In the last few years, a Zempik or Manjaro managed to make millions of people lose massive amounts of weight with seemingly only mild side effects.
More than 1 in 8 US adults have tried the drugs and for the first time in history, the country's obesity rate actually fell.
At the end of 2025, the WHO added GLP-1 drugs to its essential medicines list for diabetics and released guidelines on how to use it for obesity.
For the first time ever, we have a medication that reliably, quickly and seemingly safely can make people lose weight, sometimes massive amounts of weight.
But, as with most things related to nutrition, health and weight loss, these medications are controversial.
There are many aspects to GLP-1s, but we'll focus on one today the potential medical revolution these drugs could mean for obesity, one of the most deadly chronic diseases of our time that over 1 billion people suffer from and that remains largely unsolved and underfunded.
It turns out GLP-1 drugs are the first effective medical treatment for obesity in medical history.
In 2025, more than a half of Europeans were either overweight or obese, plus one in three children.
And in many countries like the US, Mexico, Chile or Saudi Arabia, the numbers are even worse.
Today, this kills almost 4 million people each year and if trends continue, by 2050 one in three adults on Earth will be obese and half of humanity will be overweight.
When hearing the word obese, most people think of the extreme ends of the spectrum, but this is not correct.
It's not very helpful that the definition of obese is a bit vague, because bodies are pretty different.
So it can be a BMI of over 30, your waist to hip ratio, or a body fat percentage of over 25 for men and over 32 for women.
In the end, obese is a medical term that doesn't judge how you look, but if you have an unhealthy amount of body fat,
How did we get here?
For most of our history, food was scarce.
So when our ancestors found a calorie bomb, binging on it was the best of ideas.
The more sugar, fat and salt, the better.
Our brains are wired to love these foods.
They bring pleasure, enjoyment and mental release.
This helped us survive in a world where food was the most important thing to worry about each day.
And then the world changed overnight and suddenly our modern food environment hijacked our biology.
Food is a product now and has become cheap, calorie-dense and hyperpalatable, which means it's been engineered with addictive levels of sugar, fat and salt, making our reward centers go ballistic with joy.
About half of the products in a US grocery store are ultra-processed and many are labeled in ways that are deeply misleading, like the serving sizes on packs of chips.
Marketing strategies like value pricing and constant food ads stimulate us to eat more.
So, most people overeat regularly, sometimes without even noticing.
And this is very subtle.
Most people don't get overweight because they massively lack self-control.
They just eat a little bit too much over a long period of time.
Just a small excess, like the equivalent of half a Snickers over your maintenance.
Calories per day compounds to almost 5 kilograms or 10 pounds of fat after a year.
This is how most people get obese slowly, bit by bit.
Since being overweight is also shamed on top of being unhealthy, we try to fix our overeating behavior with all sorts of well behavioral methods.
The world is filled with diets and healthy habits campaigns, but if we look at the results, just telling people to eat healthier foods and to move more does very little in the real world.
Most people gain back most weight they lose during a diet within a year or two and often gain more afterwards.
Often through little fault of their own, because once you do lose weight, your body's also working against you by trying to bring you back to the fat baseline it was used to.
Really, the only reliable way to do it is a lifestyle change.
Not a break from calorie-dense food, but a lifestyle where you eat it only occasionally or not at all.
Which is not just very hard, but also feels like saying no to some of the best things in life.
Finally, there's simply hunger.
A really strong and hard to ignore signal from your body.
How hungry you are is genetic, so just through bad luck you may experience a lot of food noise and think about eating a lot.
And to make things worse, in many people who get overweight or obese, their hunger signal becomes dysregulated.
Not necessarily permanently.
But even after losing weight, it can take a long time before your hunger adjusts downwards again.
And this is exactly where GLP-1 drugs interact with our biology.
Before we get there, let's fix something easier first.
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And now back to losing weight.
Your hunger is hormones.
Many eating behaviors eat now or later chocolate or vegetables are actually governed by an orchestra of hormones that are not within your control.
You're not hungry in the evening because you decide to be or because this is when your body needs energy, but because your body releases certain hormones.
And it turns out your fat is one of the major regulators of this orchestra.
If you're overweight or obese, the excess fat is throwing your hormonal orchestra out of tune.
This may make you more hungry or push you to overeat more, creating insulin resistance that causes type 2 diabetes, and so on.
We made a video if you want details.
But there's one specific hormone that plays its tune quietly in the background, even in obese people the glucagon-like peptide 1, or GLP-1.
It's one of the hormones your body releases after a meal.
It tells your pancreas to release more insulin to keep blood sugar in check and slows down your digestion to keep food in your stomach.
And in your brain, it increases your feeling of fullness and being satisfied, curbing your appetite.
These effects are usually modest.
Once in your bloodstream, GLP-1 disappears in barely two minutes, its song quickly fading away.
So one day scientists had an idea.
What if we made artificial copies of GLP-1 that play the same song but louder and much longer?
A GLP-1 signal that stays in your body would boost insulin and silence appetite.
The first artificial GLP-1 was approved in 2005 for diabetes and in 2014 for obesity, but the revolution came with semaglutide and terzapatide, Ozempic and Monjaro.
Really powerful GLP-1 agonists that play their songs in your bloodstream for up to a week.
They send out a loud and steady signal that dials down your appetite 24-7.
You still enjoy food, but you feel full and satisfied much sooner, making it easy to not overeat.
And since the song never really switches off, you feel less hungry throughout your day, making you eat less often.
How intensely you feel hunger is largely genetic, so especially people who suffer from food noise a constant urge to eat.
Feel a huge psychological relief from the drug.
Finally, their body stopped screaming at them.
Suddenly, you're dieting without expending willpower, without really thinking about it.
It feels magically effortless.
By changing your biology, a drug changed your behavior.
But, hmm, is this a good thing?
Miracle drugs.
On the weight loss side, these drugs are incredibly effective.
In three months, you can lose 10% of your initial weight.
Three months later, over 15.
And after a year you may reach more than 20, a level of weight loss that used to only really be achievable through bariatric surgery.
In other words, GLP-1 drugs make excess weight melt away like nothing before.
We can't stress enough how unhealthy obesity is, causing everything from diabetes to heart attacks and cancer.
So the consequences for health are stunning.
Treatment with semaglutide cuts your risk of stroke or heart attack by 20%.
17 months of tezepatide crashes your chances of developing diabetes by 66%.
They also reduce sleep apnea, improve kidney and liver function, lower inflammation, cut cancer risk and may potentially slow Alzheimer's.
They might even boost fertility, as obesity often disrupts hormones and increases complications during pregnancy.
And there may be more positive long-term effects.
Some of these benefits are a direct result of weight loss but intriguingly, they sometimes occur regardless of how much weight has been lost, and some have been seen in patients who weren't obese to begin with.
We don't know why yet, but it seems like turning up the GLP-1 signal is synchronizing the whole metabolic orchestra, restoring a balance between brain, gut and body.
And, as if that weren't enough, GLP-1 drugs may also quiet other cravings.
They seem to reduce the use of alcohol, nicotine, cannabis and opioids.
Large trials are underway to confirm these effects.
If the results hold, they could become something unprecedented, real anti-addiction drugs.
But of course there are side effects, most commonly nausea vomiting, diarrhea and constipation.
Not fun but usually harmless and fleeting for the vast majority of patients.
More serious stuff like pancreatitis, kidney problems or gallbladder disease do happen, but for well under 5 of people.
So it's pretty risky to take these drugs without medical supervision, and in extreme cases they can land you in the emergency room.
While these drugs are not really that new, since diabetics have been using them for decades because now millions of people are using them we might discover new side effects in the coming years.
Apart from this, the main downside of GLP-1 drugs may come from their greatest strength rapid weight loss.
If you don't actively check what you eat, taking these drugs is just an unhealthy crash diet.
Any steep calorie deficit requires resistance, training and plenty of protein, or else you'll lose a lot of muscle along with the fat.
That's harmful at any age, but especially after 40, when building muscle gets harder and the risk of falls starts to rise.
So while these drugs change your biology, they don't do all the work for you.
Staying healthy still requires you to adopt healthy habits.
In the end, the same is true for these drugs as is for any other diet.
Without a lifestyle change, you either have to use the drugs forever or you'll probably gain the weight back.
After about a year, the weight loss slows down and eventually stops in most people.
At this point, you usually stop using the medication.
If you use that time to change your eating habit, you have a really good chance of keeping the lost weight off.
But about 25% regain a significant chunk and some 20% put back on all of it.
So for many, maintaining the results may mean staying on the drug forever.
Is this a bad idea?
Well, we don't know.
The newest generation of drugs is just too new, so there's no long-term data.
The first GLP-1s from 2005 haven't shown major issues.
Based on what we know today, it seems pretty clear that living with obesity is much unhealthier than living with drugs.
And to be crystal clear, this doesn't mean that these drugs are for everyone.
If you want to lose a couple of pounds but are otherwise healthy and have no chronic disease, these drugs were not made for you.
You really should go the traditional route first before you start injecting drugs.
Using it to get to unhealthy amounts of low body fat is definitely not a great idea.
In a nutshell, the best thing these drugs do is to remove the pressure of intense hunger and food noise, to give you a time window where you can change your habits.
You still need to change your habits though.
No drug can fix that for you.
Conclusion and opinion.
A recent study modeled what would happen if millions of US adults who are obese or overweight got GLP-1 drugs for life.
In just two years, about 50% of all obesity in the country would vanish.
Over the years, it would prevent 26 million cases of diabetes, 13 million cases of heart disease and 55 million premature deaths.
Which seems like a pretty good thing.
And new drugs that are in final trials promise to work even better.
Defeating obesity suddenly feels within reach.
Right now, the biggest obstacles are actually supply shortages and high prices, which make these drugs inaccessible for many who actually need them.
Patterns for semaglutide and tiazepatide will expire soon in many countries and prices for them will collapse as a result.
In the long run, increased production and plummeting costs seem almost guaranteed.
So, should we just inject obesity away?
Well, for now at least, it seems that there are few downsides, although please don't listen to internet videos and talk to your doctor before you make any decisions for yourself.
It's also important to remember that while these drugs are immensely helpful, they are not magic.
They make a hard thing easier, but it still requires you to change your habits and put in some effort.
They can gain us the time we need to fix the root causes of obesity.
But it does seem the future just got a whole lot healthier.
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