My Wegovy Journey

I am in general very slow to start worrying about my health. I tend to think that the medical establishment is a bunch of money hungry hustlers, prone to administering expensive procedures and to writing out medications in order to solve problems. I try to stay away from them as much as possible.

But after I got back from Togo in August 2025, my health had reached a low point, even for me. My weight was 350 pounds, which was the greatest it had ever been. According to ChatGPT, that is Class III obesity, otherwise known as severe or morbid obesity. That is really bad.

More importantly, I was having major health issues that seemed to be related to my weight. The one that triggered my concern most was frequent urination at night. I was waking up every hour on the hour to urinate for 50 seconds each time. That seemed like a lot of liquid to me (5 liters?). And I was not getting enough sleep, so I was falling asleep at school drawing the ire of my colleagues. I had a host of other health problems that are honestly way too embarrassing for me to write about here. 

How exactly I arrived at this morbid state of health is the topic of a different blog post.

So I went to my NYU Langone MyChart, and arranged a telemedicine appointment. I got a male doctor on the line, whose name and accent made him seem Russian to me. I explained to him my problems, and naturally he recommended a full suite of blood tests to check it out, as well as a follow-up visit with a physician. When I got the blood tests, I learned that my A1c was 6.4, which is prediabetic, one very small step away from full-blown Type 2 diabetes.

I had reached the breaking point. My father told me that he had friends who are Type 2 diabetic, and they have to have an insulin shot every day just to manage it. That scared me even more. I definitely did not want to be dependent on insulin for the rest of my life. So I decided on action to be taken on all fronts. I could not just ignore my health and hope it would get better. What miracle was I waiting for anyway? The way I was going, I would live the last quarter of my life in very unpleasant conditions, and maybe even die early from Type 2 diabetes-related conditions.

The doctor suggested that I go on Metformin, but Metformin is not known to help weight loss very much, so I was not so enthusiastic about it. I recommended to her that I try Wegovy. So she put me on Wegovy injections starting in September 2025. I wanted to go on pills, but at that time Wegovy pills did not exist. 

Simultaneously, I changed my whole diet. I abandoned all sugar completely, as well as most processed carbohydrates. In effect, I went on a low carb diet. I was lucky to find some very good YouTube videos on controlling blood glucose levels, providing me valuable guidance on my journey. The channel is called Insulin Resistant 1, and it has a wonderful series of short videos on controlling glucose spikes:

 https://www.youtube.com/@insulinresistant1/shorts. I recommend it to anybody with similar issues.

My life has been a love affair with carbohydrates. But now I had to bid farewell to them. For the good times, here are just a few of my favorites (which for the most part I no longer touch): bagel with butter and jam, waffles or pancakes with butter and maple syrup, French baguette with butter and jam, chocolate croissant, scone with butter and jam, chocolate chip muffin, warm apple turnover (my favorite of all), blondie bar, brownie with walnuts, oatmeal raisin cookie, fries and ketchup, Doritos, frosted cupcakes from Magnolia, sausage pizza, mac and cheese, any kind of pasta, mashed potatoes with gravy, apple pie or pecan pie with vanilla ice cream, mint chocolate chip ice cream, cookies and cream ice cream. That is really just the tip of the iceberg, actually. The list is much longer. Those carbohydrates have been my whole life, and I now say goodbye to them forever.

I am low carb, not keto, so I will still eat a bit of rice (limiting it to half a cup), or whole grain bread, or small russet potatoes or low carb tortillas. I also allow myself fruits, especially apples and berries. I will also occasionally eat dark chocolate (70 percent or higher). But for the most part I have abandoned carbs, especially sugar and highly processed carbs (like white bread).

The main reason that I went low carb (and no sugar) is to control the glucose levels in my blood, because of my diagnosis as prediabetic. But there is also a connection between a low carb diet and weight loss. Carbohydrates and sugar are addictive. Eating them causes the brain to release dopamine, in a way similar to taking drugs. On top of the dopamine release, eating sugar and carbohydrates causes the pancreas to release the hormone insulin, which helps cells take up glucose from the bloodstream. Glucose spikes and subsequent drops (“crashes”) can, in some people, contribute to cravings for more sugar and carbohydrates. I am definitely one of those people. A handful of chips leads to a bowl, which leads to the whole bag. One cookie, leads to two, which leads to four or five. Sticking to healthy protein, fats and fibers, and a very small amount of carbohydrates, lets one feel full and satisfied, and bypasses all these toxic issues of addiction and cravings.

Because I had learned that muscle mass tends to decrease when you take Wegovy, I decided to start lifting weights twice a week at the NYU Paulson Center, just five minutes walking from where I live. I go there for about half an hour and do work on six machines, all focusing on the upper body. On each machine, I do four sets of ten reps, for a total of 240 reps. I try to take it easy, because I am 62 years old. I keep the weights manageable. I am not trying to look “ripped” after all. I am just trying to not lose muscle mass.

In addition to this, I have always done some aerobic exercise on a daily basis. I bought a stationary bike many years ago, and I use it for 35 minutes every morning. I have been doing that for decades. Without that exercise, I am pretty sure I would be dead by now.

So that is my four-pronged plan: Wegovy, low carb, weights and biking.

I started the new health plan in September of 2025. It is now the beginning of April 2026. In that time period, I have lost 46 pounds, which is a weight loss of about six pounds a month. I started to feel that the fat was magically melting off my body.

During this time, my A1c went from 6.4 (higher end of prediabetic) to 5.7 (lower end of prediabetic). While I still urinate at night, it is now at a much more reasonable level for somebody of my gender and age. I no longer feel so drowsy in the middle of the day, and I no longer take naps at school. In general, my whole body feels better. I walk faster and get less winded. My daughter says my gait has change from an obese waddle, to a more normal style. And some of the unmentionable health issues, too embarrassing to discuss in this blog post, have completely disappeared. So I do think I made the right decisions in this case.

Here are the exact dates, as I have them recorded in my correspondence on MyChart:

September 9, 2025: Visit to doctor to discuss Wegovy, A1c is 6.4%

September 15, 2025: 350 pounds

September 16, 2025: Insurance approves of Wegovy

September 20, 2025: First Wegovy injection

October 13, 2025: 350.4 pounds

November 1, 2025: 345.6 pounds

December 6, 2025: 333.8 pounds

December 23, 2025: Visit to doctor to discuss Wegovy, A1c is 5.7%

December 30, 2025: 325.2 pounds

January 31, 2026: 317 pounds

February 28, 2026: 313 pounds

April 9, 2026: 304 pounds

What about Wegovy? How has that been?

The way Wegovy works, you start at a minimal level and build up every month. With the injections you start at 0.25 mg, then 0.5 mg, then 1.0 mg, then 1.7 mg and lastly 2.4 mg, which is the stable level. So it takes five months to get to the stable level. The climb to the stable level is just meant to help your body acclimate to have the GLP-1 doing its work.

For the first month or two, you barely feel any effects at all on your body. But around 1 mg, I definitely started feeling it. The main effect for me is that on the day of the injection and the day after, I would feel nauseated, and a little weak. So I spent most of the day on the couch, just forcing myself out for a walk in the evening. Luckily, as my body got used to Wegovy, I started to feel less and less of a shock on the day of the injection.

In general, throughout the whole week, I feel less enthusiastic about eating. Eating became a chore, instead of something I looked forward to. Apparently, one of the effects of Wegovy is to slow down the digestion of food. If I eat a good breakfast and lunch, I feel full (as if I had just eaten) late into the evening. As a consequence, most of the time I do not eat anything at all in the evening. If I do eat in the evening, it will be a bit of cheese and a few crackers, or maybe yogurt and berries. But I cannot really see myself eating a full meal at night. The prospect of eating meat at night makes me feel nauseous again.

As I am getting ready to return to Togo in June and July 2026, I have switched from Wegovy injections to pills. The issue is that the injections need to be refrigerated, and there is no readily available refrigeration for me in Togo. So I needed to switch to pills, which do not need to be refrigerated. Even though Wegovy pills did not exist in September 2025, they were introduced in January 2026, so I decided to take advantage of them.

The pills are taken every day, with a small sip of water, 30 minutes before you eat or drink coffee/tea in the morning. You are supposed to start at 1.5 mg per day, then 4 mg, then 9 mg and finally 25 mg, which is the stable level. Because I had already achieved the maximum injection level, I could have gone right to 25 mg/day. But the doctor and I decided to start me at 9 mg just to get my body used to the pills first.

After just a few days at 9 mg, I started to feel hunger again, which worried me, because I had just spent months not being hungry anymore. It was like a monster that had always been there, but now the cover was being pulled away to reveal its presence again. So after 7 days at 9 mg, I arranged a telemedicine call, and requested that they change my prescription to 25 mg per day. Because I was not having any side effects, they agreed to the change (and apparently the insurance company did too, since I paid the regular co-pay). I am now at 25 mg per day, and still trying to figure it out.

My target is a 20% loss of my starting body weight. After that, I will cease taking Wegovy. I believe that with my new low carb diet, and my new exercise regime, I can maintain a healthy weight level without it. I very strongly dislike being on any kind of medication. I do not like putting complicated medications into my body. But that said, Wegovy has given me a second chance to make the last quarter of my life livable. I was stuck before and it has given me just the edge I needed to take on losing significant weight to get my health back in order. So I am grateful.

That in a nutshell is my Wegovy journey. If you have any questions or comments, let me know.