Are Wegovy, Ozempic & semaglutide worth a shot?

One writer's yearlong journey on the weight-loss drug

Feb 02, 2025

My year on Wegovy: How semaglutide changed my perimenopausal life

The author chose to share her story anonymously

I’ve spent the last year in a pretty exclusive club. In February 2024, I began weekly doses of Wegovy (semaglutide), which I injected into my belly. As a Gen X GAL a few years into perimenopause, I’ve gained a ton of weight — to the point that my labs were screaming at me in all caps: YOU IN DANGER, GIRL.

How it started: On the struggle bus

I received the prescription from my regular doctor in November 2023, after asking if she would prescribe it to help me lower my skyrocketing A1C levels. I’d been over 200 pounds (around 233) for a few years, without any luck of shaking it through exercise or diet changes. My blood pressure was high, along with my A1C which was at the top of the “pre-diabetes” range. She agreed, but it wasn’t that easy. I still had to navigate the wild waters to obtain the drug, which was unavailable anywhere.

I spent months calling a handful of local pharmacies — ranging from national chains as well as a few mom-and-pop options. I’d hear the same thing over and over: they didn’t have Wegovy in stock but they could attempt to get some for me if I went through the process of transferring over my prescription to their pharmacy. But there were no guarantees.

At one pharmacy, the pharmacist legit laughed at me over the phone when I asked how possible it was to get the drug. I was heartbroken. I even called the pharmacy benefit manager associated with my insurance to see if they could recommend any other options — like running for the border in Canada. But they said neither was a viable solution for me.

The weighting game

I waited and even considered joining one of the growing number of “medical spas” in my city, which offered their own cocktail of GLP-1 drugs with a hefty “membership fee” tacked on each month. But what would cost just a few hundred dollars with my insurance at a normal pharmacy would cost thousands through a med spa — with no guarantee that their elixir (called “compounding” in pharmacy speak) would do the trick.

I hemmed and hawed and waited it out a little longer. At the end of 2023, Novo Nordisk, the company that makes Wegovy as well as Ozempic, promised that they would be ramping up production in early 2024. I had hope.

But January came and went. My doctor was out on maternity leave, so I met with her fill-in for a check-up — and my labs were even worse from the holidays. But this time, the substitute doctor had new ideas for sourcing my prescription: mail order. Low-and-behold, CVS Mail Order Pharmacy had the injections, and I was able to get my first “starter” doses of Wegovy in February 2024.

I continued with CVS as I ramped up my dosing, and now I get Wegovy at my local pharmacy. (Since last spring, CVS Mail Order Pharmacy stopped carrying Wegovy completely, citing costs.) Finding doses locally has now become easier, partly due to increased production — partly as initial Wegovy users discontinued their medication.

I remembered those days of my own dieting so well — and I realized how diet-charged our existences had become. And how toxic diet culture permeated everything.

Scaling down: How Wegovy works and feels

Because Wegovy (like other GLP-1 inhibitor drugs) works to make your stomach empty slower, it can be a bit of a shock to your system. Patients start on a very low dose — just .25 mg each week for the first month, administered via epi-pen injection. It’s then increased (if you’re tolerating it well) to a .50 mg dose. Then 1 mg, 1.7 mg, and finally 2.4 mg as the final dosage. In normal circumstances, this takes five months, but sometimes patients repeat a month or go slower per doctors’ instructions on individual tolerance.

First, almost immediately, I felt a physical fullness creep into meals. Especially when eating later in the day. I wouldn’t say that I had cues to stop eating all the time, but if I took it slowly and served myself less, I would hit the end of a meal having eaten less than I used to. In fact, that was the one overarching tip my doctor gave me: put half of what you’d normally eat on your plate. It was the best advice I received on managing the effects so I wouldn’t feel like I had to throw up. This worked well to make me feel satisfied and “normal,” even while suddenly consuming less food.

The silence of “food noise”

The problem with eating habits are, well, they’re habits! And by the time you hit your 40s, you’ve definitely gone on autopilot with food. Food was and still is pretty tied to emotions. The biggest change I experienced at the start of taking Wegovy was a turning down of the “food noise” in my head.

I never heard a name for this emotional eating that fit so well as this phrase. It’s almost like I didn’t realize how loud or constant it was until it was gone. (Like tinnitus suddenly lifting.) No more did I feel like I had to go and raid the pantry for something salty or sweet at certain times of the day. And I didn’t even want dessert now? (Who was this person?)

I found myself skipping whole meals because I wasn’t hungry — I didn’t even notice. Previously, I might have gotten shaky or light-headed if I skipped lunch, and now there was nothing to even remind me to eat.

I didn’t even want the big dessert because food had no intrinsic value past just being food. It wasn’t charged with categorical goodness or evil. It simply was there to be enjoyed.