My Harrowing Experience with GLP1's
(00:01):
So all through my life when I went to an all girls boarding school, we had these giant buffets. I went to this New England boarding school and I was kind of thin, but then we would have these elaborate meals, like giant breakfasts with cook to order omelets and it was kind of a bit luxurious. So when I went to boarding school, I noticed I gained quite a bit of weight. I was like 120 pounds when I first went and then I went to like 140. So that’s kind of been a problem all my life. But all my life I’ve sort of stayed. I’m five foot six. I’ve stayed around 135, 140 pounds. And then genetically my mom as far as I can remember back my mom, my grandma and my great grandma right as they begin to age in their mid 40s and so on, they kind of pull the rip cord and that midsection kind of comes.
(01:12):
And so genetically I look exactly like the inherited template of all of my family. So I think like hormones and genetics are a huge part of it. It makes me sad when they blame women as they get older for being kind of lazy inactive and overeaters and do a lot of emotional blaming of women when they kind of get that midlife, midsection. So first and foremost, I’d like to say it’s very common that women will kind of round out as they age and get that sort of midsection belly fat. So if that happens to you like it happened to me, I just want there to be a lot of self care because I mean it’s hard. There’s a lot of social culture around being really thin and nowadays since almost all of Hollywood is on Ozempic, there’s this new trend of that kind of like 80s heroin addict aesthetic of like super thin and like these women look really scary to me.
(02:15):
They can see their ribs and their jaw indentations. So I don’t think it looks very attractive. And they have done studies with male responsiveness to women’s attractiveness and women that were more round and more full looked healthier than those sort of skeleton, super thin women. So I still think being a little bit round and soft and healthy for women is more attractive than … I’d rather be me now even overweight than super skeleton. But with the social pressure and you know, when you start to women as they start to age, I’m part of that whole group that starts to have that whole entire metabolic syndrome where you have higher cholesterol, your blood pressure can go up, your weight goes up, and then it can start making impacts on like your ability to go on long hikes or I love to dance. I’m an old deadhead so I love to go out dancing for hours at a time and you know, so I jump up and down.
(03:27):
So I jump and spin and stuff like that and after I come back dancing, I’ve noticed my knees really hurt and so I don’t want anything to prohibit my ability to dance in this life. So I started to go on a GLP-1 with all the social pressures like, “Okay, I’m going to take these medicines.” And I don’t have diabetes or even pre-diabetes so I had no comorbidities that would approve it through my insurance. I have really good insurance. I have UnitedHealthcare, but I tried really hard with my doctor, but my BMI was not high enough and I didn’t have anything that could prescribe them. So I had to buy them sort of on this tree. So these compounding pharmacies and I bought them aftermarket. Actually I did first try, I know that Eli Lilly has got a direct to consumer product if you don’t have type two diabetes where you can pay out of pocket.
(04:31):
It’s like $400 a month and that was my first experience. I tried Tirzepatide. I think it was called Zepbound and I would inject it into my stomach once a week and I started to get this like 10 by 10 inch round welt. It didn’t start right away. It was like after the fourth or fifth week I would have this giant well and it would get bigger and bigger and I felt like I was having a distinct allergic reaction to it. So after about three months on the tirzepatide, I had to go to the urgent care because I was having like systemic kind of rash and my lips started to swell up. So the urgent care doctor said, “You have to immediately discontinue the Tirzepatide. You’re having a systemic allergic reaction to it. ” I was like, “Oh no.” I’m like, “One of the unlucky ones, everyone’s losing like 65 pounds super thin and I like can’t even … I’m really med sensitive, so I wasn’t able to use Tirzepatide.” And it really worked like food just was disgusting to me and the thought of eating anything was like exhausting and unattractive.
(05:58):
It really, really curbs your appetite and I can see how there’s a correlation between the compulsion to use drugs and alcohol, anyone who’s an alcoholic, my God, these GLP-1s, they just kind of cut that kind of compulsive, like snacky kind of you’re bored and you want to find something externally. It just sort of cuts that. So they’ve been really invaluable I think in the milieu for addiction, but I couldn’t take them. I was like, “Well, okay.” So I didn’t lose that much on it. I was on it for what, three months or so, three, four months and I think I lost about … I weigh myself in kilograms because it seems like less and anyone that has a stigma or feels that they would have a huge self-esteem issue by seeing 180 pounds on the scale or something like that. Go ahead and weigh yourself in metric because then it sounds like a lot less, at least as far as just the stigma and the self-esteem.
(06:59):
So I was weighing myself in kilograms during the time on my Tirzepatide, I think I only lost about three or three and a half kilograms. So it wasn’t like 20, 30, 40, 50 pounds that you’re seeing with some of the other people. So it was a lot of money. I was paying like $399 a month and I had an allergic reaction and virtually no weight loss. So I took some time off of taking GLP-1s and then I started up again through a compounding pharmacy, one of these things like AgelessRx or there are a few different ones out there and I was taking the oral sublingual so you put a little drop of liquid under your tongue and you hold it before you eat in the morning and it’s supposed to go right into your blood system. That didn’t work at all. I didn’t notice any appetite suppression and zero weight loss.
(07:56):
So for me, the oral didn’t work at all. I know there’s like a product called Rybelsus and I think now Ozempic is becoming oral. So the oral ones didn’t work. Maybe I just couldn’t hold it under the tongue enough or I don’t know, maybe I was taking it incorrectly, but I experienced no weight loss and no appetite suppression. So then we tried again like really relentless trying really hard to use these because I wanted to be like thin and beautiful and I tried again and I got a prescription for oral semaglutide and everything was going pretty well. I wasn’t losing a whole lot of weight. I think I was on those for about half a year and because I’m pretty med sensitive I could stay on the entry level dosages like 2.5 milligrams or 0.25 milligrams and I noticed a distinct appetite suppression like I didn’t want to eat at all when I was on it, but they kind of made me feel sick and I’ll tell you why I had to discontinue.
(09:09):
So the day that I would take my injection, I didn’t have an allergic reaction to them like I did the tirzepatide, but I would take the injection and I’d feel like nauseous, really sick, like sick and kind of dizzy and tired. I would kind of take the injection and I’d like lay on the couch. I can just be sick and I didn’t feel like I have a gym membership, I have a house that’s got all these beautiful hiking trails. I have an at home gym that I started from COVID, I do yoga. I just was like, I didn’t want to do any of that. I was like, I’m just going to stay here and be a nerd because it does something to your digestion and your stomach and how you metabolize food and it does something to your sort of food signals. So I was under eating and tired and it felt like I had a stomach virus.
(10:05):
So you take an injection every week. It was about the first four days I would just be like nauseous and just had to like lay there and watch TV, like just not even justly inert. I couldn’t move at all and so that didn’t feel good, but I was losing a little bit of weight and I wasn’t eating, but not really losing a huge amount. So I think I was on the semaglutide for about six months and I was kind of building up to the higher doses. So finally I was titrating up. I went up to one milligram and one milligram is where it started to be a therapeutic dose. I kept going back to my doctor. I’m like, “I’m the only one that I’m just eating … I must have been eating around 1,000 to 1,200 calories a day. I just didn’t feel like snacking or eating, but I also didn’t feel like moving, so they just made me ill.
(11:01):
And once I got up to that one milligram, I was taking a shower one day and I just noticed a huge amount of my hair falling out. I was like, oh my God, this is terrible.” It was like coming out in droves. It was even coming out not just in the shower, just I was shedding all over my clothes.
(11:22):
I was just shedding. I would just be standing there feeding my cats and my hair, like a pile of hair would fall out. It was like really terrible and frightening. I had read about it. Now the doctors don’t tell you. See, this is the scary thing. I didn’t feel that there was any type of informed consent. This was all being prescribed to me by my primary care doctor who’s like, I have one that’s a weight loss expert. He’s like the king of prescribing GLP-1. So he was overseeing it even though I couldn’t get it through my insurance. I was buying it aftermarket through a compounding pharmacy, but he was still overseeing the process and I go to him and I’d be like, “Oh my God, my hair is all falling out. ” And he’s like, “Well, it’s temporary,” but it didn’t feel temporary. And I read from a lot of blogs and people’s experience on these … I read an article through the National Institute of Health and they were saying that that hair loss from GLP-1s was permanent and not coming back.
(12:27):
It wasn’t just like a shedding process, they call it TE I can’t quite pronounce it, but it’s a shedding process where your follicles will go through like a shedding and then regrow back, but people were saying that people on GLP-1s, it’s so new how many people are using them now that hair loss might be permanent. And it was really scary. It was like I could really feel my ponytail becoming like half the size and I had like a handful of hair, not only in the shower, but then when I would brush it afterwards, I’d pull the hair out of the brush and it would be like another handful of hair. So I was really scared and I talked to my husband and he says, “Well, I would rather you be a bit overweight than bald.” I was like, “Oh my God, I was really scared.” So of course now I discontinued again the GLP ones and I just couldn’t … I felt like my body was telling me that it was having maybe a systemic allergic reaction to them.
(13:35):
I did notice something like before the hair started to fall out, my scalp felt like really inflamed, like it was itching and kind of burning, which was sort of almost the same feeling I had with the tirzepatide, like maybe a low grade systemic allergic reaction and I know if you have an allergen you can lose your hair and I didn’t just lose it on the top of my head. My eyebrows were getting thinner, my eyelashes and also the hair on my whole body. My daughter looked at my arms and she said, “Mom, you don’t even have any hair on your arms anymore becoming like amphibian.” So I didn’t lose all my hair. I still have like half of it left, but it hasn’t come back now and I have discontinued the oral semaglutide since December. I’ve stopped around Christmas because that’s when I noticed the hair loss.
(14:32):
So it’s been a few months.
(14:37):
It’s been about four months since I’ve discontinued and I’m still having hair loss. It still scares me, but it’s a lot better. I tried Nutrafol- since I’m med sensitive it had something called saw palmetto in it and that made me anxious. It kind of acts like a human growth hormone and I was having insomnia and anxiety. So as soon as I discontinued the Nutrafol I felt better. I’m just really sort of med sensitive. I can’t take weird chemicals a lot of Western pharmaceuticals anything if it’s got a side effect I’ll experience the side effect. So a lot of us are sort of med and chemical sensitive. So then I tried, I’ve got like rosemary oil for the hair so I’m using that and then I found that one product called the Ordinary Hair Serum. It’s not very expensive. I think it’s like $20 and I put that on just about once a week and that seemed like that was the turning point and I just wanted to also say that I feel unhappy that there are a lot of dangerous health side effects.
(15:56):
I think they’re talking about possible bone density loss. I mean, my God, if your bones start to become porous, I’ve worked with seniors for a really long time. That’s one of the most dangerous things is you break a hip or start breaking bones. I mean, my God. I don’t know if that’s been medically proven, but there had never been so many people on these GLP ones till now, so there’s more research than there’s ever been and hair loss, especially for women. My dermatologist said to me, “One in 25 women are experiencing significant…” It’s not just a little shedding, we’re talking like handfuls of hair from the GLP-1s. When I went in there, she said I was the third woman that day coming in as a side effect for hair loss. And the doctors don’t tell you. I mean, maybe it’s in the small print somewhere or super tiny, but they don’t say, “Hey, you could become super nauseous.
(16:51):
You don’t want to move. You don’t even want to exercise like your muscles are all going to be eaten alive by this. It actually metabolizes your muscles you lose.” That’s why you see these Hollywood freak shows. They look so frightening and scary because they lose not only fat, but they begin to erode your muscles. Then the people are like undernourished. They call it Ozempic face, these gaunt eyes and this pale kind of … They got all wrinkly and old.
(17:23):
I mean, being a little bit overweight or even class one obesity looks better than what we’re seeing here. These people look horrible. So I am strongly opposed to them for health reasons, the lack of informed consent and my own experience. I felt like my body was just really rejecting them. They change everything. They change sort of how quickly you metabolize food, your digestion slows down, it dehydrates you. You can become undernourished, tired. So I don’t think that they’re the panacea of the … There’s no pill for obesity and that it’s the godsend. I think that we’re going to pay for it on another end because people aren’t really making the proper lifestyle changes with diet, exercise, nutrition and overall health. It’s like a thing that makes you sick. So even though they’re working for some people, it’s bringing down diabetes, bringing down heart disease, they may be very well paying for it on another … Robbing from Peter to take from Paul paying for it in another way.
(18:31):
So they’re scaring me now. So I wanted to offer my own personal experience with this. I work in health coaching and I’m not any type of medical professional whatsoever, but I just wanted to share my experience. I had put two affiliate links on this page. One is for the ordinary, you can buy that on Amazon and the second one, and this is what I really want to talk about. I’m not just trying to push a product, but this has really been helpful. I have tried a number of weight loss supplements, all kinds of concoctions. I’m a huge supplement person. I don’t tend to have side effects from supplements that you get over at Whole Foods Market, but I found one called GLP Support and there’s a link to it here on this page and it is almost the closest to a real GLP-1 medical prescription and so it’s very inexpensive.
(19:35):
I think it’s like 19 or $20 for 90 capsules and you take two per day and I’ve been taking that for a few days now and I feel almost exactly the same way that I felt on the semaglutide. I just don’t feel that sort of craving for snacking like, oh, sitting down with a whole bunch of popcorn or like there’s no kind of like overeating, like having second portions, like I’ll have just one portion of dinner and I won’t want to have seconds, but I don’t feel any weird side effects like being tired, my hair’s not falling out. That process has pretty much stopped. As I said, it comes out a little bit now, but it’s nothing like what it was. So I highly recommend if you have been considering a GLP-1 to try this natural supplement on Amazon and I’m really saying this from firsthand testimony.
(20:31):
I’m not trying to just push a product. I think they give me like a dollar commission person. So I’m not like saying this to you to try to push some type of funnel here. I really mean it. And if you’ve been wanting to lose weight and wanting to have some of the side effects from a GLP-1 mitigated, then you could try this natural product here. It’s called GLP-1 support and it’s amazing. I just called a friend yesterday and I said, “You got to try this. ” So I’m making a personal testimony to the efficacy of these two things. One, if your hair’s falling out, the ordinary and then secondly, the GLP-1 support supplement here So I wish you well and if you are considering going on a GLP-1, please just be informed that it can have side effects that don’t really go away. They say that there’s this, “Oh, you’ll kind of be okay after a couple months.” No, the side effects for me never went away.
(21:35):
They got worse and worse and worse and the hair loss point was really scary for women. I mean, men look great without hair, but women, we don’t look so good so I didn’t really want to lose my hair prematurely. So yeah, try it out and also if you do try it, would you come back to my blog and write a comment because I want other people to know if it’s worked for them and thank you so much for listening to my story and health and well wishes to everyone and please before you start on a real GLP-1, don’t be enticed by them being oral now because they don’t work that well. The injectables, there’s a lot of side effects I’m really concerned about our consensual health problems. They made me really ill, but these supplements are working. So yeah, well wishes to everyone and thanks so much.
Dawn Boiani-
Health and Wellness Coach
