their fat mass and 6.9% of their lean body mass. Semaglutide causes fat and muscle loss. And apparently, the rapid facial fat loss among semaglutide users is making them look significantly older. The term to describe this, coined by dermatologists, is “Ozempic face.” Dermatologists are also reporting that many more patients are coming in for facial fillers after taking weight-loss injections.
So what happens after you stop taking this appetite-suppressing drug?
Your appetite comes back, you eat more, and you gain the weight back. That’s what happened in two different studies. Look at this chart from the Wegovy website:
As you can see, patients who received placebo injections after 20 weeks of Wegovy regained almost all the weight they had lost by the end of the trial. Notice the marketing spin in the headline above, “People who kept taking Wegovy continued to lose weight.” Novo Nordisk wants you to keep taking Wegovy forever.
A 2022 study found that one year after stopping weekly semaglutide injections, participants regained two-thirds of their lost weight.
A 2026 Cambridge study reported that 3,200 patients across six randomized controlled trials rapidly regained 60% of the weight they lost within one year of stopping GLP-1 drugs.
According to researchers interviewed for the Cambridge article, “The drugs may also affect the body long-term, altering hormone levels and ‘resetting’ the brain’s appetite control mechanisms.” And not in good ways.
60 Minutes Paid to Pimp the Drug
On January 1st, 2023, 60 Minutes aired a 13-minute story on Wegovy. In the piece, Wegovy is described as “safe,” “highly effective,” “impressive,” and “fabulous.” But there was no mention of the risks and side effects. Turns out, CBS received advertising payments from Novo Nordisk, and all the doctors and experts in the segment were paid by Novo Nordisk.
CBS posted four additional 60 Minutes After Hours segments about Wegovy on their website. Because of this blatantly obvious paid drug promotion masquerading as a news story, Dr. Neal Barnard and the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine filed a complaint with the FDA because this was not an unbiased news story; it was an advertisement and violates the fair balance requirement for drug ads, where you have to list the side effects.
The Physicians Committee also reported that Novo Nordisk’s PAC paid over $250,000 in campaign contributions to members of Congress in an effort to persuade them to pass legislation requiring the U.S. government to pay for Wegovy prescriptions at $1,300 per person per month.
Now let’s talk about the side effects
Semaglutide drugs Ozempic, Wegovy, and Rybelsus all have the same disclosure. The following is copied directly from the Wegovy website:
Wegovy® may cause serious side effects, including:
- Possible thyroid tumors, including cancer. In studies with rodents, Wegovy® and medicines that work like Wegovy® caused thyroid tumors, including thyroid cancer. It is not known if Wegovy® will cause thyroid tumors or a type of thyroid cancer called medullary thyroid carcinoma (MTC) in people.
Wegovy® may cause serious side effects, including:
- inflammation of your pancreas (pancreatitis).
- gallbladder problems, including gallstones.
- increased risk of low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) in patients with type 2 diabetes, especially those who also take medicines for type 2 diabetes. This can be both a serious and common side effect.
- kidney problems (kidney failure).
- serious allergic reactions.
- change in vision in people with type 2 diabetes.
- increased heart rate.
- depression or thoughts of suicide.
The most common side effects of Wegovy may include nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, constipation, stomach (abdomen) pain, headache, fatigue, upset stomach, dizziness, feeling bloated, belching, gas, stomach flu, heartburn, and runny nose or sore throat.
[End Quote]
More side effects discovered…
A 2 million person study published in Nature Medicine in January 2024 reported arthritis and gastroparesis, which is painful stomach paralysis.
GLp-1 drugs linked to increased risk of sudden blindness
A 2024 study published in JAMA suggests that type 2 diabetic patients taking semaglutide three years had over four times the risk of Nonarteric Anterior Ischemic Optic Neuropathy (NAION). NAION is a “eye stroke” that can cause partial or permanent blindness. The study also found that overweight or obese patients taking semaglutide had over a seven times higher risk of NAION than patients taking other diabetes medications.
GLP-1 drugs linked to increased risk of autoimmune diseases
A 2025 study of 290,000 patients taking GLP-1 drugs found they had a 30% higher risk for Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, a 30% higher risk for ankylosing sponditis (arthritis of the spine), a 17% higher risk of psoriasis, 11% higher risk of ulcerative colitis, and an 8% higher risk of rheumatoid arthritis when compared to another group of 290,000 patients taking a differnt type of diabetes drug, DPP-4 inhibitors.
GLP-1 drugs slow stomach emptying which can result in a bezoar, which is ball of undigested food that stays in the stomach, Symptoms of a bezoar include nausea, vomiting, stomach pain, feeling full quickly, and a lack of appetite. A bezoar can become a life-threatening blockage in the stomach or small bowel.
If the risk of cancer and all of those other serious side effects, and the fact that patients gained most of the weight back after they stopped GLP-1 drugs, isn’t enough to make you think twice about taking them, here’s a quick history lesson for perspective.
Dangerous weight loss drugs of yesteryear
The FDA approved a weight loss drug called Belviq (Loarcaserin) in 2012. That drug was eventually recalled because it increased the risk of pancreatic, lung, and colon cancer. Guess how long Belviq was on the market before they figured this out?
8 years!
Tens of thousands of people took Belviq, and countless people were harmed. Meanwhile, the drug company made around $50 million a year from Belviq and kept all the profit after it was deemed unsafe and taken off the market. Lawsuits are underway.
Weight loss drug Meridia (Sibutramine) was approved in 1997 and pulled off the market for increasing cardiovascular risks, heart attack, and stroke. Guess how long Meridia was prescribed before they figured this out?
13 years!
If you take a new drug with no long-term safety testing, you are paying to be part of an experiment that may cause you considerable harm inthe future.
Don’t be seduced by the drug industry’s quick-fix, magic-bullet, miracle-cure marketing. Quick fixes usually often come with long-term consequences. But the good news is you can lose excess weight, dramatically improve your health, and reverse chronic diseases by just changing your daily diet and lifestyle routine. If you’re ready to take contol of your life and your health, I would like to invite you to join the Square One Program and our incredible holistic healing support community.
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I created a coaching program and a private online support community to help you survive and thrive through cancer. The SQUARE ONE Program contains the step-by-step strategies used by myself and many others who have healed cancer with a holistic approach using evidence-based nutrition and natural non-toxic therapies.
