If you are on weight loss injections, what do you make of this article?

[IwishIwasacaterpillar]

If you have come off them, have you gained weight very quickly?

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jan/07/weight-loss-jabs-regain-two-years-health-study

@Tessasanderson Yes, I will keep taking the medication if I need to. Please don't worry about the cost to me, I can easily afford it and am capable of planning to manage my finances and those of my family, to take into account unexpected life changes and cope.

I am glad that I am not doing anything wrong. I never thought that I was.

My point about my future weight is that thanks to these types of medications, I do not have to inevitably regain all the weight I have lost. There are now a variety of effective tools to manage it, if it turns out, as many people think, that I cannot maintain the weight lost on my own. So, the option is always there to restart medication, or continue to take it. A return to a BMI of 50 is now avoidable.

You are completely correct but the difference with the injections is that they reduce (sometimes completely stop) the food noise and hunger pangs.

When you diet with other methods, you still get these but you have to be much better at consciously controlling them.

That is why diets that are too restrictive never work in the long term and we’re told to lose weight slowly.

Traditional diets are much harder to lose weight and how easy it is to maintain it, depends on how restrictive it was.

The injections make it much easier to lose weight in the short term but much harder to maintain it than traditional methods.

Yep, but apparently adults making bad decisions by outright lying which ultimately could have consequences is somebody else's problem now. There is too little individual accountability left in this country!

If you use remote telemedicine honestly and the HCP follows their PGD then the risk vs benefit equation based on evidenced based practice is in favour of having WLI.

If other people want to lie to obtain it then they are adults and it is not my problem and should not affect my accessibility to mounjaro or the cost of it (remote prescribing is what is keeping the cost down).

And here’s another one debunked courtesy of nondata1985:

Yes, people often regain weight after stopping Mounjaro - that’s in the data. But the idea they usually end up heavier than they started just isn’t true. In trials, people who stopped regained around half to two-thirds of what they lost, and most were still below baseline a year later.

Again, it seems to me that people have entirely different expectations for this than other drugs, essentially because they disagree with it. I am far less 'monitored' for other drugs I take than I was for Mounjaro. For Sertraline I have one check with the Nurse Prescriber a year, and it would seem that my GP practice have moved to this check being an online questionnaire. Like you, I'm not sure what supervision people want (though I think it might involve people being regularly lectured on how they should just have more willpower rather than taking this nasty drug) but I don't think it aligns with what's normal for other medication.

If they do mean people buying it off TikTok then it's the wrong term - that's not 'unsupervised' use, it's 'illegal'. You can buy plenty of prescription medication as street drugs and while more could be done to tackle that it doesn't tell us anything about their use in people being legitimately prescribed them.

Yep!

And I just don't see how people getting the drug illicitly and longer term weight gain for those who went through the proper channels then stopped are linked. But at least one poster seemed to be doing that.

You are. I said her post was stupid and ignorant and it is. I could argue that that poster is attacking people who take WLI’s by insisting people on them are gong to “balloon to double the size” when they inevitably have to stop. It is just utter crap, it’s tedious and people are sick of it.

Stop posting opinions as fact people!

Viewing this as a horrible situation is so bizarre and divorced from reality. I have a medical condition that negatively affects my body. I'm on medication that entirely treats that. It's amazing. I don't mind paying for it and I can fortunately afford it. Nothing horrible about any of it.

Like a pp has said lots of people regain weight whatever method they use. And a lot of people find it very hard to stop smoking and drinking but it doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try. You wouldn’t say to an alcoholic “don’t bother trying to stop drinking it won’t work”

I lost 3 stone on MJ last year / the year before but came off it due to cost. I’ve put 1 stone back on. Ideally I’d like to lose that stone and then 1 more.

I don’t regret going on the jabs at all. I’m confident I won’t regain the 2 stone back any time soon and I still feel much better for it.

Well....it took me 20ish years to get 7 stone overweight, with constant fluctuations, always ending up.

If I gain that weight back in the next two years? Ok. Not ideal, and I think unlikely due to the amount and timespan (meaning I could see gaining back 2 stone in 2 years, not 5) but at least I know I can do it again.

I'm hoping I can maintain. But if I can't - well, that's my lookout really isn't it? Is spending £1200 over the course of a year to lose weight any worse than the all the clothing I've bought that I never wore because I bought it to slim into? Is it any worse than the money I wasted buying fast food and snacks? Is it any different than the money I spent on Slimming World over the course of a year, only to gain back every single pound and a LOT more over the years? Probably not.

It's my body, my money.

No but in what way is it dangerous without monitoring? What are the dangers (widespread dangers please, not very rare outliers) and how do you think monitoring would impact weight gain statistics after stopping?

This happened to my friend, she lost the weight then came off it. Put all the weight back on and is back on it again! She said it’s a hunger suppressant, without it she wants to eat more.

Sigh…

Saying her opinion is stupid and ignorant is attacking her. There's no need to resort to rudeness to make a point.

If you really want non-users to listen to what you're saying and change their opinion on WLI, maybe think on that.

I’m a long term goal member at SW. we’ve got a lot of people like me who hit goal more than two years ago after losing a lot of weight. The ones who stay at goal still go to meetings and weigh ins every week without fail. I eat no sweets, cake, bread and don’t drink alcohol. I find it challenging having a meal out because a main course at a pub for instance is often over 1000 calories and to maintain weight I know I can’t have more than 1600 calories a day on average, so it limits the occasions I can eat out in a lot of places.

however. It’s worth it for me, and the others in my group because of the changes to our lives that losing the weight has brought to us.

Is it a possibility that in the future we’ll see it prescribed far more widely on the NHS, probably in tablet form, and lots of people will just be on a maintenance dose lifelong?

You’ll gain weight back after any diet if you don’t make permanent lifestyle changes. I lost 4.5 stone through diet and exercise and have kept it off for 5 years, but I’m quite sure I could put it back on very easily if I went back to my old habits. I maintain by being consistent which does take significant effort for me. If I let it slip for even a few weeks I do see the weight starting to creep back on.

It’s not surprising to me that the same can happen following stopping WLI’s.

It's a thing that could happen, yes. But I think even in the best case scenario not for a while.

Suspect it would probably take cheaper generics being widely available, plus there are logistics. It may well save the NHS money in the long term, but it isn't simple to take resources freed up in eg cholesterol and blood pressure treatment and turn them into WLI expertise instead. So there'd have to be a whole process.

Nothing.

That’s not a WLI issue it’s a weight loss issue. No matter what the method most people who lose weight regain it in 2 years (some 90% I read).

https://health.clevelandclinic.org/why-people-diet-lose-weight-and-gain-it-all-back

Somebody described weight loss as like climbing Everest. Everybody talks about getting to the peak (goal weight) but getting down (maintenance) is just as difficult. If not more so.

This is more trying to scare people away from WLI.

Edit: from the above link:

But before you beat yourself up, endocrinologist and obesity specialist Marcio Griebeler, MD, has some welcome news: It’s most likely not your fault.
“Your body is fighting to keep your weight as it was before the dieting,” he says. But take heart — it’s possible to win the battle.
What “weight set point” has to do with it
Experts think as many as 80 to 95% of dieters gain back the weight they’ve worked so hard to lose. Why? (WHY?!?)
Dr. Griebeler says the culprit is your “weight set point”: the weight your body is programmed to be. Your weight set point is a combination of several factors, including your:

• Genetics.
• Hormones.
• Behavior.
• Environment.

Weight set point and metabolism play for the same team: Your metabolism burns energy at a rate that will maintain your weight set point, even if that point is heavier than is healthy.

I agree - also, WLIs are indicated as an adjunct to lifestyle changes so if people aren't using them correctly in the first place, it's obvious they'll gain weight when they stop using them. Weight regain was low in longer-term clinical trials where patients were using them correctly and were closely monitored.

I do have some sympathy for the review authors here. It appears they were clear about the limitations of their findings, applied caveats and drew nuanced conclusions. But this being WLI there are going to be lots of people who want the more sensationalised approach instead. It must be frustrating.

GLP 1RA generics are already available in the UK - fantastic news for people who can't afford them currently.

Really? I had no idea!

@Dragonscaledaisy there aren’t any GLP1 generics available in the UK for weight loss? Can you explain what you’re referring to?