Is Ozempic Right for You?

How to Harness Psychology for Your Success

Weight loss drugs have burst on the scene with a frenzy. Take your injection of Ozempic, Wegovy, Monjauro, or Zepbound each week, and your weight will come off. It’s that simple.

But what if you’re my patient Janice?

Janice, who has struggled with binge eating in the past, had a flare up since her fourth child was born. Yes, Ozempic can help Janice lose weight. But it cannot help her deal with her underlying stress and disappointment at her husband’s lack of help. Will Janice’s weight loss with Ozempic solve her issues of loneliness and anger in her marriage? Unless Janice can confront these troubles directly with Mark, all the weight loss and injections in the world will not help her unhappiness with Mark. Unresolved sadness and anger eventually leads to the compelling urge to return to comfort eating and break-through bingeing.

Or what if you’re Melanie?

Melanie wants to get married like all her girlfriends. She believes losing weight will make her more “marriage eligible.” But, after losing some weight on Wegovy, Melanie became depressed. Not the reaction she was expecting! In her therapy, we discussed that, although she was feeling more attractive with the weight loss, she also realized how fearful she is of meeting a man and developing a committed relationship. “My parents had the worst marriage on the planet. I didn’t realize how frightened I am of repeating that history with a future husband. When I dropped some pounds and felt more hopeful to start dating, I also got in touch with a lot of worry about ever finding a loving relationship.” Fortunately, for Melanie, she has now brought these inner fears out to the light of day and can work to resolve them in her therapy.

Ozempic may be a step forward in resolving weight issues, but it’s only part of the picture of what healing looks like. If you’re an emotional eater who has depended on food to reduce your stress, numb your feelings, cope with depression, what will you do without the comfort and distraction of food once Ozempic has reduced your capacity to eat? Food, after all, is a “drug” that can help you detour, divert, and deny the undigested emotions that are gnawing at you.

To create your Comprehensive Personal Strategy and maintain your progress with weight loss, the psychological dimension of emotions that have fueled your overeating or bingeing in the first place needs to be addressed. Or you may be back “looking for love in all the wrong places.”

While on these drugs, it’s a perfect window of opportunity to address the psychological reasons and triggers that may have lead you to bingeing, eating compulsively, or finding yourself on a diet/weight gain cycle.

Key To Success: The Willingness To Feel

Sharon’s story is complex. Food, body image, and throwing up is woven into her history.

Sharon has been to many inpatient treatment centers, been prescribed a variety of medications, consulted psychiatrists, and has had multiple outpatient therapies. She came to therapy with me since going through another relapse. Nothing has sustained her recovery. Until now.

Sharon asks for my help to try Ozempic. Sharon began semaglutide injections two months ago, and twelve hours after the first injection, her urge to binge and purge lifted, she began eating normally, identifying when she was hungry and stopping when full. She began eating a variety of foods. She announces that she is now cured and has never felt better! The bulimia monster seems to have been driven away. Sharon is relieved and delighted. I am relieved and delighted. And yet…

And yet, I know that this relapse of Sharon’s bulimia was provoked largely because of her fear, anxiety, and denial that her mother is imminently about to die. She cannot face losing her mother which also means coming to terms with never having gotten what she needed from her. Changing her behaviors around food and losing weight is only part of the solution. But all the Ozempic injections in the world and all the weight loss she hopes for is not going to help Sharon with the emotional storm about to crash which she has pushed to the back burner with her consuming bulimia.

Anticipating the grief of her mother’s death is a deep hole within her that needs to be faced and spoken about, and Sharon needs to have the courage to feel and express her pain. People often “freeze” their grief by bingeing, purging, or starving. When there’s no excess food to keep numbing, the sorrow of grief will assert itself.

Now with Ozempic dialing down your hunger and your craving to emotionally eat, those unbidden feelings, previously numbed by food, will emerge to the surface. Emotions that are not “digested” will keep returning until they are dealt with. And we are not only talking about serious issues like grief and depression but also anger, loneliness, disappointment, frustration boredom, procrastination, – any uncomfortable feeling – can send emotional eaters to unwanted food.

The key to achieving success with the new weight loss drugs is to face the feelings that have been submerged behind your eating and to have the willingness and courage to feel your uncomfortable emotions.

Psychotherapy can be a vital component in the resolution of emotional eating, a place to work out anger, anxiety, depression, trauma, guilt, and grief. This can be a key ingredient for long-term and lasting recovery.

One crucial question a therapist may ask is, “After you lose weight with the semaglutide injections and are no longer obsessing about eating, what is the next issue that will come up for you?” This is a crucial question because you may have used food to push this “next issue” to the back burner. When asked this question, Emma offers, “Next up is thinking about divorcing my husband, but I’m really scared.” Jerry says, “Leaving my awful job, but I’m scared.”

Ozempic plus emotional exploration of your inner self can be the key to success. You can then learn to sink your teeth into life, not into your obsession with food!

Join Mary Anne and Bracha Banayan on February. 23 at 7:30 to discuss “Semaglutide and Emotional Eating” https://shorturl.at/ez3ey

Mary Anne Cohen is Director of The New York Center for Eating Disorder. www.EmotionalEating.Org.