A young woman details her experience with the newly available weight loss medication.
About two years ago I saw a different doctor from my usual GP about the issue of weight. I’m average height for a woman, not yet 30, and go to the gym four to five times a week. I lift weights and do cardio. My main meals are healthy enough, I do not smoke or even drink, but I have a “food brain”. Snacks? There are none. I ate them all.
I will be the first to admit that I have issues with why, when and how much I eat. I am thinking about food all the time when I am awake, and my eating suffers because of it. One common theme you’ll find online when people discuss their “‘Wegovy journey” is recognising negative personal patterns from the start, so you can build habits to break these and better understand your eating needs.
So anyway, I’m sitting there in the doctor’s office, opening up about the fact that I want professional help to tackle this problem and my doctor quickly informs me that the weight loss options New Zealand has available (or had available at the time) weren’t ones she wanted to prescribe to me for two reasons. One, they had lower efficacy than weight loss medications available overseas which she wanted me to wait for. Two, I wasn’t at the point where we needed to do something urgently. She asked me to keep my eye on things and come back when GLP-1 (the hormone that helps regulate blood sugar and appetite) medications made their way over here.
Fast forward to the end of June 2025.
It’s in the news, it’s on TV, it’s on social media, it’s everywhere. Wegovy was finally arriving at the start of July. I felt optimistic but uncertain, would I meet the criteria to take it? Turns out, yes. A less than 15 minute conversation looking over my recent bloodwork/medical work, discussing whether I could afford it, why I wanted it, how it was taken and why she was confident it would be beneficial for me was all it took for a successful prescription.
It’s not cheap. I’m paying $459.99 a month for it. I thought about it long and hard when I first saw how much the medicine was predicted to cost in June. I thought about it before my appointment, during the appointment, walking to the pharmacy and then had a micro-panic about it when it was time to pay.
I can afford it. I am not sacrificing other things to pay for it. My doctor did alleviate some of the stress at the potential of being “locked in” to wasting my money though by advising me that if in three months time I had seen absolutely no benefits, stopping it (alongside its hefty cost) would be the obvious choice.
If you’ve never dealt with “food noise” before you might not understand, or maybe even laugh at the prospect, but it can really harm someone’s life and wellbeing (mental and physical) if so much of your thinking is consumed by food. Pretty early on in my teen years I remember whenever my family would go out to dinner or bring food in, after we finished eating I would constantly be thinking about the leftovers in the fridge. Even though I knew I wasn’t even hungry? I would think and think and think about them until either I ate them, my family did or they ended up in the trash. The same applied throughout my teens and early 20s for essentially all food I liked. If it existed and was not in front of me being eaten, I was thinking about eating it. This obviously resulted in me, most of the time, eating the food.
Without going into too much detail, to take Wegovy you take the medicine via a subcutaneous injection. This means into the layer of fat beneath the skin. Each pen comes with four disposable needles and one pen which contains four doses of the medicine. The disposable needle goes on, you wind up the pen dosage counter, pick the place you want to inject, hold it to your skin for six seconds while pressing the injection button aaaaand in goes the medicine. You do this once a week on the same day.
In three weeks I’ve lost just over 4.5kg and this should continue. Thankfully I haven’t had any horrific reactions to the medication and honestly? Life is great. The food noise I was talking about? Gone. I actually spent more time in the first week thinking about how shocked I was that I was doing other things and not thinking about food. I will be honest with the negatives: It does suck a little bit going out and not wanting to eat anything.
I do have much, much more patience for concentrating on things and space in my brain to appreciate more than just the food in front of me and what I’m eating later. I mean even at my job, I have more concentration because my patience doesn’t dwindle before lunch. However, injecting yourself isn’t very fun and frankly is scary. Eating a lot less means you may not have the same energy you had previously for high energy stuff – that might include your work, depending on your job. Thankfully I have the most energy when I wake up, so my morning gym sessions haven’t been hit too hard but I’ve noticed I’m not as strong as I was before Wegovy. This is probably due to decreased mass (some of which might be muscle). I do crash REALLY hard about 5pm though after work. Obviously the cost sucks too.
Put simply, I was sick of the mental energy I was expending with my “food brain” and was willing to pay to make it stop. If you’d need to sacrifice other things to pay for this medication, I don’t think it would be worth the sacrifices you’d be making.
Overall though, I can’t express enough how much it has changed my life for the better. Will I be on it longterm? There are conflicting reports online about weight gain after stopping the medicine, versus the medicine being brilliant at getting someone to where they need to be and then they maintain it from there. For me? I guess we’ll see how I do with higher doses (as Wegovy is given in titration doses starting at 0.25mg, escalating every 4 weeks until you reach 2.4mg or until your doctor deems suitable) and whether my mindset about food shifts over time. I am accepting of the prospect that I will be on this medicine longterm.
I’m not a medical professional, so it obviously needs to be stated that if you want medical advice about whether this drug is suitable/eligible for you then you need to see your doctor. But for me, these past three weeks have changed my life.