Donate Your Fat Clothes

I commemorated the 26th anniversary of my dad’s death this past weekend. I lit the traditional Yahrzeit candle, which lasts 24 hours, and said the ancient prayer in Hebrew called the Kaddish.

This time it was particularly significant because it also meant that I had lived longer than him. I know that such footnotes of survival are stupid in the rational world in which I walk on the treadmill, trade machine tools, and write weekly blogs. Yet it looms large to me.

Oddly enough, I also had my semi-annual appointment with my cardiologist yesterday, who listened to my heart, and checked my blood pressure, pulse, and oxygen. Happily, he deemed me okay. I noted that it was almost 15 years since my heart attack and naively asked him how I had lived this long. He told me bypass surgery is much less common these days with the prevalence of beta blockers and ACE inhibitors that control blood pressure, as well as pharmaceutical grade fish oil and statins to lower cholesterol. Add in the widespread use of stents, and death by heart disease will soon be less common than from cancer, which sadly has not been treated as successfully.

The negative side of the picture is the prevalence of overweight folks in America and Type II diabetes, which is too often its companion. But now the miracle drug we have been waiting for forever has begun to change the world. Novo Nordisk came out with a once a week injectable drug, Ozempic, to lower A1C (blood sugar), but its remarkable side effect is promoting loss of appetite and weight loss.

Theoretically, Ozempic is not a weight loss drug, but it is. If there was ever a clear signal that willpower and running six miles were not the only solution that works, it is Weight Watchers Corporation recently buying a telehealth startup called Sequence, which will prescribe weight loss drugs. 

The world has truly changed. My dad, grandmother, and grandfather all suffered from diabetes. The importance of Ozempic and new competitors hitting the market cannot be minimized.

I am no doctor, but I asked my endocrinologist about Ozempic and she had a one word answer–fantastic!

Her specialty is treating obesity. 

I did not plan to write a blog about medical advances, but as usual it wrote itself. 

As April ends and Spring actually looks like it might come a month into baseball season, I wish you all good health and long life. 

And please donate your fat clothes.

Question: How have you successfully lost weight?