Johann Hari still remembers the strange sensation he felt two days after he first injected himself with . A doctor prescribed the drug for weight loss — a famous side effect of the Type 2 diabetes treatment — in 2023 when Hari weighed 203 pounds and had a body fat percentage of 32%. Hari’s grandfather died of a heart attack at 44, his uncle in his 60s, and his father underwent a quadruple heart bypass in his 70s.
Hari didn’t have diabetes and was wary of weight-loss drugs knowing that past options “always turned out to be a disaster,” he says. But seemed like a way to lower his own heart disease risk. He noticed the drug’s effect a couple of days after his first dose.
“I woke up and I thought, ‘There’s something weird. What is it?’ I couldn’t figure out what it was. And then I suddenly realized I had woken up and I wasn’t hungry.
That had never happened to me,” Hari, 45, a journalist who lives in London and Las Vegas, tells TODAY.com. “My appetite was just dramatically dialed down from that point on.
I was so much less hungry than I’d been before. I felt very full, very fast.” Hari ultimately lost 42 pounds with Ozempic and then its sister drug , which has the same active ingredient, semaglutide, and is specifically approved for weight loss.
He set out to find out all he could about — which mimic at least one hormone produced by the gut to signal fullness — in his new book, “ .” Hari shared his insights in an interview with TODAY.com.
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