In June of 2023, Kim Francis did something that 10 years ago would have been unimaginable, but is now as American as apple pie: She shot herself up with Ozempic, praying it would change her life.
“My blood sugar was out of control. My weight was out of control,” she said. And yet, despite her worsening arthritis and type 2 diabetes, she still craved food.
She also craved alcohol, and was beginning to worry that her drinking habits were unhealthy.
And then, just like that: One shot took it all away. Her daily drink turned into one a month, her chronic joint pain vanished, she dropped 25 pounds. Ozempic didn’t just improve her health, it gave her choices—to do “things in life that I wasn’t doing before,” like going to the gym each day. She was finally sleeping through the night.
And yet when we spoke recently, she said she wasn’t sure Ozempic had made her life better. “My mind and my day-to-day is kind of gray,” Francis told me. In the first 48 hours after she injects herself—which is every week—the emotional impact is almost unbearable. “I just feel worthless,” she said.
This is the trade-off of weight loss for her: “You don’t want to be involved in life” for two days of every week.
