O-O-O-Ozempic!
From personal experience, one sure-fire weight loss technique is to catch Covid. Anything you put in your mouth tastes like cardboard and your stomach warns, “The next thing you eat is coming right back up.”
A less physically-draining but equally effective method is the highly-advertised diabetes drug, Ozempic. TV commercials show shiny, happy people romping with their grandchildren in sylvan settings claiming, “My A1C is way down and I lost fourteen pounds!”
Pretty much the sole disclaimers are:
“Do not use for Type 1 diabetes” That’s OK. I don’t have any diabetes in the first place. I just want to lose weight.
“Do not re-use injectors”. Oh crap. Needles are involved. Well, no pain, no gain.
“Do not use if allergic to Ozempic”. If my throat swells shut and I die of asphyxiation after shooting myself up with Ozempic, at least I can be buried in my 55 year old Army uniform.
Those TV commercials are working. Health-care providers wrote more than 9 million prescriptions for Ozempic and similar drugs in the final three months of 2022, If the commercials are true, Americans lost 9 million x 14 pounds = 126 million pounds before last Christmas (and probably gained it right back again). Experts estimate that only a little more than half of patients taking Ozempic have a history of diabetes. Medical insurance plans including Medicare do not cover weight-loss drugs. Ozempic is not cheap. Buying it at your local CVS will run $1,100 for a month’s supply. You need Donald Trump’s “honest” foot doctor (“Those fake debilitating heel spurs should keep you out of the Army”) to claim you have Type 2 diabetes to get your “swimsuit body” at a reasonable price.
Here’s a surprise. Ozempic use was compared in 15 major US cities. You would think that New York, LA, or San Francisco would lead the pack. Those cities are well-known for rich, vain people. The highest per capita Ozempic use was in, of all places, Cleveland. In fact, usage there increased by 480% year-to-year. Either Cleveland doctors are generous with their diabetes diagnoses, or Fashion Week — Cleveland will feature particularly thin models this year.
By Ed Dufton
