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 robotically writing out prescriptions in order to quickly solve problems. I try to stay away from them as much as possible.

But after I got back from fieldwork in 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 directly related to my weight. The one that triggered my immediate concern the 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. Should I really be losing five liters per night? Would I dry out? Is losing this much liquid good for my internal organs? As a result, I was not getting enough sleep, and I was falling asleep at school, drawing the ire of my colleagues, who actually started complaining. I had a host of other health problems that are honestly way too embarrassing for me to write about here in an internet blog post.

How exactly I arrived at this morbid state of health is the topic of a different blog post. But it did not happen rapidly. My descent into morbid obesity took decades of inattention and bad health decisions. 

So I went to my NYU Langone MyChart, and arranged a telemedicine appointment. My first step toward redemption. I got a male doctor on Zoom, 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 at the very high end of prediabetic, one small step away from full-blown Type 2 diabetes. I was hanging on by just the thinnest of threads.

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 to take action 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 illnesses.

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 a GLP-1. In fact, I suggested Rybelsus, because I found it came in pill form. As it turned out, the insurance would not cover that, because I did not have Type 2 diabetes. So she put me on Wegovy injections starting in mid-September 2025. I wanted to go on Wegovy pills, but they did not exist at the time. 

Originally, I was squeamish about the injections. That squeamishness actually delayed the process by a couple of weeks, while I deliberated. I had that idea that I would be injecting myself with a long thin needle like the ones they use to draw blood. But the Wegovy injections are actually quite convenient. Once a week, you just put the pen against your belly and push. Since the needle is very short and goes into a fatty layer, you hardly even feel it. The procedure is painless and quick.

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. These videos show clearly how the glucose levels in your blood depend directly on the foods you eat. They are filled with practical common-sense advice about managing the glucose level in your bloodstream.

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, oatmeal scotchies, fries and ketchup, Doritos, frosted cupcakes from Magnolia, carrot cake, 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 and vanilla ice cream with butterscotch topping. That is really just the tip of the iceberg, actually. The list is much longer. Those carbohydrates had been part of my quotidian life, and I now say goodbye to them forever.

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

The main reason that I went low carb (and no sugar) was to control the glucose levels in my blood, because of my diagnosis as a 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. In effect, you become addicted to the sugar high. 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 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 or even more. That is the story of my life. I am not a one-and-done kind of guy when it comes to sugar. 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.

I had actually been exposed to low carb diets a decade ago, when my daughter and her boyfriend started to study them seriously. They were into the writings of Gary Taubes. They spent a lot of time and effort trying to convince me to rid my diet of carbohydrates, even vegetables. I thought at the time that they were being extreme. I was not ready to hear what they had to say, and so it did not change my behavior one bit. Now, here I am a decade later advocating my own version of a low carb diet. This just goes to show everybody follows their own individual journey, complete with detours and dead ends.

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 a five-minute walk from where I live. I go there for about half an hour and workout 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 don’t care about “abs”. I don’t really care about the physical appearance of being fit. I am just trying to not lose muscle mass in taking Wegovy.

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 of biking 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, light weight lifting and biking.

I started the new health plan in mid-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 6 pounds a month. That is like a piece of checked luggage for a transatlantic flight. Imagine carrying that around all day, and you will get a pretty good idea of what I felt like. I started to feel that the fat was magically melting off my body. I felt for the first time in a very long time that I had actual control over my eating and weight.

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 (male) and age (62). 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 walking up steps. My daughter says my gait has changed from an obese waddle, to a more normal style. And some of the unmentionable health issues alluded to above, 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, so you can see the exact progression:

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

September 15, 2025: 350 pounds

September 16, 2025: Insurance approves 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 4, 2026: Switch over to daily pills from weekly injections.

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. The real weight loss takes place at the higher levels.

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 weak. So I would spend most of the day on the couch, just forcing myself out for a walk in the evening. Luckily, I had planned my injections for Saturday morning after breakfast, giving myself the weekend to recover. As my body gets used to it, I have started to feel less and less of a shock on the day of the injection.

There are other little issues here and there with using Wegovy. Occasionally, when I get up off of the couch too quickly, I feel lightheaded. So I need to watch out for that. There are also a few gastrointestinal issues, like gas and a growling stomach, but these are infrequent.

In general, throughout the whole week now, I feel less enthusiastic about eating. Eating has become a kind of chore, instead of something I look forward to. For example, at breakfast instead of wolfing down a ham and cheese omelet with buttered toast, as I normally would do, I now eat it bite by bite, thinking about each bite, and forcing myself to put it in my mouth. I still like the taste of it, but it is somehow less compelling. I often leave things on my plate, which I never did before. 

There seems to be a combination of two things going on. While I still get hungry, I don’t ever get ravenously hungry. For example, when it is time for lunch, I feel a bit hungry, so I know I need to eat. But I do not feel so hungry that I get weak and I cannot concentrate any longer. At night, if I do not eat dinner, I feel a bit hungry, but nothing that would prevent me from sleeping. So there is definitely a decrease in hunger pangs. But equally important, there is the constant presence of nausea lurking in the background. Certain foods seem more unpalatable than others, and I know if I put them in my mouth, I would start feeling nauseous. Similarly, I feel like if I eat too much, I will become nauseous. The possibility of nausea actually decreases my desire to eat.

Apparently, one of the effects of Wegovy is to slow down the digestion of food. If I eat a good breakfast and a good lunch, I feel full late into the evening. My stomach feels full, as if I had just eaten. As a consequence, most of the time I do not eat anything at all in the evening. So Wegovy pretty naturally leads to what is called “intermittent fasting”, where you only eat during a certain period of each day. If I do eat in the evening, it will be a bit of cheese and a few crackers, or maybe yogurt and berries, or possibly a handful of peanuts. But I cannot really see myself eating a full meal at night. The prospect of eating meat at night makes me feel nauseous all over again.

As I am getting ready to return to Togo for more fieldwork 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 where I will be staying 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. Apparently, the actual size of the sip is important. The more water you drink, the less effective the pill. If excessive, the water somehow impedes the absorption of the drug into your bloodstream. 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 per day. But the doctor and I decided to start me at 9 mg just to get my body used to the pills at 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 hidden, but now the cover was being pulled back to reveal its wicked presence again. So after 7 days at 9 mg, I arranged another 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.

Even after adjusting my dosage to 25 mg, and learning the proper sip technique, I feel there is definitely less of an edge with the pills than with the injections. The injections reduce hunger a bit more, especially at night. The pills also lead to less of a sense of lurking nausea. I am afraid that switching over to pills will halt my weight loss progress before I reach my target. I am still trying to figure it all out.

My target is a 20% loss of my starting body weight. After that, I will cease taking Wegovy. I very strongly dislike being on any kind of medication. I do not like putting complicated synthetic substances into my body. The key to the process will be advanced planning. I believe that with my new low carb diet, and my new exercise regime, and a few other reasonable adjustments, I can maintain a healthy weight level post-Wegovy. 

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 despite my general misgivings about the medical establishment, I am grateful.

That in a nutshell is my Wegovy journey.