What does it mean to be healthy? Is it the absence of disease? Can it be summarized with a number?

Unfortunately, we’re still pretty behind when it comes to fully understanding what it means to be healthy, and that is partly because our healthcare systems still rely on outdated measures to determine health status.

Ob*sity is described as a complex medical condition, brought on by many factors, that leads to excessive body fat. In recent years, we’ve even heard more and more about obesity being a disease, one that is complicated and still quite misunderstood. For such a complicated medical condition, we sure have a pretty naive way of defining and diagnosing it.  

Research shows both losing weight and restrictive dieting increase the risk for eating disorders. Many assume a restrictive diet has a name, rules, and a specific duration, but the term “restrictive diet” simply refers to eating less than your body needs. Not only are GLP-1’s prescribed in addition to restrictive diets, but they also make following a restrictive diet much easier due to their mechanism of action: extreme appetite suppression and delayed gastric emptying.

Weight loss injections have consistently increased in popularity for the last few years. So how did we go from a medication being used to manage blood sugar to being used as the punchline of every joke this award season? The weight loss injections we’ll be discussing today all fall under the class of GLP-1 receptor agonists. You may have heard various drug names like semaglutide, liraglutide, or tirzepatide, or popular brand names like Ozempic, Wegovy, or Mounjaro, though there are several more.