Is it too late to welcome in the new year? At the beginning of January, 87% of people resolve to get healthier.* Most of them are looking to lose weight.
I was one of those people last year. I reached a high of 197 pounds shortly after Thanksgiving. At 5 feet, 8 inches, that’s a BMI of exactly 30. I was medically categorized as obese.**
Fortunately, that high was not the norm. Thanks to the Fitbit app and my Fitbit Aria scale, I can see that I averaged 191.5 pounds last December. That’s better, but not much better.
I made a resolution to make some lifestyle changes, and I wrote about them in every monthly update. By June, my average monthly weight was down to 179.4 pounds. I haven’t had an average annual weight under 180 pounds since 2016. I was particularly proud to get to this point.
Then I hit a wall. For the next five months, my weight was within one pound of that 179.4 pound average. I aimed to get to 175 but couldn’t break through the wall.
In early November, a friend of mine got generic Wegovy from a compounding pharmacy. She said it was transformative. She didn’t desire food after dinner and often skipped breakfast. She said it was a cheat code for intermittent fasting.
Even if you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve probably heard about the weight loss drugs Ozempic and Zepbound. Some health insurances will cover them, but typically, it requires a person to have multiple medical conditions—obesity itself isn’t enough. Without insurance, the medicine can be more than $1000/mo. For some people, that’s worth every dollar. For many others, that’s an absurd amount of money.
In many ways, this is a uniquely American problem. A month of these weight loss medication in Canada costs between $200 and $300. In Japan, it’s around $175.
My friend had a bit of a solution. Her price was $400, which was reasonable enough for her. I had read of cheaper prices in the news, so I offered some alternatives if she wanted to save money. However, this got me thinking, “How cheap can I get this, and is it worth it for me?”
The Quest for Cheap Generic Wegovy (Semaglutide)
To start, I didn’t consider generic Zepbound. It’s been shown to help people lose more weight, but it’s almost always more expensive. That’s a great fit for some people. I didn’t want to jump into the pool. I was just curious to dip my toes in the water.
I found a lot of suggestions on Reddit. Originally, I was going to go with Henry Meds. Their $300/month prce is a good savings over what my friend was paying. I looked into Hims, which has been successful for me to grow hair so far. The problem with Hims is that the cheapest pricing is for a year commitment. At the time, it was $200, but it’s a little lower now. Without a year commitment, the pricing varies, but it was closer to the same price as Henry Meds.
The best value in my search was Lavender Sky Health. If you click on that link, you’ll notice that the website looks like your aunt designed it in the early 1990s. Nonetheless, everything is functional. What is the price for semaglutide on Lavender Sky? It’s around $250 for 10 weeks, depending on the pharmacy you choose.
Now is a good time for me to disclose that this is NOT a sponsored post, and I DON’T make any commission if you decide to go with them. In fact, I could make a few dollars if I suggest you go with Hims. So many people have asked me in real life that it only made sense to write about it.
Lavender Sky performs the service of getting you a prescription written and connecting you with a pharmacy. I completed the online questionnaire in just a few minutes and paid a $65 fee for their doctor to review it. Within a day or two, I was approved, and the pharmacy processed the prescription. I think it can take 5-10 business days, but I had my medication in around 5 days. It was quite quick. I could have asked the doctor questions, but I didn’t have any. Also, since my wife is a pharmacist and was on board with this experiment, I was very comfortable.
With the prescription fee ($65) and medication ($250 for 5mg), I ended up paying $315. However, because this dosing is for 10 weeks, my cost was around $136 a month. Once again, this is not the brand name medicine, and this may be a concern for some people. You may want to review the the FDA’s concerns about these compounded medicines. I had one day that I felt sick in the last 8 weeks that I’ve been on it. I don’t know how fair it would be to tie it to this prescription. It could have been any number of things.
I recently ordered my first refill. That required a $45 doctor consult to review how the initial prescription went. The consult was just me filling out a form and waiting a day for the doctor to approve it. For the refill, I had the option of going to tier two, which is $300 for 10mg of medicine. If my body doesn’t build up resistance, I may continue to stay at a low dosage and stretch the medicine longer. It’s twice as much medicine, so it should last for 20 weeks. If I need to up the dosage, it could reasonably last for 16 weeks. That would bring the pricing to around $90 a month.
There’s still yet another tier (25mg) that I could go on and stretch the medicine 2.5 times further. That could almost last me a full year and be under $500. I don’t see myself going to that level though.
My Results So Far
Wow, I used a lot words building up the anticipation for this haven’t I? Time for the reveal.
To start, here is how my weight loss has gone over the last year.
I wanted to show the progress that I’ve made with traditional diet and exercise. This graph shows that my average weight was 181 – down from last year’s average of 189. However, you can see that December’s average was 176 – so a loss of 13 pounds. You can also see that not much happened from June through November.
I use an old Fitbit Aria that syncs body fat to the Fitbit app. Google discontinued all Fitbit scales that report body fat percentage, so it would take some research if it ever breaks down. Here’s my body fat over the last year:
That shows a similar trend with the weight loss. It’s important to measure body fat because it’s no good if you are just losing muscle.
Those two graphs were still a bit tease. It doesn’t show the changes since I started with Lavender Sky Health very well. It also ends in December, which leaves a week of January out of the picture. Let me do better.
Here’s my weight loss over the last three months. Keep in mind that only the last 8 weeks have been on semaglutide. (November 15th was my first day.)
This shows that on average I’ve lost 2.6 pounds since the previous 3 months. However, I’m more focused on the current number which is around 174. That’s a loss of around 5-6 pounds. That’s very significant, considering that I have plateaued for about six months.
And my body fat over the last 8 weeks:
This graph is a little anticlimactic, but I felt it was necessary for completeness. I’d like to get under that 22% body fat percentage, but I need to increase my exercise for that.
Side Benefits of GLP-1s
There are a bunch of reported benefits aside from weight loss. Snack and alcohol companies have been concerned about the loss of sales from customers who take these medications. Boo hoo! Cry me a river.
I’ve noticed that I don’t need to spend as much at the grocery store. There’s no way that someone can save enough at the grocery store to counter-balance a $1000+/month bill for these medicines. Even at $100/month, the savings might not add up to break even. However, the savings are significant. If you eat at restaurants a lot, perhaps GLP-1s will save a few expensive meals.
Some people report that they have no desire for snack foods. I haven’t experienced this benefit yet. It’s just less of a need to eat food in general.
Personally, I’ve noticed that I don’t have much of a desire for alcohol anymore. I had a few drinks at a Christmas party, and that’s about it over the last 8 weeks. Research on GLP-1s suggests that they may help curb alcohol addiction. Even if I was at my ideal weight, I’d want to continue the GLP-1s for this benefit.
The various health benefits could be transformative. These medications were originally designed for diabetes, so it’s clear that they’ll help there. Many health conditions are linked to obesity. Less obesity directly translates to fewer chronic diseases. With the recent push to formally label alcohol as a cause of cancer, it’s another reason why cancer rates could fall.
How do you put a price on reduced chronic diseases? Financially, there is certainly a number and it’s huge. The quality of life is more important in my opinion.
Are These GLP-1s Legal? If So, For How Long?
For now, the compounded GLP-1s (semaglutide and tripeptide) are legal. The legal landscape is changing rapidly. The owners of the patents on the drugs want to sell them for more than $1000 a month. It’s not great for their business if you can get them for around $100 a month. The compounding pharmacies are allowed to make and sell the drugs because demand greatly outweighs the supply. However, as manufacturing ramps up, it’s possible that compounding pharmacies will lose the right to make these drugs. This would likely create a situation where people can’t afford them anymore.
Final Thoughts
The food industry has engineered a bunch of synthetic ingredients and food additives that create cravings. It’s not a coincidence that Pepsi owns Lays – the sweet pairs with the salt. In the last couple of years, research has started to show how dangerous these ultra-processed foods are. Sadly, so many foods are ultra-processed. It’s almost impossible to escape them. When you are stuck in a rat race, you often don’t have time to cook real food from real basic ingredients.
It’s somewhat ironic that the pharmaceutical companies are selling the solution to a problem that the food companies created. At least there’s something that now fights against the problem. We’ve watched obesity rates climb for decades. That’s not just in the United States but around the world. It’s easy to say that people should take some personal responsibility, but the impact on the environment can not be discounted. You can only fight so many battles, right?
Many people need these GLP-1s a lot more than I do. This gave me some pause before taking the plunge. If there’s a supply shortage, then it feels morally wrong for me to get it, right? Interestingly, when I got my medication in November, it had a date that it was created in August. It had been sitting in the pharmacy for several months. I concluded that the shortage is about what the patent owners can produce. It doesn’t apply to all the compounding pharmacies that are stepping in to fill the need. This was a relief. I wasn’t preventing anyone else from getting access, and those who really need it can still get it.
* I completely made up that 87% number. It feels right though, doesn’t it?
** BMI isn’t a perfect indicator of health, but it can be a good rule of thumb for most people. My scale noted that I averaged 25.8% body fat, which is also the range of obesity.
