04/24/2025
Fantastic article on NPR by physician Mara Gordon, who identifies as a being a 'size -inclusive physician.'
Some gems:
"My experience was not unique, new research shows. The majority of people who start GLP1 agonists end up stopping them, according to research published earlier this year in JAMA. The study authors found that nearly 65% of study subjects who were taking the medications explicitly for weight loss, rather than diabetes control, ended up going off them within a year."
"But a narrow focus on weight — which, so often, our medical training still teaches — misses the point that there's more to being well than a number on the scale. For me, I felt healthier at a higher weight because stopping Ozempic helped me exercise regularly, sleep better, and feel less pain.
Some of my patients tell me similar stories. One woman told me that having a peaceful relationship with food is more important to her than a few pounds of weight loss. Another patient told me that "being skinny isn't worth feeling sick every day."
I worry that in the age of Ozempic, we doctors have returned to a myopic obsession with weight as the definition of health. Instead of focusing on objective measures like kidney function or liver inflammation, doctors instead hone in on BMI, a metric that the American Medical Association has denounced as not rigorous enough to evaluate an individual patient's health."
"This comes even as major medical organizations are putting less and less emphasis on BMI and as new research emerges that shows cardiovascular fitness may be more important than body weight as a predictor of disease."
Taking the drug made one writer feel so sick she quit and focused on healthy habits instead of her body size. Turns out, 65% of people using GLP-1 drugs for weight loss quit within a year.
