Two recent studies offer good data that the weight loss achieved with GLP-1 drugs (Wegovy, Ozempic, Mounjaro, generic semaglutide, and others) is not durable if the drug is stopped. One also highlighted that almost two-thirds of people who start the drugs for conditions other than diabetes stopped them within a year.
New Meta-Analysis This Month
The most recent article this month in BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal), called Weight regain after cessation of medication for weight management, analyzed 37 weight management studies that used a wide range of drugs, including the GLP-1 class. In all of them, weight begins to rebound within a few months of drug discontinuation and is projected to revert toward baseline over about 1.5-2 years, as do the improvements in blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol achieved with the drugs.
An earlier meta-analysis from BMC Medicine in 2025, Trajectory of the body weight after drug discontinuation in the treatment of anti-obesity medications, gave similar but less expansive data from about 11 studies.
I have some concerns about the details in the studies because they are meta-analyses, which are highly statistically driven rehashing of multiple selected studies that make many interpretative decisions that are often obscure and hard to validate. Nevertheless, I suspect the overall conclusions above are reasonably accurate.
What These Findings Mean
We are documenting more clearly that the GLP-1 drugs are not tolerated well by large portions of the people who try them and, more importantly, that the weight loss the drugs help attain must be maintained through extended if not indefinite use of these drugs. That is problematic, since long-term effects of the GLP-1 class noted in just a few years include substantial muscle loss and remodeling, as well as nausea, diarrhea, and serious pains in the pocketbook.
For me as a physician, this means that we should work much harder to give each individual more effective physiologically based tools to control their own hunger and eating patterns in the absence of long-term GLP-1, to offer stronger practical guidance for people to make better food choices, to establish more effective meal patterns, and to achieve appropriate portion control.
Coming Soon
I believe more effective nutritional self-care can be described and learned by motivated people. I have been researching the physiology literature extensively and will start a series on nutrition and weight management with the next newsletter.