A Faster Way to Fat Loss?

Jonathan Clogstoun-Willmott

August 14, 2024

Most of us want to lose weight – a faster way to fat loss! (Well, not me personally – I’m thin and would prefer to be a bit sturdier!)

A ‘new’ range of drugs based on semaglutide is available: these include Ozempic, Wegovy, Saxenda, Moujaro, Zephound and Victoza.

Semaglutide mimics a naturally occurring gut hormone called ‘glucagon-like peptide-1’ (GLP-1) which stimulates insulin production.

GLP-1 and its mimics lead to an increased feeling of fullness – ie satiety – so you eat less. What is more, an analysis of over 4 million people taking these drugs showed they had less likelihood of anxiety and depression than controls not taking the drugs.

When you eat less (and exercise more and improve your diet) you lose weight. If it works, there’s your faster way to fat loss!

What’s not to like?! Become less depressed, less anxious AND less fat (- less obese)!

How Semaglutide drugs (like Ozempic and Wegovy) work

It’s claimed that drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic reduce weight if taken over 68 weeks together with doing more exercise and, importantly, eating a balanced diet low in calories, fat and sugar. (So it turns out what you eat still makes a difference!)

By the way … all this started over 50 years ago when they discovered that semaglutide drugs helped to control type 2 diabetes. You get diabetes when your pancreas fails to produce enough insulin. Insulin is your body’s vital hormone to control the amount of sugar in your blood.

That’s important because high blood sugar levels lead to all sorts of horrible diseases. These include heart attacks, strokes, poor circulation and sometimes even amputation of affected limbs. (Wondering why you might get diabetes? Click on diabetes risk factors.)

Does this faster way to fat loss work? Unfortunately, tests indicate that it’s not hugely effective, at least in reducing weight. “One study, involving 1,961 people with a 30-plus BMI score, concluded that it helped reduce weight by less than 15 percent after 68 weeks (one year, four months) of treatment. The group not taking the drug lost 2.4 percent of their weight”. (New Eng J Med, 2021; 384(11): 989–1002)

Obesity is bad news for health

man in grey shirt sitting on chair outside house — Obesity – needs a fast way to fat loss!

However, obesity is a source, even cause, of many diseases, including cancer where it accounts for 40% of cases. And obesity is common: the obesity rate in America is 74% and 64% Britons are obese. So anything that tackles obesity successfully may reduce the incidence of many kinds of cancer.

The downside of Semaglutide drugs?

However, semaglutide drugs are not all good.

The United States FDA (Food and Durg Administration) rates it with a ‘black box’ warning, meaning that it raises the risk of cancers (yes!), thyroid tumours and blockages in your intestines.

(Indeed, ‘In one study led by UTHealth Houston, more than half of patients taking GLP-1s had “significant gastric contents” before going into surgery, even if they had followed pre-op fasting protocols, according to a press release on the university’s website.’)

The manufacturer (Novo Nordisk) itself warns the drug may cause inflammation of the pancreas, low blood sugar, digestive problems, allergic reactions and gallstones.

Other side effects include nausea, diarrhoea, vomiting, headaches, fatigue, dizziness, bloating, belching, heartburn and more.

How does Chinese medicine explain this faster way to fat loss?

woman sitting beside table holding cup — What passes for deep thought, over a cup of herbs!

(Please note! This is MY take on the subject, and also my FIRST take on it. I may well alter my opinion when I’ve seen enough people taking it for an extended period.)

How to assess and explain its effects?

First I consider how its manufacturers claim it works, then look at the side-effects.

Manufacturer’s claims for Wegovy etc

Semaglutide (in drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy) imitates the hormone in your body that tells your brain you are full, so to stop eating.

Usually for people not taking it, this hormone naturally kicks in when you’ve eaten enough. It tells your brain that you are satiated so to eat no more. So your appetite disappears. (Mind you, when pudding comes along, most of us are so habituated to the sweet taste that our desire for it can, at least for a while, quell the effect of the hormone telling us we’ve had enough!)

Delving further into the claims, it appears to slow down or retard the movement of food though your gut, specifically from the stomach into and then through the small intestine.

So, if things aren’t moving forward (down), they quickly back up, adding to satiety.

So … “These medications slow down digestion, which means food stays in the stomach longer,” said Dr. Alfred Bonati, the founder of the Bonati Spine Institute in Florida.

Worse is to come …

… because if food backs up too far, you might breathe it in.

That leads to ‘ a potentially life-threatening condition called pulmonary aspiration, when food or liquid is inhaled into the lungs’.

Pulmonary aspiration may damage your lungs, increasing the likelihood of infections, even death, warned Dr Bonati.

How Chinese medicine explains Wegovy

brown bonsai on top of table — Asian medicine for health

From this, at least in Chinese medicine, I’d say that semaglutide (eg Wegovy) retards the action of Stomach yang and Stomach qi. (These, in health, work to ‘descend’ food, to move it onwards.)

That means that food remains in the stomach organ and upper gut – your small intestine,. This reduces normal bowel action: in short, your abdomen distends and you start to get constipated.

This leads on to Stomach Qi stagnation.

But, from the side effects, it appears to do something else. This is to weaken how well your small intestine absorbs nutrition from what you eat.

Weak Blood

That means your blood is less healthy, a kind of anaemia, leading to shortness of breath, tiredness and sometimes dizziness. That means faintness if you get up too fast or walk too quickly without first taking a few deep breaths.

(To make more sense of what Chinese medicine means by this, click on Blood.)

Also, diarrhoea and tiredness, dizziness and some kinds of headache are symptoms of Spleen qi deficiency. If food stops moving through the small intestine and backs up, once the nutrition has been extracted from what’s there, there’s no further source of nutrients until – somehow – more food is forced down.

Other side-effects suggest that not only does semaglutide weaken or retard Stomach qi and yang, it leads to Stomach Qi rebelling, with symptoms like nausea, vomiting and belching.

So, my first diagnosis is that semaglutide-containing drugs lead to:

Put these together and their symptoms pretty well explain the effects and side-effects of taking semaglutide drugs.

woman in black and white shirt writing on white paper — Studying for health – so much to read!

To read all four pages linked above might take you a while. So, to check what I’m saying, I suggest you start by just looking at the symptoms of Stomach Qi stagnation. This and the other syndromes listed above show the drug can cause serious digestive problems, and possibly fatal intestinal blockages.

What happens next after taking these faster ways to fat loss drugs for a while?

Well, Chinese medicine has been observing us humans for a long time. It has seen what happens when one thing goes wrong: something else then goes wrong.

If we take just the case of Stomach Qi stagnation, what often happens next are various forms of what is called Blood stasis, then Heat and Stomach Fire, then possibly Phlegm.

(Just please note that Blood stasis, Heat and Phlegm are all potentially contributing factors to cancer.)

If I’m right – and it may take the important movers and shakers in Chinese medicine a while to pronounce on all this – then drugs based on semaglutide may indeed help around 15% of takers with weight-loss and also with anxiety and depression (30% improvement in a small study from University of Toronto in 2017).

However, if taken for too long it may cause the syndromes mentioned above and the more serious conditions to which they can lead.

What can be done about this faster way to fat loss?

burger beside fried potatoes with drinking glass — Junk food worsens health and digestion

It’s boring – what causes weight gain is well-known(!) – and you’ve heard it before but the best treatment for most people with obesity is a better diet, NO junk food, less sugar, less artificial sweeteners and less sweet food, more exercise and more good sleep. Look around you and see how people who aren’t obese live their lives and what they eat: hint, it often means learning to cook.
English Proverb – ‘Don’t dig your grave with your knife and fork.’ Instead, read up on what Chinese medicine means by nutrition and diet: often quite different from your ‘Western’ dietary advice.
If you develop severe symptoms such as from Stomach Qi stagnation and Spleen deficiency, for long-term health reduce or stop drugs made with semaglutide for a while. Practitioners of Chinese medicine such as acupuncturists and herbalists should be able to get your system working again, though the longer you have taken the drug and the weaker your health the longer treatment may take to succeed.
Exercise greatly helps many forms of depression and anxiety.
Exercise also helps you sleep better which improves your mental outlook and increases your energy.

By the way … “It’s easy to distract fat people. A piece of cake.” (Chris Addison)

people on beach during daytime — Outdoors and Exercise for health

What to do if, being on these drugs, you are due to have surgery?

As surgeons and doctors have discovered, going for surgery with blocked, distended stomach and intestines, is a bad idea. I agree, you should stop semaglutide-containing drugs WELL before surgery. They say a couple of weeks: I’d say make that a month, minimum.

Then, having stopped the treatment (mostly this is a weekly injection you give yourself), take treatment to normalise your digestion.

Please take advice, but what you need is some form of laxative that acts throughout your digestion. The trouble is that, if you’re all stuffed up, even ‘backed-up’, how to get the laxative down to where it can act!

This site is mainly about Chinese medicine, not Western medicine. So the following are ideas that occur to me, assuming you don’t have access to someone knowledgeable about Chinese medicine, such as an acupuncturist. But please, check with your doctor!

The following don’t involve swallowing food. Of course, once things start moving, you can consider using a laxative. However, if one of the following helps, why not stick with it?!

Acupuncture

An acupuncturist inserts tiny flexible, non-hypodermic, needles into acupuncture points, mostly on legs, arms or your back.

These influence how your digestion and bowels work, helping your Stomach ‘qi’ move food forwards and downwards. You will need several treatments, possibly twice weekly for a while.

Find out more on our frequently asked questions page on acupuncture.

Cupping is another therapy that many acupuncturists use. It moves blood, so may help move qi (energy). But your acupuncturist should not do this too strongly to begin with, because if, due to anaemia, you are short of blood, it’s not a good idea to try to ‘move’ blood to vigorously!

Homoeopathy

A homoeopath gives medicines known as ‘remedies’. You don’t eat these ‘remedies’, you suck them in your mouth – you don’t swallow them.

One of the most effective remedies (but not the only such, and for best results, see a homoeopath!) for food that won’t move forwards and is ‘backing-up’ is Nux Vomica.

Collection of homoeopathic remedies, from the past. — Homoeopathic remedies

You would take this probably in ‘low potency’, several times a day, for probably up to a week, keeping in touch with your homoeopath.

When taking Nux Vomica, or indeed almost any homoeopathic remedy, you’ll see faster results if you avoid caffeine, such as in coffee or coke.

If you’re also having acupuncture, please tell your acupuncturist that you’re taking a homoeopathic remedy – and vice versa.

Indeed, I would do either acupuncture or homoeopathy, not both. The effect of one might confuse the picture for the other!

Fluids

If you can, drink plenty of water, to help flush things through and downwards. Not caffeine-containing fluids, however. They are more yang and tend to push things upwards. Read our page on coffee!

Colonic hydrotherapy or colonic irrigation

This uses water to flush waste from your large intestine. It’s somewhat similar to an enema, but probably more thorough.

If you haven’t had colonic hydrotherapy/irrigation before, you will feel a little shy and apprehensive beforehand. This is normal! Get used to it, and afterwards you’ll feel better.

This helps make space in the lower part of your intestines for waste coming down from the upper part.

Your colonic therapist should also recommend foods to avoid.

macro shot of vegetable lot — Foods for digestion and health. (Though probably better if cooked, if your energy is low.)

Eventually, assuming you don’t go back on semaglutide drugs immediately, you should normalise your digestion with food containing plenty of fibre: green vegetables, whole grain bread or muesli, fruit and, where edible, its skin. Commonly recommended are broccoli, cabbage, sesame and chia seeds – but they are just the start!

Shiatsu and Tuina, also therapeutic massage

Tuina and shiatus practitioners know about the acupuncture meridians or channels, and can help to adjust them back towards health.

woman in pink long sleeve dress sitting on white bed — Shiatsu on arm meridian

Therapeutic massage is Western, but can be very good too.

Getting healthy before surgery

If you’re due to have surgery, you want to be in peak health beforehand. Surgery is a shock to your system. Get fit first!

The above suggestions are for where you can’t swallow properly because food is backing-up, so you are probably anaemic, depleting your health. Please try to normalise your digestion first, and eat some proper food for a while, get the goodness out of it and only then go for surgery!

For more, do please read our page on nutrition.