Welcome to class. Today we're gonna go through the entire Ozempic protocol that I give patients from start to end. By the end, you'll know everything you need to know about how to use the Ozempic pen, what to eat, what not to eat, and side effects. 

To get the most out of this class, download the companion notes, Ozempic Injection How to Use. We'll be referencing the specific food list and the timeline.

Click on the link in the description, enter your email, and the guide will be sent straight to you.

A quick thank you to everyone who watched our last masterclass. You helped us get incredibly close to qualifying for the YouTube Health Partnership. This is a special status that prioritizes verified medical information. By watching this course from start to finish, you're directly helping us get that badge so we can get real safe medical advice to the people who need it most.

So with all that in mind, let's get started. I'm Zoe Reed and this is Medicine Made Simple. 

MODULE 1: Insulin Resistance Diet Plan

We're gonna start with the no sugar reset, an insulin resistance diet plan that helps set the stage for using Ozempic.

This module is all about what to take out of your diet.

All five of these pillars help lower insulin resistance. I generally recommend that patients start this 90 days before their first injection. But of course, check with your doctor first.

Our goal is to make digestion, blood sugar, and insulin more stable. Doing this before you start Ozempic can really help with side effects. Now, if you've already started the medication, I still recommend doing the first three. We'll talk about why in just a moment.

This plan has five pillars.

Pillar #1: Cut Liquid Sugar

First, cut liquid sugar. Putting sugar in your tea or coffee or drinking juice and soda is a major cause of insulin resistance.

If you've watched my previous videos, you'll know that if you stop putting sugar in your tea or coffee and cut out juice and soda, you will dramatically help reverse your insulin resistance.

I recommend sticking to water.

And while I normally recommend black coffee, it's important to know that drinking coffee while on Ozempic can actually increase things like nausea, diarrhea, and heartburn. The good news is that it doesn't happen to everybody, but it may be helpful to reduce the amount of coffee you're drinking if you plan on going on Ozempic.

Pillar #2: No Dairy, No Fried Foods, No Processed Foods

No dairy, no fried foods, no processed foods.

Ozempic slows the movement of food out of your stomach. Instead of food moving through at a usual pace, it stays there longer, sometimes much longer, which is part of why you feel full sooner and for longer.

Because dairy and fried foods are heavy and slow to digest, eating them on Ozempic often leads to nausea. Cutting it out three months before your first injection will give you time to break the habit.

Pillar #3: Start Walking

Walking is one of the most important forms of exercise that you can do while on Ozempic.

In 2016, researchers looked at a group of people living in the suburbs and a group of people living in downtown areas. They wanted to know why people living in the suburbs have higher rates of type two diabetes.

At first, they thought maybe people living in downtown areas had healthier diets. Maybe they exercised more. But when they compared the differences between the two groups, they weren't all that different. People in the suburbs and downtown largely ate the same diet and exercised the same amount.

One thing they noticed, though, is that people living in downtown areas walked more. That’s a really important finding because it shows that walking every day may play a major role in lowering type two diabetes and insulin resistance.

So here's what I tell patients every day:

• Aim to get in about 10,000 steps per day
• You can break it up into 20-minute sessions, three times per day
• Walking around the office, to the bathroom, to the water cooler — all of it counts

If you're frugal like me and don't want to spend $1,500 on a tracking device, you can use your phone or any $20 pedometer. They're accurate enough, and as long as you use the same one every day, you'll generally get a good baseline.

Pillar #4: Fewer Eating Windows (Gut Rest)

Fewer eating windows. Gut rest.

Three meals a day, no snacks in between, will help lower insulin resistance.

In the nineties, we were told that constantly eating throughout the day and snacking was the healthier thing to do. But we now know that eating constantly throughout the day actually works against metabolic health.

Here's why.

Every time you eat something, insulin is released to help bring your blood sugars down.

So let’s say you’re eating three meals a day — breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You’ll have insulin released at those times to manage blood sugar.

But what happens when you're eating five times a day, with snacks in between? You’re also releasing insulin during those times.

So essentially, by eating five times a day, you are sitting in a high insulin state all day.

By simply reducing the number of times you eat each day, you can bring your total insulin levels down over 24 hours.

There’s also digestive reasons this matters, especially on Ozempic.

Your gut has a natural cleaning cycle called the migrating motor complex. It helps clear residue and bacteria between meals. This cycle only runs when you're not eating, and it takes time to activate.

When snacking is constant, that cleanup process never gets a chance to do its job.

Pillar #5: 7:00 PM Eating Cutoff

The 7:00 PM eating cutoff.

If you've watched my previous videos, having nothing to eat three hours before bed also helps lower insulin resistance. In practical terms, that usually means nothing to eat after 7:00 PM.

This may also help reduce side effects, since late-night eating increases the risk of gastric reflux, especially on Ozempic.

Summary

Here are the key takeaways:

• Cut liquid sugar
• Cut dairy, fried foods, and processed foods
• Walk 10,000 steps per day
• Three meals a day, no snacks in between
• Stop eating three hours before bed

That completes module one.

Next, side effects. See you there.

MODULE 2: Ozempic Side Effects

Let's talk about Ozempic side effects, nausea, dosing problems, muscle loss, and visible changes people worry about like Ozempic face.

You may have been told nausea is worse at the beginning. You just need time to adjust. That part is true, but what comes next is the part that I strongly disagree with.

You may have been told: “Don't worry. Keep taking more. It'll get better.” I can't think of a single medication where a patient develops a side effect and our response is, “No problem. Let's increase the dose.”

If blood pressure drops, we don't increase blood pressure medication. If a statin causes muscle pain, we stop it or lower the dose. Yet so many people starting Ozempic are told to increase their dose, ignore nausea, and push through it.

In module three, I'll give you the exact nausea prevention protocol.

For now, what matters is this principle: start low, go slow, and at the first sign of real discomfort, stop.

Ozempic Nausea

Ozempic works by slowing how quickly food moves through your stomach. Normally, the stomach empties at a steady pace. Ozempic deliberately slows that process so food stays in the stomach longer, helping you feel fuller sooner, and for a longer period of time.

But when digestion slows too much or too suddenly, the stomach feels heavy, overfull, and unsettled, which is why nausea happens.

There's also a brain component. Ozempic doesn't just act on the gut. It also signals appetite centers in the brain. These centers regulate hunger and fullness, but they overlap with the areas that control nausea and vomiting.

When those signals are altered too abruptly, some people experience queasiness.

I want to show you a clip from a YouTube video by Jamie French entitled My Horrific Experience With Ozempic.

I am not showing this clip to call out other doctors or criticize how anyone is prescribing. I'm showing it because I think it's important that we listen to what people are actually saying about their experience with this medication, particularly the gastrointestinal side effects that Ozempic can cause.

Let's listen to what Jamie has to say.

“I found several doctors on social media who also promoted the generic form. The active ingredient is the important thing of semaglutide. So I got my first injection and immediately I got some very serious side effects in the form of diarrhea. Walk away. Now, I have suffered from a condition called lymphocytic colitis for like 12 years. I would say maybe longer. I don't even know at this point, so I am no stranger to that. But my colitis had actually been in remission since like late 2020-ish, around the time where I healed my gallbladder.

The colitis also went into remission around that time. So to be in remission with colitis for almost three years, only to be hit with a literal poop storm the day after starting this drug, I was pretty confident that I knew it was the drug causing it. And may I just say if any of you have colitis or Crohn's or anything like that, you know the absolute agony, meaning pain, that it physically causes in your intestines?

Well, buyer beware because that pain has nothing on Ozempic. I mean, I spent years, every time I went to the bathroom when colitis was at my worst, just hunched over in agony, moaning in pain, like salivating, always about to throw up from pain. I did not ever imagine it could get worse than that. And on Ozempic it was worse, but worse than that even.

Not only was the pain much worse, like I said, which I didn't think was even possible, but I was also suddenly unable to always control myself, meaning on more than one occasion, I pooped my literal pants. It's funny, but it's not funny. You know what I mean?”

First, I want to acknowledge Jamie for being so open and honest about her experience.

That kind of transparency genuinely helps other people feel less alone and more informed.

Jamie goes on to describe that these side effects developed even at the smallest dose. She does mention that her doctor slowed the dose down, but it sounds like a wait-and-see-if-it-settles approach was taken.

“Mind you all, friends, okay. This was the bare minimum dose. This is like the tiny little dose that you start off with before you work up to the therapeutic dose. So I believe I was on 0.25 at this time, and this was the reaction I had to the smallest dose possible.”

And that point is really important. Because if someone is experiencing significant nausea at 0.25 milligrams of Ozempic, then something different needs to be done.

Nausea and GI side effects don't reliably resolve unless you intervene, and if you increase the dose while someone is already nauseous, you are essentially pouring gasoline on fire.

Jamie also mentions that she has a history of lymphocytic colitis, an inflammatory condition of the colon that causes episodes of watery diarrhea and abdominal pain.

There isn't a specific warning label that says Ozempic plus lymphocytic colitis are contraindicated, but that doesn't make it irrelevant.

Starting Ozempic properly requires a real medical history review, not just a prescription and a dosing schedule, especially when people have a history of diarrhea, nausea, constipation, abdominal pain, and vomiting.

Which brings us to the next issue: dosing errors.

Ozempic How It Works

When I talk about women overdosing on Ozempic, I am not saying women are the problem.

They're not.

Jamie was not the problem.

Instead of being heard as an individual, she was measured against the population average and told in essence, that's not possible.

One of the biggest problems I see right now is that we treat human bodies like interchangeable units, applying the same dosing schedules to everyone without enough attention to individual physiology or medical history.

Jamie's case shows us exactly why that approach fails.

In most clinics, patients start Ozempic at 0.25 milligrams. After four weeks, the doses increase to 0.5 milligrams. Four weeks later, it often goes to one milligram. This standard step-up schedule is designed to move people to a steady dose quickly.

The problem is that men and women don't process medications the same way.

Differences in body composition and hormone levels all affect how long a medication stays active in the body.

Women often clear medications more slowly, which means the drug can linger longer in the bloodstream and raise the risk of side effects. As a result, using the same fixed step-up schedule can lead to overmedication in some women.

A lot of medications do not require sex-based dosing at all, but Ozempic is different.

Ozempic doesn't just curb appetite, it changes how your body handles food and weight, and people don't respond to that change the same way.

A 40-year-old woman is likely to respond very differently to Ozempic than her husband. A 28-year-old female with type two diabetes will respond differently than her dad who is 55 with high blood pressure.

Once you understand that men and women metabolize medications at different rates, it becomes clear why microdosing can be remarkably effective in women. Ozempic microdosing and the start slow philosophy are about finding the minimum effective dose for you. Here's the part that surprises most people.

You can't reliably predict who will be sensitive to Ozempic ahead of time. Some people are extremely sensitive and do very well on 0.25 milligrams weekly, the lowest dose. These super responders take a small amount of the medication, sometimes even less than the standard starting dose. Their hunger quiets, blood sugar stabilizes, and weight begins to come off.

The problem is we don't know who the super responders are ahead of time. That's why across the board and from the start, I use microdosing on everyone. If you give too much too fast to people who are super responders, you don't improve metabolism, you overwhelm it.

Microdosing works because it quiets hunger without silencing it.

It slows digestion without freezing it.

It improves insulin signaling without flooding the system.

You see, the goal is not to override the body. The goal is to guide it back into rhythm. That's the difference between using Ozempic as a metabolic tool and using it as a blunt instrument.

All right, everyone, that concludes part one of our Ozempic side effects. Up next, muscle loss and how to avoid it.

See you there.

MODULE 3: Ozempic Muscle Loss

Ozempic doesn't create male and female side effects. What it does is expose where male and female physiology is already different. Nowhere is that more apparent than when we talk about Ozempic muscle loss. Ozempic doesn't only shrink fat. It shrinks tissue. In men that can quietly mean losing not just weight, but strength, metabolic rate, and testosterone along the way.

Ozempic Side Effects For Men

Men typically start out with a higher lean muscle mass than women. But since Ozempic-mediated weight loss is not fat selective, without resistance training, men can lose a disproportionate amount of muscle. And because testosterone is tightly linked to muscle preservation, the combination of rapid caloric restriction, GLP-1-induced appetite suppression, and inadequate resistance training can lead to a drop in testosterone, which then accelerates muscle loss further.

This creates a feedback loop.

Ozempic does not directly suppress testosterone, but in some men, rapid weight loss plus an energy deficit and muscle loss can lead to functional hypogonadism. And what that shows up as isn't always obvious at first.

Fatigue. Reduced strength, low libido, mood flattening, loss of drive, or motivation.

And this is why the issue is so often missed. It's not listed as a formal side effect because it isn't caused by the drug molecule itself. It's mediated through physiology, specifically how the weight is being lost. In other words, if testosterone is dropping on Ozempic, it's rarely the medication, it's the strategy.

This does not mean that women don't lose weight on Ozempic. They absolutely can, but in women, muscle loss is quieter because women start with less muscle and don't have testosterone protecting muscle mass. Even small losses have oversized effects. Instead of obvious symptoms, what often changes is the background fatigue increases, weight loss plateaus earlier than expected, and maintaining progress becomes harder over time.

This is why women may be doing everything right on Ozempic and still feel stuck or experience regain later. In both men and women, Ozempic muscle loss can happen, but it's not unique to Ozempic.

Because anytime you lose weight, you risk losing muscle. Muscle is expensive tissue, it burns calories even when you're doing nothing. From the body's perspective, when calories are limited, muscle is not a priority. Survival is. So when weight loss is aggressive, the body panics.

Muscle becomes dispensable. Metabolism slows and fatigue rises. Slow weight loss allows the body to adapt and preserve muscle along the way. That's why low and slow is not conservative. It's strategic.

How to Prevent Muscle Loss On Ozempic

The good news is, you can prevent muscle loss on Ozempic. The goal is to stack the odds in your favor.

Here's how: movement.

At least four weeks before your first injection, I want you to start walking more. Aim for about 10,000 steps a day. Patients who consistently walk around this amount tend to have less nausea and better muscle preservation overall.

The same applies to swimming. I found that patients who swim once or twice a week tend to preserve the most muscle. Swimming functions as a form of resistance training, engaging major muscle groups, especially the upper body and core. Because water provides constant resistance, it supports fat loss while helping maintain muscle.

The key idea here is simple. The body only preserves muscle when it's convinced that muscle is still needed. That message is sent through use. You don't need extreme workouts or bootcamps. You just need regular activity. Movement tells the body this tissue matters: don't dismantle it.

What Causes Ozempic Face and How To Avoid It

Turn on social media, and you've probably heard someone talking about the gaunt aged appearance with sunken cheeks, hollow eyes, and sagging skin seen in people on Ozempic. But it's important to be clear. This effect is not caused by Ozempic itself. Ozempic is not chewing up your facial muscle. The gaunt appearance can happen because of rapid weight loss or losing too much weight too quickly.

That's why going slow matters. Pace protects structure.

It's also important to know that even when weight comes off slowly, many people, particularly women over the age of 30, will notice fat loss in their face early in a weight loss journey. The face has a much thinner layer of fat compared to areas like the abdomen or thighs.

So even small amounts of weight loss are more visible there. After about age 30, we naturally begin to lose muscle and volume, especially in the face. So what holds up our skin? Subcutaneous facial fat. But by this point, we've already lost some muscle, collagen, and elasticity, which means the structural support is already reduced.

That's why even a relatively small amount of weight loss, sometimes as little as 5, 7, 10 pounds, can result in a sunken appearance in people over 30. For some, even earlier. This happens because the body burns through subcutaneous facial fat that was helping support the skin.

There isn't a simple fix, and that's okay.

Understanding why this happened matters far more than trying to fight a normal structural change.

Part four: how to avoid Ozempic side effects. You can correct Ozempic face cosmetically if you want. But as an internal medicine physician, I am telling you that it is not something you have to fix.

Because Ozempic face is not a disease, a complication, or a harmful side effect. It's an aesthetic consequence of fat loss in part of the body where fat is structurally important. Reversing insulin resistance and type two diabetes is strongly supported by weight loss. We shouldn't avoid improving our metabolic health out of fear of facial changes.

The reality is that facial volume changes with age for everyone, with or without Ozempic, with or without weight loss. It's a part of normal aging. What isn't inevitable is insulin resistance or poorly controlled diabetes. Treating those can dramatically improve both the quality and length of your life.

Health has to come first.

Kelly Osbourne Ozempic Face

This brings us to another side effect that doesn't actually show up on the label, but one that I see causing some of the most harm in my clinic: shame.

I want to show you a clip from a YouTube video titled Ozempic Is Ruining Your Face. To be clear, I am not showing this clip to call out the creator. I'm showing it to call us in.

Because messages like this don't stay on TikTok or YouTube. They walk right into my exam room and they impact the kind of decisions patients make.

Let's watch the first minute.

“It's no secret that Hollywood is completely addicted to their new Holy Grail Ozempic, my precious. We've got celebs hitting the red carpet with ribs visible, losing pound after pound, and looking literally sick. And no, I'm not talking like sick, dude. I'm talking like you look like you have a disease.

There's a darker side to Ozempic that makes it so much more dangerous, and that is the fact that normal people and influences have also decided to start taking it. And when you're somebody that actually doesn't need a drug like this at all, it starts to come with a few caveats, and one of those being your face.

That's why we've got tons of videos on TikTok calling out Ozempic face. There is a reason why Ozempic isn't FDA approved, and it's the same reason why women are suffering from sunken faces, saggy cheeks, and wrinkles. No, don't say wrinkles, girl. We're gonna have nightmares. But hey, it's fine that their faces are starting to sag towards their collar bones because they can always just go get a facelift and that is why Ozempic is so dangerous.”

Okay, pause there. There's a lot going on here. The creator is charismatic and sarcastic, which works really well in the context of entertainment. Unfortunately, it doesn't land very well when we're talking about medicine and people's health.

She makes a confident statement in the first minute, but that is factually incorrect. Precision matters here. Ozempic has been FDA approved in the US since 2017 for type two diabetes. In 2020, it was approved to reduce cardiovascular risk, literally to prevent heart attacks and strokes. It is not approved for weight loss under the brand name Ozempic, but the exact same molecule, semaglutide, is approved for weight loss under the name Wegovy.

She also says that Ozempic is incredibly dangerous. Well, yes, all medications are dangerous if prescribed to the wrong person for the wrong reasons at the wrong dose. Even over-the-counter medications can be dangerous.

The accurate framing is this: Ozempic, like any medication, can be dangerous when misused.

Let's jump ahead and look at the discussion about Kelly Osbourne.

“You cannot fix your weird Ozempic face. Once you take Ozempic and your face starts to look sunken and gaunt, there is just no fixing that. Hello, I'm Kelly. Kelly Osbourne's appearance has been concerning fans. She looks extremely gaunt and frail and nothing like how she used to look. If you look at old photos of Kelly, she looks unrecognizable.

Fans are urging her to stop their alleged Ozempic use and stop having so much work done on her face. Oh my God, you guys, like, I think people are becoming literally blind to what they look like. Like this is the beauty standard. This is how we're supposed to be looking, somebody as people fear it's going to cause long-lasting damage and it may already be at the point that there is no return for her. Sharon Osbourne, her mom, has even spoken out and been very honest in her Ozempic consumption and has said she did not like it and it had a bad reaction with her body. And Sharon's appearance has been shockingly different ever since she started the drug and has never been able to bounce back fully.”

This is a classic example of judgment dressed up as concern. Because the bottom line is significant weight loss, like the kind we see in Kelly Osbourne, is never a sign of vanity. It's a sign that someone is struggling. The reason I brought this up is because this kind of policing doesn't just stay online.

It shows up in the exam room. Patients come in feeling guilty or embarrassed, terrified of being judged or found out for using Ozempic. And the point is, what medications you're on, what health conditions you have, is nobody else's business but yours and your doctors.

Which brings us to the deeper question: what is your goal?

If your goal is metabolic health, then some facial fat may simply be part of the process, and that trade-off looks very different when viewed through the lens of health.

This concludes module three.

Up next, we're gonna go through the Ozempic diet.

Module 4: Ozempic Diet

Part one, Ozempic nausea. I have to tell you, I hate nausea. I'm extremely sensitive to it. Everything makes me nauseous. Perfumes, heat, cold, car rides, bubble gum, and in my lifelong experience, living side by side with nausea, I can say with a hundred percent certainty that nausea does not go away on its own.

Here are two simple tools to avoid Ozempic nausea: popsicles and ginger chews. Popsicles help reduce nausea because their cold temperature makes them easy to tolerate and provides hydration and a small amount of glucose. All of this helps curb nausea. Ginger blocks serotonin receptors in the digestive tract that contribute to nausea.

Now I know what some of you are thinking. Dr. Reed, didn't you just finish doing a video telling us to cut sugar? It's important to know that this is just a bridge. I am not telling you to eat popsicles every day, but I am saying that getting in front of Ozempic nausea is really important and popsicles and ginger chews are the bridge to get you there.

Popsicles and ginger can get you through a nauseous moment, but diet is what keeps you from cycling back into it. Here are the top six diet principles that I teach my patients to help prevent Ozempic nausea.

Number one, avoid dairy and high fat foods. Dairy and fatty foods almost always worsen nausea. This includes fried foods, cheese, milk, and yogurt. These foods sit in your stomach longer and intensify that heavy unsettled feeling.

Number two, go easy on the fiber at the start. High fiber foods can also worsen nausea early on because Ozempic slows digestion. Large amounts of fiber become harder to process and can backfire, making nausea worse rather than better.

Number three, clean things up before your first injection. You don't want dairy and high fat foods in your system just as your digestion is starting to slow. If you remember from module one, cut out dairy and high fat foods a few weeks beforehand, ideally 90 days.

Number four, insulin-resistant-focused diet, Mediterranean leaning. Okay. Most of my patients have already been eating a Mediterranean-leaning diet for two to three months before their first injection. This approach is outlined in detail in the masterclass, How to Lose Weight at Home, which you can find in the link below. After your first injection, easy-to-digest carbs like potatoes, rice, or toast are added back in because portions are smaller and digestion is slower. The pre-Ozempic phase isn't about restriction. It's about priming.

Number five, don't overload protein in the first week. Binging protein right away will only increase nausea on the day of the first injection. Stick with simpler, blander carbohydrates, plain potatoes, rice, or toast, and ease back into protein gradually. Start with easily digestible options like chicken breast and build from there. The long-term goal is a Mediterranean-style diet, but you can work your way up to it. You can also begin adding simple vegetables like cucumbers or carrots, paired with foods that are easy to digest, such as rice and chicken.

Number six, hydration. Hydration is the other piece of the puzzle. Ozempic can blunt thirst, just like it can blunt hunger.

If you're not drinking enough water, your metabolism stalls and side effects like constipation and nausea can get a lot worse.

Check out the handout below for the complete summary on diet tips.

This concludes the Ozempic video. If you have questions, make sure to drop them in the comment section. I read them all and respond. Thanks again for watching everyone.

Why does weight come back after stopping Ozempic?

That's a really great question and something that I get asked quite a bit in clinic. I break this down into three overall reasons.

The first one being that people haven't changed their eating habits overall. That's why I spend a lot of time diet counseling with people to make the changes even before starting Ozempic. The problem with Ozempic is that for a large portion of people, they can actually lose weight while continuing to eat the same way that they had been eating previously. And this is just because overall, Ozempic does lower insulin levels and therefore can combat insulin resistance while still possibly eating not the healthiest things.

Now, this certainly isn't the case for everybody. If you have something like PCOS or endometriosis, then definitely changing eating is actually really important. But for other people, that's not always the case. And for those people, they have to be very careful because once stopping the medication, if they haven't actually made any dietary changes, then the weight is going to come back, and come back quite quickly.

The second reason is that people might be on too high a dose for too long. The problem with that is that it can actually slow metabolism over time. This is particularly the case for women who may not actually require the full two milligrams once a week. It's something to be cautious of.

Now, there are going to be a portion of people that actually do require the two milligrams once a week, particularly people who are on insulin or people who would otherwise have had to have gone on insulin if they hadn't started Ozempic. For those people, I do find that two milligrams is actually the dose that they most likely are going to require. And it's just because it's going to take a little bit more time and for a little bit longer in order for insulin resistance to start to settle and therefore reverse.

But when you're outside that category, let's say you're only on one medication like metformin, then two milligrams might actually just be a little bit too high a dose. And everybody is different. It's hard for me to actually say, yep, you're going to definitely require two milligrams. Nope, you're definitely not going to require it. But the point is to always be questioning every week. Is this the right dose for me? How do I feel on it? Have I been on it for too long? And when is the time to start to step down? And that's just because we want to make sure that our metabolism is actually still up and thriving and running and feeling great.

Number three is going to be abruptly stopping. I say this with a caveat: there are going to be other times that are going to require having to stop the medication. Best thing to do is to plan for when you're going to be coming off of it and weaning very slowly, so slowly that your body actually doesn't even recognize that you're coming off of it overall.

Those are going to be the three most common reasons. Number one, the eating habits weren't changed. Number two, too high a dose for too long because it slows metabolism. And number three, abruptly stopping.

How to maintain weight after stopping Ozempic

I break this down into three different categories. The first is what you're doing before you start Ozempic. The second is what you're doing while on Ozempic, and the last is what you're doing when you stop Ozempic.

For the first category, thinking about how to maintain weight when you stop actually starts 90 days before you even start the medication. Ideally you've done the 90 day no sugar reset, which is the five pillars to help you lower insulin resistance. This is just really important overall because it's giving your body a new way to acclimatize to a new environment. That's going to be the first thing.

The second thing is what you're doing while on Ozempic. Once again, it is the principles of microdosing that we talked about, which is trying to maintain on the lowest dose possible for what your body needs or requires.

And then the final is what you're doing while off Ozempic. That's going to be a lot about number one, maintaining the pillars about lowering insulin resistance, in general long-term following an insulin resistance diet. We have other videos that go more into depth. But the important thing to note really is that when we think about how do I make sure that I keep the weight off, it really starts long before you even start the medication. Now, I recognize that maybe not everybody actually did the no sugar reset before starting Ozempic. And that's okay.

How to inject Ozempic

There are six steps to taking the Ozempic pen. Make sure to go to the Ozempic website as well, because they actually do lay these out quite nicely, but I'm going to walk you through them as well, just because seeing it makes it a lot easier to just do overall.

Okay, the first thing you want to do is prepare your pen. Here's what the pen looks like. You want to take a look, make sure it actually says Ozempic on it. If it doesn't, please do not inject the substance into your body.

But otherwise, hopefully, if you've gotten this pen from Canada or the United States, and from your pharmacist, it should say Ozempic across it.

The other thing you want to do is you're going to open it up and just make sure that the color inside the Ozempic is clear and colorless. Normally on the actual pen that you get there is an expiration date. Here I can see that this one actually expires in 2027. But you still want to just take a look at it.

Does it look clear? Is it colorless? If so, great. If not, don't inject that substance into your body because it's probably expired or contaminated.

All right, number two: attach the needle. With your prescription you're going to get a needle that looks like this, has a little flap on top of it. You're just going to pull this off and end up with a very tiny little needle inside the opening flap. What you want to do next is then just screw that into or tighten it in. And as well, I should mention that before you've done any of this handling of any needles, you've washed your hands. That's very important. But assuming all of that has been done, you've now tightly secured it and that is how it should look.

Okay, now that we've attached our needle, we're ready to move on to step three. Here we want to check the Ozempic flow. And you only want to do that with a new pen. Every time you're starting a new pen you're going to have to do this. What you're going to do is here you have the pen. You're going to remove the cap. And then you're going to remove the top cap as well. And you're going to see a little tiny needle that's poking up. Now you're going to turn the dialer, which is at the very bottom of the pen, and you're going to turn it until you see the little line that appears across the pen. When you see that line, you're now going to push the injector button, which is the little gray button at the bottom until you see zero.

And the one thing I forgot to mention is when you push that flow, you should see a little bit of the medication coming up from the top. You'll see it's sitting at the top of the actual needle here. And that's really important because it's just making sure that the medication or the needle itself is actually working and that the flow is good.

Okay, next up is number four. You want to select your dose. If this is your first time using the Ozempic, you should be starting on 0.25. I've heard of people being prescribed the medication at 0.5 mg starting dose or one milligram starting dose. This is not an appropriate dose to be starting at. Everybody should be starting at 0.25 because it just gives you an idea of how your body is going to react to the medication. And 0.25 is actually quite a tiny dose. On some of the Ozempic studies, they actually describe it as a pseudo dose. It doesn't necessarily have any sort of strong potent effects. But as we've already talked about with microdosing, that isn't actually always the case with everybody. That being the case, everybody should be starting at 0.25.

And if you haven't been given that to start, please talk to your prescribing physician and ask them, shouldn't I? Is it better maybe we start at a lower dose just to see how things are. And that's going to be really important.

You're going to take your pen and you're just going to click it to 0.25. And as you can see at first it does take a little bit of clicks to get there. And it should say 0.25 now across this little screen.

The other important thing now is right before you're about to inject, when we're talking about injection sites, Ozempic is injected under the skin of your abdomen, thigh, or upper arm. Do not inject in your muscle or vein. That's really important. You're really just putting it in the skin under the skin area.

The second thing is you want to change or rotate your injection site with each new injection. You don't want to use the same site for each injection. And if you choose to use the same area, you just want to make sure that you inject it into a different place. If you were going to pick your arm, then if you had it here one week, you're going to actually inject it over here. And don't inject through clothing. This should be a bare area.

All right, now you're ready to inject the dose. I'm not going to inject myself, so I'm just going to use Paddington over here. He is already prepared because we shot a first clip and weren't actually recording. Attempt number two.

If we were to inject Paddington's stomach area or his abdomen, you would just clip a little piece of skin, pull it up, and place the needle in. Then you're just going to push down. You'll hear that little tick tick tick tick tick.

And then you're going to hold it for six seconds. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Now that was obviously longer than six seconds because I was talking. Just make sure that you're doing it for six seconds. You're not talking or on the phone or in the middle of doing other things, just make sure you're focused while injecting.

Okay, now we've injected. There you go, Paddington. And this is going to be the most important part. You're going to remove the needle, just winding it off. And please do not throw this in the garbage. People actually have to handle the garbage. And it's really, really important that we do not poke them because it's really dangerous for them. We want to be making sure that we're always following needle protocol.

You're going to pick this up and if you don't have a needle dispense bin, you can use a little piece of Tupperware. Put it in your Tupperware, close the Tupperware, and then take that back to your pharmacist and they can dispose of the medication for you.

And then when you're there, you can just ask them, do you have a needle dispense bin that I can have? Most pharmacies in Canada and the US give them away for free. And if they don't, most of them do, I really haven't come across one that hasn't.

That's going to be the most important thing out of all of the steps. I would say that this is really important because we just don't want to be throwing these needles in the trash, and we don't want to be poking other people with them.

All right, so those are the six steps.

And now for the question of the day, what has been the hardest part of starting Ozempic for you so far? Comment below. I'd love to hear from you.

This concludes the Ozempic video. If you have questions, make sure to drop them in the comments section. I read them all and respond. Thanks again for watching everyone. Like and subscribe if you like this video and leave a comment below.

Until next time everyone.