Hi Family,
I know many of you have considered Ozempic as a weight loss option. I would be lying if I said I hadn’t as well! Wouldn’t It be wonderful if it were as simple as just taking a pill? But I’m sure you have figured out by now, that it isn’t that simple.
If you are anything like me, you have been on a number of different pills/injections/shakes/diets… all that claim to be THE THING that is going to CURE your weight problem! And if you are like me, maybe you lost a few pounds here and there but IT ALWAYS came back.
Because the ugly truth is that weight is a SYMPTOM of a problem and not the actual problem! It will always come back until we treat the actual root causes. Now the uglier truth is that root causes are harder to find and deeper problems to fix. They often take lifestyle changes and take some time to unwind. But the good news is that this will fix things for good! Also, a lot of them are simple things you already know need to be done!
I see it daily in my practice and in my own health as well. I have fixed things that I was told could not be cured….and with a little elbow grease and consistency, it reversed! All clear! But that’s another story!
Let’s talk about Ozempic! First, I want to explain to you how your body processes food. I think this will help clear it up for a bit later when we actually talk about Ozempic and how it works! Bear with me, this article is a bit long, but I think you will agree that it is worth it because I am going to clear things up a bit and connect dots you probably haven't seen before!
So, let’s start with putting a piece of bread in your mouth. We are using bread because it is a simple carbohydrate, meaning that it breaks down easily into glucose. Digesting fats and proteins are slightly different processes and will briefly be touched on later. We are using carbohydrates for now, so that we can focus on a clear example of how it effects your blood sugar.
Okay so I eat a piece of bread. Digestion starts in the mouth with chewing and grinding the food in to smaller bits. Saliva has enzymes to help break things down further. Once the food bolus is a more manageable size, it is swallowed and taken to the stomach. It is dropped into a boiling vat of acid in the stomach. This vat is able to break down the food further, very similar to cooking food. There’s a lit bit of churning and grinding going on as well.
Once it’s sufficiently broken down enough, it passes through to the alkaline small intestine. It’s important that the valves are working sufficiently here so that the acid from the stomach doesn’t burn the alkaline small intestine. Once in the small intestine, the bacteria in the gut release enzymes to break down the food into small enough pieces that they can pass through into the blood stream. These pieces are very very very small pieces, mostly, in the form of glucose. Glucose is the smallest sugar that most carbs break down into. Glucose is the fuel that every single cell in your body runs off of. Glucose is foundational fuel and of utmost importance.
The food has been broken all the way down into glucose. It passes into the blood stream and is now floating around your blood stream as blood glucose or blood sugar. Now, I like to think of glucose as those spiky little sticker burrs that get caught on your show laces. Normally, there is plenty of room in your blood vessels for them to float around, so it’s not a problem, but in a little bit, you are going to see how it becomes problematic.
The blood sugar is floating around and gets to visit all the organs of the body. The body has receptors in the blood stream paying attention to how much blood sugar is in the blood stream. When there is blood sugar in the blood stream, they tell the brain to tell the pancreas that it’s time for the cells to eat dinner. If there isn’t enough blood sugar in the blood stream, they tell the brain to tell the pancreas that we are going to need to eat soon.
The receptors tell the Brain that there is sugar in the blood stream… dinner time! The brain tells the pancreas to send out insulin. Insulin rings the dinner bell for all the cells. It goes around telling everyone that there is food on the table, come eat! The cells come out and take what they need until they are full, and sometimes a bit extra to store. They start releasing Leptin to say that we have enough energy in storage. At this point the blood sugar has been sufficiently decreased, the receptors tell the brain that we need to start getting ready for the next meal. The brain tells the pancreas to release glucagon and all insulin to come home. Glucagon tells the body to manage the blood sugar in the in between. If we use up all the free-floating energy, break into the fat storage. As glucose stores drop far enough, receptors and glucagon tell the brain to stimulate the stomach to release ghrelin. Ghrelin is the hunger hormone that tells you it’s time to eat. So, then you eat and the cycle repeats.
Now let’s talk about where things go wrong.
Eating too much or too often can lead to excess glucose in the blood stream. The body can only process so much at a time. But the worst-case scenario is to pee out fuel… so it creates fat stores to save it for later. But, your glucagon- receptor-ghrelin system (discussed above) should prevent this from being a problem. Except for that fact that we live in today’s world. where it is hijacked by fake sugars and fake foods that are literally designed to make you addicted and leave you craving more. Additionally, many of these foods are severely lacking in nutrition, so in an attempt to get the nutrients you need, you are forced to eat more.
So we keep going back for more because of addiction and lack of nutrition, and now the blood sugar is higher than it should be. The stomach and intestines don’t have as much time to get the food through, so they actually speed up your metabolism, resulting in less efficiency. This means that, again, you need more food to get enough nutrition from the food you eat that is basically running through your system.
Now your body is designed to keep a certain level of blood sugar in the blood stream at all times, so. Your brain and heart have enough fuel to keep you alive. Even in starvation situations, we see the blood sugar remain fairly level because the body will tear down absolutely anything (muscle, fats, even organs) to keep that blood sugar stable. Now when you have excess blood sugar in the blood stream, the body still needs to keep the blood sugar fairly stable. It does this in a couple of ways.
First, your body will keep telling insulin to ring the dinner bell. Insulin keeps ringing it, calling to all the cells, and the cells take up as much as they can and put it in storage as fat.
But if the levels of sugar in the blood exceeds how quickly the cells can pick it up, the blood sugar remains high. This leads the brain to continuously keep telling the pancreas to release even more insulin. But the cells are already full! So, they begin to ignore the insulin dinner bell and we get what’s called insulin resistance. The brain will keep yelling at the pancreas and the pancreas keeps sending out insulin but the cells can’t keep up, so insulin resistance just gets worse and worse.
Normally this is where we see diabetes form. And what is the treatment for diabetes again? To inject more insulin…. When the cells are already ignoring it…. How is this fixing a problem? Well, that’s a story for another time, but for now, understanding that insulin resistance is how we get major fat storage and where weight issues start showing up, is what I want you to take away from this.
The second way your body deals with excess blood sugar is by peeing it out in urine. This is obviously a very bad situation if you are leaking out fuel.
So, let’s back peddle a second. Remember when I told you that glucose is like spiky sticker burrs? Well normally they have plenty of room to float around in the blood. But when there is too much blood sugar, there is less room to float around and they start bumping into each other and into blood vessel walls. They scrape up the walls and are causing increased pressure in the system. Think of it like a garden hose. A handful of sticker burrs won’t do much damage to the hose and flow through without problem. The more sticker burrs I put in there, the more space they take up, causing increased pressure in the hose. This is where we get high blood pressure from… too many things floating around in the blood.
Then all those sticker burrs start bumping into each other and scraping up the hose. If we don’t go in and bandage it, it could break the hose. So, the body sends out cholesterol. Now, cholesterol gets a bad rap, which is crazy to me and I’ll show you why.
Cholesterol is a fatty building block that is found in the walls of literally every single cell in your body and thus intimately involved in repair of damaged tissues. It is also the building blocks to every single hormone in the body. So, it’s important! Returning back to our story, the body now has this damaged blood vessel and it calls out for LDL cholesterol to come help close it! Yep, the “bad” cholesterol! Think of LDL cholesterol here like liquid bandage… it comes in and temporarily seals off the wound so that other cells can bring the materials needed to fully close off the wound. But that liquid bandage takes a second to dry and the wound takes a second to be repaired. But, the flow of blood with all those sticker burrs, doesn’t slow down! So, more and more LDL cholesterol (liquid bandage) is added to try and protect the area against all these sticker burrs flying by. This soon becomes a mountain of liquid bandage trying to protect that one area. Various layers begin to harden and dry and this is what we call plaque and is what we typically think of when we refer to high cholesterol and blockages in the vessels. Now you can see how this mountain of liquid bandage might make an already crowded vessel, even more crowded, causing even more increased pressure on the vessel, creating even higher blood pressure. You can also imagine how pieces of these bandages might go flying off when a sticker burr hits it just right, and now we have dry bandages floating around that can lead to clots or even a stroke.
‘Good’ cholesterol (HDL cholesterol) is involved in cleanup. It takes away used bandages once the wound is closed. This is ‘good’ because that means there is more healing, less damage to the area, right? Well, kind of…. It means it was healed, sure, but high levels of cleanup means that there was high levels of damage. So, increasing high levels of cleanup, while decreasing levels of liquid bandage doesn’t actually fix the problem of why the damage was being caused in the first place! This is where statins and high blood pressure meds come into play. Statins are used to decrease liquid bandage… so how do we repair the vessel damage? A fun thought to explore in another article!
High blood pressure meds are used to help you pee out the excess sugar…. So, we need to talk about the kidneys. We left off where we have all of these sticker burrs floating around causing increased pressure in the system. The kidneys are like a coffee filter for the blood stream. They are designed to filter out excess fluid and very small bits of waste from the blood stream and leave all the necessary fuel, cells, and nutrients in circulation.
This would mean that glucose, the fuel for the entire body, is something we want to keep and so the body would make the filter holes smaller than glucose molecule. But now, with all the sticker burrs in the blood stream, we have high blood pressure, which causes increased pressure on the kidney filter. Plus, all those sticker burrs are sharp and tearing at the filter more and more. Eventually, they tear holes large enough that the glucose sticker burrs get out and are sent out through urine. This is bad… this means that the filter that manages your blood pressure and keeps enough blood in your body to pump the heart, now has holes in it! The more sticker burrs and the higher the blood pressure, the more we see bigger and bigger holes in the filter. Eventually huge things, like cells and proteins and fats can get out of the filter too! This is really bad and when see renal failure. Your body can no longer control the blood pressure or blood volume in your body, which means your heart can’t pump and every cell in your body won’t get the nutrients it needs.
So, follow me for a second…. High sugar in the diet leads to high sugar in the blood, which leads to high blood pressure and insulin resistance. More insulin resistance leads to more insulin in the blood stream, contributing to high blood pressure and leads to diabetes. All that sugar and insulin, increases blood pressure higher and higher putting more stress on the vessels, leading to more and more cholesterol bandages and a problem of mounting high blood pressure. This leads to the vessels becoming weakened and more clogged, leading to heart disease. The ever-rising blood sugar and blood pressure also leads to too much pressure on the kidney filter and valuable energy and nutrients are peed out, eventually leading to renal failure. Renal failure is followed quickly by extreme malnutrition, heart failure, and then death.
High blood pressure meds force you to pee out more of the blood sugar to get it out of the blood stream…. Leading you too more damage to that kidney filter. They do not address the actual cause of the high blood pressure and end up perpetuating the problem…make it make sense!
The last way your body tries to get out the excess sugar is through your lungs. The diabetics’ sweet breath is associated with glucose being released from the lungs as well. This is needed to rebalance acid/ alkaline states in the body. You see, spiky blood sugars are also pretty acidic. Your body maintains a special balance of acid/ alkaline in certain areas. that are necessary for balance. The foods we eat and water we drink are a variety of acidity or alkaline levels and the body has to regulate them. Saliva is usually fairly neutral pH and changes slightly to adapt to the food we eat in order to make it safer to go down the throat. The stomach is very very acidic, actually more acidic than the stomach acids of wolves… which leads to a whole other conversation about what our bodies are designed to eat! But again, a topic for another day!
The stomach needs to be very acidic in order to break down food well and also to kill any pathogens that might be found on it. Then the food passes to the very alkaline intestines, where there are plenty of bacteria to break down our foods further. The food that passes through to the large intestine and colon, is a bit more acidic due to waste products that accumulate and are sent out through the digestive tract. The nutrients that pass through into the blood stream tend to be a little more acidic or basic than the blood stream itself, which is fairly neutral to balance it out. The nerves are super particular about what acidity the body is so it’s important that the blood remain fairly neutral so as not to piss them off. Glucose specifically is fairly acidic. When we see lots of glucose in the system, we see the acidity level of the blood stream rise as well…. This makes the nerves very mad and we start seeing them have issues, which in this case is seen as diabetic neuropathy. We see this mostly in the further areas of the body like the hands and feet because it’s important to keep it away from the central brain and spine.
As the blood stream becomes more acidic, the lungs attempt to help the body get rid of that acidity by sending it out through the Lung mucosal tissues. Just like before in the kidney filter, this is very hard on the delicate lung filters and can cause severe damage there as well. This is a necessary sacrifice to keep the blood pH a safe level for the brain.
So, as you can see, this process is quite complicated and involves a lot of moving pieces.
It is also really interesting to see how modern medicine has attempted to intervene to treat these conditions and obviously failed significantly, evidenced by the ever-increasing numbers of people with diabetes, obesity, heart disease, renal failure, and digestive disorders. But I digress…. Let’s actually get to Ozempic!
So Ozempic is A GLP-1 receptor agonist which means that it attempts to slow gastric digestion in order to keep the body from feeling hunger as often and to allow more time for food to digest. Not a bad plan in theory…but in a lot of cases, has proven to be faulty logic and symptom-based treatment. Let me show you why.
Firstly, when we naturally see slowing of digestion, we see constipation… sometimes extreme constipation! When was the last time that was a good feeling or good situation???
Secondly, when see this kind of constipation and food sitting in the gut, we get a lot of release of toxic gases which is why our stomach ‘burns’, ‘feels sour’, has bloating, and excess gas. The body is desperately trying to get rid of the toxic fumes created by slow and inappropriate digestion.
Thirdly, food rotting in the gut can result in bacterial imbalances that kill off the good bacteria in the gut by creating too many fumes and a toxic environment. This also just so happens to be an environment that allows bad bacterium and parasites to thrive! This can have a huge domino effect into conditions like SIBO, leaky gut syndrome, fibromyalgia, and even autoimmunity.
Fourth, remember how we talked about how the poor nutrient value and highly addictive qualities of our food led to more eating and higher blood sugar? And how that led the metabolism to actually speed up and run food through faster, resulting in less efficiency? Well now, we throw in a drug that artificially slows down the metabolism and digestion without actually correcting the problem. Meaning it only keeps the metabolism down while you take the medication, and when you stop, it results in a rebound effect, causing the initial problems to be worse.
Fifth, Ozempic interrupts communication between organs and the brain. Remember those harmonious conversations between blood sugar receptors, the brain, the pancreas, the stomach, and all the cells? Where each member had a say and everyone listened without yelling at each other? Well, now we interrupt that conversation by preventing stomach from actually saying what he needs to say, by smothering him. This could result in him having trouble talking at all, even when we stop taking Ozempic.
Sixth, this can have effects on the pH of the system by causing excess toxins to build up, it can lead to a decrease in stomach acid, the small intestine to become more acidic, and irritation of the nerves which can cause pain and dysfunction.
Seventh, this can lead to weight loss very quickly. When we see this kind of situation in nature, the person is in starvation mode. Do you remember how I told you that the body will do whatever it can to keep your blood sugar stable? Well in starvation mode, it does this by breaking down fat and even muscle! It is not a good thing to break down fat and muscle and your body will do just about anything to prevent that. Remember how I told you that fat was a storage place for excess glucose? Well think of it like vacuum sealed Ziploc bags of glucose. Opening those vacuum sealed bags takes work and results in toxic trash like the plastic bag. It also takes a second to make that glucose usable which results in toxic byproducts we call ketones. Ketones are concentrated forms of glucose, from fat, that the brain loves to use as it is like a megadose of energy at a time. However, these ketones are very acidic and make the blood pH change dramatically leading to all of the pH, nerve and kidney problems we discussed earlier.
Additionally, anytime we tear down muscle, it’s very hard on the body and results in severe stress of the kidneys… we see severe signs of starvation form with long term situations and eventual shutting down of organs. To make matters worse, if you didn’t improve your diet at all then when it’s time to get off of Ozempic, you now have less muscle than before and are likely eating the same foods that got you to that situation before, so will likely experience weight regain worse than before, and now with less muscle mass. Nevermind the amount of trauma it places on your body to think it is actually starving for months!
Eighth, while Ozempic does decrease blood sugar by allowing more time for your food to digest, it does so at the expense of all of the previous issues above, AND it’s only temporary, while you take the pill. We did NOT fix the problem of high blood sugar and all the effects that came after it.
Ninth, the thyroid controls our metabolism in general. It is in charge of regulation of energy and speeding up and slowing down of processes as needed. Before, we discussed a number of ways that artificially holding down parts of your metabolism can result in temporary gains but once removed, result in drastic rebound effects… well sometimes it’s worse than that. In the case of the thyroid, holding down things artificially doesn’t just have effects when you release it, it tells your brain that thyroid isn’t regulating things well. Just like before, with pancreas, where we saw it desperately trying to provide the right amount of insulin or glucagon and not being listened to, we see the same thing happen with thyroid. Ozempic has major warnings for all sorts of thyroid conditions as a result, including Medullary Thyroid Carcinoma. This means that taking Ozempic to lose weight can cause so much dysfunction to your thyroid that it causes cancer!
Tenth, these problems are not isolated, small amounts of cases! In fact, Ozempic is in multiple class action lawsuits around the world for these severe side effects! Some studies have shown that as many as 50% of patients experience moderate to severe symptoms like gastric pain, muscle spasms, bloating, gas, constipation, nausea, and vomiting. And even worse, 1 in 10 patients experience severe problems like gastric paralysis, thyroid tumors, gastric blockages, diabetes, pancreatitis, kidney problems, gallbladder problems, and even death.
These are not small numbers and I believe are really not worth the risk!
Worse still, in this entire conversation, we have shown how interconnected all of this is! How heart disease ties in to blood sugar which ties in to kidneys, etc. We have shown that repeatedly, when we intervene in inappropriate areas, we see dramatic ripple effects. These interventions don’t make logical sense and they don’t fix the problem, which is why so many don’t get better when taking these drugs! Afterall, there’s no money in making you better.
This is why it really comes down to root causes. I can continue to put band aids on problems, try to get symptoms to shut up, and ignore the things I know my body is asking for me to do. But it will always, always result in greater illness down the line. The body and brain talk to us through our symptoms and it is of utmost importance that we listen and give the body what it actually needs.
Now these root causes are not wrapped in shiny packages and don’t have amazing infomercials saying ‘you can fix it in a day’. They are simple things that you likely already know to do but they take time and consistency.
Some are lifestyle things you can do at home; things like getting enough sleep, enough sunshine, minimizing blue light and Emf exposure, enough of the right kinds of movement and foods, etc.
Others require a little more intervention depending on how far along they are, mostly because of the nature of the world that we live in. Leaky gut or parasites, for example, require some more intervention because the liver needs a break. The food quality has decreased and environmental toxins have increased so dramatically that the body has a hard time keeping up. Additionally, getting the nutrition you need from your food is getting harder to come by with the standard American diet. So, finding better food sources and temporary supplementation might be needed to get you there.
All of these are slower processes and that’s important because the body essentially has two main modes…. ‘Fight or flight’ and ‘rest and digest’. If you are running from a bear, it’s not the time to focus on digesting your food, repairing wounds, or having a baby. We have to put all efforts into running from the bear! But when we aren’t running, we can have time to focus on healing, resting, and nurturing. The body has to know it's safe and it learns this from repeated evidence that there aren’t any bears around.
If you are anything like me, stress is probably your biggest culprit. I went to grad school, opened a business, and now have this crazy drive to know more and get that info to you as soon as possible! It’s a lot of stress! And that doesn’t even include my trauma stressors, food stressors, environmental stressors, etc. I personally struggle with getting enough sleep and calming my nervous system down so that it's not running from a bear all the time. I have to take lots of purposeful rest to try and tell my body that it’s safe! I also have to help it by eating regularly so it knows that there is a regular food source so it doesn’t have to store everything. It took a while for my hunger hormone to turn back on and my insulin and Leptin resistance to start decreasing. It’s still a journey for me, but what I can tell you is that the journey is worth it. I have less pain, less migraines, less cravings, and more energy than ever before. It corrected my own autoimmune thyroid condition, fibromyalgia, clinical depression and anxiety diagnoses and I have kept them away for years. I’ve seen huge strides in how my body feels and functions… but it takes time and consistency.
Now, I know that’s not what you want to hear. I get it. I’m tired of being uncomfortable in my skin and some of my symptoms as well. I speak to you as a person who has tried so many of these diets/injections/pills, as someone who has heavily researched the surgeries, and as someone who has many times just given up. I hear you. I see you. And I am telling you, that Ozempic is not the way. The costs are too high and the return on investments are too low for the possible life altering side effects.
If you are looking for real, more personalized discussions related specifically to you, then be sure to check out our page and the links in the bio. I try to answer some things in the comments but truly, if you really want to talk about your case, then be sure to check out our consultation options by giving us a call at 210-756-9020. We have distance and in-person programs to help you find better options. And the best part is, if you choose these options, you will be talking one on one with me directly. And we can work together to find more answers for you.