Ozempic doesn’t work for everybody

KERA's Think

KERA

Society & Culture, 071003, Kera, Think, Krysboyd

4.8 • 861 Ratings

🗓️ 3 September 2025

⏱️ 46 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For people seeking to lose weight, Ozempic can seem like a dream drug — but it doesn’t work for everyone. Andrea Javor is a freelance writer, and she joins host Krys Boyd to discuss her journey using Ozempic, the disappointment that came when the scale didn’t budge for her, and why doctors think GLP-1s can regulate diabetes without the weight loss. Her article “Ozempic didn’t work for me. I was furious – and ashamed” was published by The Guardian.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	GLP-1 drugs, the Wagovis and Manjaro's and Ozempics of the world help many people get closer to the body mass index their doctors recommend.
0:19.0	If these medications have a dirty little secret,
0:22.3	it is not that millions of Americans are using them to lose extra weight. It's that they don't
0:27.8	work for everybody who takes them. From KERA in Dallas, this is Think. I'm Chris Boyd. My guest
0:34.8	went on her first diet when she was 11. She's 46 today. And even during times
0:40.1	when she's managed to lose weight, the hold food has over her has never diminished. So when she was
0:45.7	prescribed a new medication she'd never heard of back in 2018 and told it might help her lose weight
0:51.4	among other things, she was excited. The drug was Ozempic, and although it worked as promised to help her get her blood sugar under control,
0:59.7	it did not deliver its most famous side effect.
1:03.1	About 13% of people taking OZEmpic don't lose significant weight on it.
1:07.6	But when the drug didn't deliver what is considered a socially desirable body size,
1:12.3	freelance writer Andrea Javer couldn't help but blame herself. She wrote an essay about her experience
1:17.5	for The Guardian. It ran under the headline, OZempic didn't work for me. I was furious and ashamed.
1:23.9	Andrea, welcome to think. Thank you, Chris. It's great to be here.
1:28.3	35 years is a long time to be on a diet.
1:32.5	What do all those years say about your relationship to food and to your body?
1:38.8	Yeah.
1:40.0	It's a great question.
1:41.9	I think for me, since I was young, it felt like food was something that I had control over, whereas, you know, other things in life I didn't. I moved around a lot as a kid. I went to, you know, four different schools and during formative years of my life. And it was really difficult to feel like I had control over anything.
2:02.0	And I think food became the thing that I was able to, you know, decide how much I would eat and what I
2:08.0	would eat. And it was really a comfort to me. So if I think about my relationship to food, I think
2:13.6	it's been very disordered for most of my life. And it's been a long journey of several decades trying to get that under control
	...

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