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When it comes to weight loss, some of the most frequently asked questions revolve around effective strategies, suitable diets, and the role of exercise

How well does GLP-1 Semaglutide work for Weight Loss?

How well does GLP-1 Semaglutide work for Weight Loss

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Not to date myself. I’m getting old and gray headed now. But, uh, I finished my medical training and started in medical practice in earnest in 1998. And at the that time, uh, we were basically relegated to weight loss medications that were amphetamine driven. And everyone’s heard of amphetamines, just like the, the, the ill, illegally used amphetamines. They, they amp up your system, they make you jittery, all of these things, they burn energy and, and the treatment, medical treatment other than some side b 12 injections that, that we would use, that we were trained, even in 1998 I was trained. That was basically the only thing we had for weight loss. And of course, people lost weight because they were on legalized speed. They were on amphetamine. So they’re walking around, you know, at 10 times the rate. Uh, but even then they were still hungry. And the tragic thing is when we stopped the medication because of that, they gained it back quickly and sometimes even more with a vengeance. And we were also very concerned, I was always very, very concerned about the cardiac effects of amphetamines, you know, because their resting heart rate would go from what it should be in the low eighties or high seventies average up to, you know, approaching you, the resting heart rate needs to be controlled and the, the amphetamines raise those. So there were a lot of risk that came out from those. When you compare that. And shockingly 20 you advance that from 1998 20 years later to present day, that has still been the majority of physicians out in the general public are using those amphetamine based weight loss medications. Uh, that just don’t work. Then, then you go through to, to starvation diet. I’ve studied every diet on the planet, the Okinawan diet, the Paleo diet, you know, uh keto diets, all those things. And granted, we need to reduce our carbohydrate intake. We need to stabilize our protein intake. Carbohydrates really do cause a lot of weight gain. But this medicine stands out. It is so profound in the fact that the patient takes it and they don’t feel hunger. They, the, the number one thing that causes people to fall off the wagon with weight loss is they’re hungry. You’re fighting a natural urge to eat. You’re having to order a nice big steak at a, at a steakhouse and push yourself away from it. No, not this medic, not this medication. You can’t out eat this medication when you order that steak. Now, on what we’re using now, the profoundness of this medicine is you’re gonna take two bites of that steak and you’re gonna take the rest of it home to your dog. He’s gonna eat pretty good. Right. So, uh, that’s how profound it, it’s, it’s weight loss. It, it modifies your eating habits and your lifestyle and you, and after a while these patients get used to, they learn portion control because they’re just not hungry. There’s nothing worse than fighting hunger and satiety. Right. We’ve been there this limited. That’s what makes it profound. And that’s why I’m saying, do you realize I’ve got patients who had a gastric bypass surgery 15 years ago, gained the weight back and they’re on this now and they’re losing more weight. Documented, they’ve lost more weight on this medicine than they lost from gastric bypass surgery. And that’s profound.

How exactly does Semaglutide work?

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The medicine is basically a protein just like any other protein. The, the, the that, that control or that develop in the muscles of your body. Uh It, it’s, it’s so it’s very naturally occurring. We’re all born with this protein. But the problem is through the years, the protein begins to diminish. It’s very interesting. There was a study that was performed on people that it had ga uh gastric bypass surgery after the bypass surgery, they were secreting this protein at 10 times the amount before. Now. Now you would think logically that after a gastric bypass, you wouldn’t eat as much because the stomach had been part of it had been removed or it had been shrunken a bit in actuality for some unknown reason, they were secreting this protein at 10 times the amount as before. And that in fact, was suppressing their appetite because you see this pep this uh protein, this peptide as we call it goes to the brain penetrates the blood brain barrier that, that barrier, that uh uh between the spinal cord and the brain. And goes to a part of your brain called the hippocampus that controls your appetite. And your satiety. So what happens is when you’re taking this, you take a couple of bites of food and you’re full. So, the medicine is the, the, the, the most incredible thing is it is a naturally occurring protein isolated.

Will I still get all the nutritional value I need in my diet?

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Remember a portion size is typically determined by the palm of your hand. If you think about it, the palm of my hand is larger than the palm of a young 23 year old female. Her palm is gonna be smaller. Her portion size is gonna be smaller. My portion size is about like that. Well, if you look at three or four bites of steak, it fits in the palm of my hand, not fingers, just the palm. See. So, uh, it’s what it’s doing is bringing us back to the natural portion sizes that we are designed for. Now, I do have to say in, in patients that are very, uh heavy, greater than £300 even the 2 70 ranges. I’ve made it a mandatory thing to start a multivitamin because of the amount of weight that the, the weight loss is so significant and so quickly again, which is mind blowing. I’ve never had a weight loss medicine that I had to say you gotta take a multivitamin, you’re gonna lose too much weight, you know. So they have to take a multivitamin to make sure that they don’t get any vitamin. Uh, you know, deficiencies in that course. But it’s really not, they’re, they’re not under nourishing themselves. They’re bringing themselves down to the natural portion size. They should be consuming all along.

How do you customize the medicine for each patient?

Will I still get all the nutritional value I need in my diet?

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How fast will I see results?

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In my medical career. Uh This may be two of the most influential and and impactful and changing medications I’ve seen in my medical career to patients. And one of the reasons is as soon as you take that first, uh we like to actually try to get that medication for that patient on that very first visit, the very first dose because the impact is immediate. I mean, the next day, you will begin to feel the effects. Now, granted initially, remember we’re starting you at a quarter of a dose and a half and then we titrate you up to full, you’re, you’re, you won’t feel as much effect the first couple of weeks at that quarter of a dose as you will obviously at a half or, or, or, or the full full milligram, but you’re going to feel it right away the very next day. So usually after the very first day, the patient, the very first dose, those patients are hooked on the success and the feeling they get the immediate reduction of their satiety.

What is it that determines how much weight a patient will lose and how quickly it will it happen?

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The common denominator is weight and body mass index. We clearly see people, we have many patients as one we saw yesterday, uh, greater that started at greater than £400 uh, is now under the 300 is remarkably, has, has lost all of that weight. Uh, uh, approaching over £100 in 12 months had a very amped up. But the, the higher that body mass index is and the higher the larger amount of fat there is, the more rapidly they lose the weight. We have a lot of people that we actually have to pull the, it, it works so well. If they have a lower body mass index, they’re not quite as heavy, but they just wanna get down to their appropriate weight to their height. They’ll, they’ll lose at a nice consistent rate but not as dramatically as those that are, you know, 3 74 10, 4 50.

What results you’ve seen with your own patients?

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Every physician has patients that stand out. I still have some patients that when I think of them literally the I get chills or the hair stands up on my neck. You know, uh one of the most profound uh was a, a young mother, a single mother, really struggling uh had Children was, had had recently been evicted from her home. Although she was working hard, she was trying to find another place to live. She was struggling all the challenges of being a mother and she had gained north of uh well, she was over 415 pounds had gained a tremendous amount of weight from the stress of life. You know, women, particularly my heart goes out to females and they can relate to this so well after they have Children, the stress of life, sometimes they never lose that weight of pregnancy. And this was her case. And I’ll never forget when the, when she first came in the first visit, her hair was disheveled, long unkempt forward. Uh her body habit as she was looking down, her, her self esteem was low and she just started, she just started, she put 1 ft ahead of it. She took the first step, she went through the door and immediately within a month, the first month we were north of, of, uh, I think it was £17. The first month. Remember we talked, the more your BM, I, the more weight, the more dramatic the weight drops off. Uh, she told me, uh, very, um, poignantly how she had never been able to buy clothes or within the last 10 years of her life, at least in a regular store that they were so large, she couldn’t even buy them in a store. Um, slowly as the weight came down, she, she was able to, uh, to, to go to a regular store and buy clothes and the visits, the monthly visits, I saw her, her self esteem just perked up more and more and more. I saw this individual come out of a shell and now greater than £100 of weight loss. I mean, think about that, greater than £100 of weight loss. She’s sitting there, think about carrying around a sack with £100 every day. She is, she was facing knee surgery when I first saw her, she had already been at the orthopedic surgeon. Her knees. Think of the tremendous stress in that knee joint every time she walked up a, uh, a couple of steps, et cetera, she canceled the knee surgery. Her, uh, she comes in that office bounding with confidence she has bloomed like a flower. Uh She’s an inspiring individual. So this is unlocking a lot more that weight. It changes the traject, uh the trajectory of their life. It is life changing. It’s not just some superficial change where you can get into smaller clothes or wear a certain outfit you wanna wear, it increases the impact of your, of her life. I forget exactly how she said it one time but I think she said something on the lines of, instead of me, uh, looking at a life of 55 years, I’m looking at a life of 75 years now, which is true. It changes all of those. Remember, all of these patients that have that much weight are on a, it’s not a matter of, if they’re going to get type two diabetes, they’re going to get other medical problems. If their weight continues. Like it is. And we’re able to stop the, the process that leads to high blood pressure, uh, high cholesterol, high glucose readings by getting their weight down. It is such, uh, an empiric thing for quality of life and length of life.

You take the medication - what’s it done for you?

You take the medication. What’s it done for you?

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Well, my personal experience with this medication is what started the whole process because I moved into a new practice, begin working with a great position. Tom gently nudged and hinted that I had become overweight and was trying to encourage me to lose weight. Now, he himself was nicely trim and slim, but he actually produced a picture and showed me that he had been morbidly obese before and began to share with me the research on this peptide. He showed the article of people that had had gastric bypass and how it was released at 10 times the amount after gastric bypass. And, and he and I had the conversation man, if you could just, if we could just bottle that up and that, that little protein and, and sell it by the bottle. And of course, that’s exactly what we’ve, we’ve been able to bottle that up. It’s like a gastric bypass in a bottle really uh that it would be there. And so he uh convinced me to start the medication. I was reluctant, I am skeptical by nature as a physician. Uh due to my formal medical training, I’ve been burned by the previous uh weight loss treatments that were pushed toward me with my medical training that were amphetamine based and they just didn’t work. Patients just gained weight back. Anyone watching this can relate to that. So I started it and the very first dose within two days, my, my appetite was just decreasing. I just would not finish a meal when we went, uh, for a steak. Uh I was not completing, uh, I did, was not hungry. I, I’ve lost £42 to date and actually I’ve never tried medication myself before, but the results were so profound that I knew I had to share this. And so I’ve slowly began to learn more. I began to introduce more patients to it. And here I am sitting north of 900 patients. Now, I’ve changed a lot of lives and changed my life. I feel better. Uh, and my weight. I’m, I’m the weight that I was in college. I have more to go, but I’m on the process since, as in my adult life, I’ve never lost this much weight and kept it off. I just don’t eat as much as I used to eat.

How have you been able to keep the cost down, so it’s affordable for anybody?

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In today’s climate, particularly or any climate medication cost can be prohibitive. They have skyrocketed when you’re talking about a medication that is 1500 to $2000 a month. And you take a very powerful case like Shannon that walks into my office, a young single mother who went on a limited income, but she desperately needs to, needs to lose weight to change the course of her life and the amount of weight that she needs to lose that uh becomes very important. I think that there’s the, the, the new class of medications that involve peptides and proteins will change the face of medicine. But unfortunately, with that, because of the excessive commercial advertising and the development that went into those, they cost prohibitive candidly, they’re far out of the reach of someone like Shannon who needed that life changing uh medication and that and that life changing therapy. And so we have worked with our compounding pharmacy, worked, we and, and we didn’t have to advertise because word of mouth very quickly spread. If you look at a very small practice that I had in Florida in a rural setting, greater than 900 patients all by word of mouth. If you’re a truck driver or a waitress or a secretary like Shannon was, it’s pretty obvious people look at you and they see that you’re down £50 and they wanna know how you got there. And so because of that, we’ve been able to get the cost down so that the average American patient people like you and I can afford this medication.

What are some of the side effects from this medicine?

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I have to say first before we speak of the side effects and all medicines have them that the, that the side effects I’ve dealt with in previous medications, uh particularly those that are prescribed that have an amphetamine base uh that have been used frequently in the past. Uh Many of the doctors call those legalized speed. Pe many patients have gone to clinics and gotten those. They have tremendous side effects, tremendous danger to their heart and their heart rate, rapid heart rate, jitteriness, all those things that make them very uncomfortably and at the end of the day, those patients are still hungry. The side effects that we deal here with. Remember I told you the medicine come is secreted naturally by your intestines. It’s a simple protein called a peptide, simple protein. Uh And so the all the side effects have to have to do with gastric. They’re all G I the first two weeks, I always tell patients to anticipate maybe just a couple of episodes of some loose stool, very mild. Um But that’s fairly consistent. Some patients very rarely. I, in my personal experience, less than 5% will have a little bit of nausea, but we head that off by combining and adding a medication, uh that helps with the nausea, Zofran. Uh And so we supply the patient with that very, very low risk. It’s very interesting that later after you’ve been on the medication for about 4 to 5 months, it may transition into uh a bit of occasional constipation. Uh you may have some very mild indigestion. But when you look at the benefit, I’ve, I’ve never had a patient come back in and stop out of greater than 900. I’ve had less than five that stopped because they had nausea. That was just a bit too much for them or diarrhea, they could not control very, very route. Uh uh Rarely. Now we start the target dose of the medication is a milligram. And the way that we combat those side effects is we start very slowly. We, we, we, the, the medical term is titrate. So we’ll titrate the person, the, uh the patient at a quarter of a dose for the first two weeks, then we’ll go to a half dose for two weeks and then we titrate and move them up to the full dose by doing that. The, the side effects are basically uh uh a non issue on occasion. If we have someone that has a little more diarrhea or a little bit of nausea, we just, we just slow down the titration schedule and we’ll, we’ll keep them at a quarter dose, for example, three or four weeks or, or, or, or a half dose, three or four weeks. So they’re really comparable in my career. The side effect profile is extremely minimal.

Who qualifies for this treatment plan … who can take this medication and who can’t?

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Compared to the medicines I’ve used in the past for weight loss in my medical career because this is a naturally occurring protein. Once again, there are very few uh contraindications to qualify. You must not have ever had thyroid cancer. Uh, there is a very, very rare type of abdominal cancer called multiple endocrine neoplasia. One or men, one, that would disqualify a patient. And just so, you know, it’s very interesting and all the patients I’ve treated, I’ve not had one disqualified because of thyroid that, that presented with that type of thyroid cancer or men. One the third, it would be someone that’s had frequent uh, pancreatitis that would not, uh, that would eliminate them from, from being able to use that. But those are so rare and every patient I’ve enrolled in this medical treatment and this custom blended set of medications, not one has been disqualified because of those three. It’s that rare.

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