The Mounjaro Journey
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My food cravings came back at first with a whimper, then with a bang. I noticed them about three weeks after I took my last dose of a blockbuster medicine that helped me lose 40 pounds with shocking ease.
During the five months that I took Mounjaro, I had experienced what felt like freedom. My usual internal Greek chorus of a thousand voices, always telling me to eat, had been silent. French fries, doughnuts and Frosted Flakes no longer called to me. Then, I stopped taking the drug, a common choice for those using medicines like Mounjaro or Ozempic to lose weight. Cost was a primary factor; I was paying $1,000 a month myself because most insurance generally covers the drugs only for their primary use, combating diabetes. And despite the weight loss, I felt ambivalent about the idea of relying on the pharmaceutical help for life, as the drug makers recommend.
Then came the challenges of the next four months: a roulette wheel of binges, diets, exercise regimens and mental and emotional battles with myself over will power, self-image and motivation. It was remarkably like the struggles of overeating without taking a wonder drug first, though with one important difference: That wonder drug had given me the gift of a 40-pound head start, to either seize upon or squander.
In my case, there was a surprise revelation to process as well. After I published an essay in The Wall Street Journal in January about my weight-loss experience, my mother disclosed to me that she had been taking Ozempic, then Mounjaro, herself for more than a year. She lost just about as much weight as I did, but as the milestone of her 80th birthday approached, she sought to lose more—“I wanted to feel well,” she told me—so she opted to raise her dose, despite the daily bouts of nausea and gastric discomfort that followed.
As the drugs’ popularity has surged, a number of clinical studies have shown that those who stop taking them can regain the lost pounds at a rapid clip. That has led drug manufacturers Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk to recommend that patients stay on the medicines, perhaps for life. But most people are quitting: A recent analysis of thousands of insurance claims found that only a third of individuals who started such drugs for weight-loss were still taking them after a year.
