3 Ways to Keep Weight Off After Stopping Ozempic According to Weight Loss MD

Weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic have successfully helped many people lose a ton of weight in a short period of time. However, there has been an issue that some have run into: When you stop getting the weekly injections, people are gaining back the weight. But according to JJ Virgin, triple-board certified health expert, Fitness Hall of Famer & 4x New York Times best-selling author, there are ways to prevent Ozempic weight regain. In a new YouTube video, the celebrity nutrition expert reveals exactly how to make weight loss drugs work for you – and how to sustain your weight loss.

1. There Are a Number of Side Effects of Weight Loss Drugs

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In the video she addresses a few of the common side effects of Ozempic, including potential rebound weight gain, loss of muscle mass, and Ozempic face. She explains that the drugs work by helping you tame your appetite and balance your blood sugar, and that if you are “weight loss resistant” they can give you the “edge you need.”

Related: 5 Secrets to Success Before You Start Your Next Diet

2. However, You Can Avoid Them

“However, the last thing you want to do is lose a lot of precious metabolism, supporting muscle, or gain the weight right back when you go off of them,” she continues. And, “the drug costs a lot, and “these side effects are going to cost you way more than that in the long term.”

3. Anytime You Lose Weight on a Diet, You Will Lose Muscle Mass

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She explains that when you go on any sort of a diet where you are losing weight, you are going to lose fat along with muscle mass. “If you lose muscle and fat, you are going to have this thing called metabolic adaptation after the diet. This is where your resting metabolic rate is lower than it was before the diet,” she says. One study found that one year after people stopped getting weekly semaglutide shots, they regained two-thirds of their prior weight loss, “with similar changes in cardiometabolic variables.”

4. Resistance Training Can Help Prevent It

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While it is “always going to happen,” when you lose weight, there are ways to prevent it from being “lower than it should.” One key component to minimize muscle mass loss is “you're going to need to do resistance training and minimally you're going to need to move each major body part,” she says, recommending two to three days a week of exercise.

Related: 13 Proven Workouts for Building a Powerful Chest

5. She Also Recommends Amping Up Protein Intake

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She also recommends amping up protein intake. “Basically, you're going to want your daily range to be somewhere between 0.7 to one gram per pound of your target body weight,” she adds. She recommends “lean healthy sources” like grass-finished filet Turkey, pastured chicken, eggs and egg whites, whey protein, bone broth protein, and pea protein.

6. Also, Increasing Fiber Helps

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You should also eat fiber, “from non starchy vegetables” and “eat from the rainbow,” she adds. “You want different types of fibers, prebiotic fibers, resistant starch. So you want different fibers and you want different colors. They represent different plant nutrients, different polyphenols. They all have different impacts on your gut microbiome, and we're rehabbing your gut microbiome here,” she continues.

Related: #1 Weight Loss Food Mistakes You Are Making

7. Fruit, Good Fats, and Seeds Are Also Beneficial for Gut Health

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As you “start to taper off” the drugs, “your own gut can start to produce what it needs to produce to tell you that you are full,” she points out. She also recommends two servings of fruit, whole fats, “things like avocados, nuts, and seeds,” and greens and eating all meals “within a 10 to 12 hour window”

8. And, Hydrate

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Making sure to hydrate is also important, because “what happens with these drugs is dehydration.” Hydrating helps detox the body, she explains, recommending drinking at least half your body weight in water in ounces. “If you are mildly dehydrated, it's going to slow down your metabolism and then also it actually makes you store fat,” she adds. She also adds electrolyte to her water.

9. Take Supplements to Compensate for the Decrease in Calories

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She also recommends “a good foundational supplement, a daily multivitamin, mineral, antioxidant, essential fatty acid formula to make sure you're covering all your bases since your calories are going down,” she says. “Here's another thing that I want you to take: Creatine monohydrate,” she says, explaining that studies have found that it helps people avoid losing muscle as they age.

Related: I Lost 40 Pounds in 4 Months With These Simple Tricks

10. Bottom Line: Weight Training and Healthy Eat Can Help Mitigate Ozempic Side Effects

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While taking weight loss drugs like Ozempic may come with side effects – like gaining weight after you stop getting the injections – Virgin offers up a good argument that you can mitigate them by pairing healthy eating with regular strength training workouts.

💪🔥Body Booster: Anytime you lose weight – whether from dietary changes or taking a drug like Ozempic – along with fat loss you are going to lose muscle mass. This can result in rebound weight – unless you take steps to mitigate the weight gain.

Have you successfully lost weight with Ozempic, Wegovy, or any other GLP-1 medication but now worry about regaining those pounds once you stop taking it? You're not alone. Many patients face this common concern, but there are strategies to maintain your weight loss. Dr. Kidd, MD, a dual-trained expert as both a Board Certified Family Medicine Physician and a Board Certified Physical Therapist, shares his insights on how to keep the weight off after discontinuing these popular weight loss medications. “I’m going to go through four tips and techniques that my patients have successfully used to maintain their weight when they come off Ozempic,” says Dr. Kidd in his YouTube video. Read on to learn his no-nonsense tips.

Tip 1: Create an Environment for Weight Loss

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Dr. Kidd explains in his video, "Developing long-term habits is a key element of maintaining weight loss, not only after following the cessation of Ozempic but for anyone who wants to maintain weight loss in the long-term. Now, we all know changing habits is very difficult, but one key principle I've found that's been very helpful is actually from a book known as The Atomic Habits by James Clear. In this book, he talks about creating the right environment for habit change. In his book, he tells us to change our habits. You should not focus on just a specific goal like I want to lose X amount of weight or try harder. Rather, what he tells us to focus on is to create systems in our environment that make good habits easier to do and bad habits harder to do."

RELATED: 20 Things You Need to Know About Ozempic and Weight Loss

How to Do It

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Dr. Kidd offers several practical suggestions in his video: "Delete all the food delivery apps off your phone right now. This way, it'll be much harder for you to order takeaway because you will have to reinstall the applications. Again, turn your TV off at the wall switch and leave your remote really far away from your couch. This will add the extra few steps that you'll need to take. If you want to binge on the couch and watch Netflix, you had better cancel your Netflix subscription altogether. Also, throw away all sugary food and junk food from your house right now and make sure that you don't buy anymore if it's not in your house, it makes you much more difficult to eat."

He continues, "Now, you can also make environmental changes that make good habits easier to do. For example, if you like to go to the gym for exercise, make sure that the gym that you go to is really close to your house or work, so there's little resistance of going there."

Tip 2: Eat More Slowly

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In his video, Dr. Kidd highlights the importance of eating speed: "There was a massive study done in Japan on about 60,000 people on the effect of eating speed on weight loss. What they found was that people who ate more slowly were less likely to gain weight, and people who ate more quickly gained weight more quickly. How this works is not completely understood, but it's thought that if you eat slowly, you allow time for us to take hormones that kick in and tell us that you're full before you consume too much food. One example of these hormones is leptin, which is a hormone that's released from our fat cells, and this is the hormone that signals our brain, particularly an area called the hypothalamus, that we're full and to stop eating."

How to Do It

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He adds in the video, "The idea that eating speed affects weight gain is also consistent. When we watch videos on people who eat large amounts of food in eating challenges, usually in these challenges, you see them eat extremely quickly, and this allows them to consume large amounts of food. So, next time you eat, make sure that you take your time. It might actually help you lose weight, and you don't even have to change what you're eating."

RELATED:20 Possible Ozempic Side Effects

Tip 3: Wean Off Medication Slowly

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Dr. Kidd advises on medication management: "Semaglutide, which is the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, helps with weight loss by suppressing your appetite. It does this by mimicking a hormone known as the GLP one hormone, which is a hormone that helps tell our body that it's full for some patients. If you suddenly come off the medication after a high dose, it may result in a large return of appetite."

How to Do It

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One way to smooth the transition is to wean the medication slowly. To give you an example, if you're taking on Ozempic one milligram, you can go down to 0.5 milligrams weekly for four weeks and then go down to 0.25 milligrams weekly for four weeks, and then I would go down to 0.25 milligrams fortnightly for eight weeks. This will allow you time to acclimatize to the changes in appetite."

RELATED:What Happens to Your Body When You Stop Taking Ozempic

Embrace Intermittent Fasting

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Dr. Kidd explains the concept of intermittent fasting: "Intermittent fasting broadly speaking refers to any diet where a person voluntary partakes in periods of eating separated by periods of fasting. There are many methods of intermittent fasting described, but some of the more popular methods include the 16 and eight method where every single day you fast for 16 hours of the day and you eat eight hours of the day.

How to Do It

Another method that's commonly described is the five and two method. This is where you could eat normally for five days of the week, but you fast for two days of the week. But in those two days, you can actually eat between 500 to 600 calories regardless of what fasting method you use."

How Intermittent Fasting Helps

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Dr. Kidd elaborates on the benefits in his video: "One of the key ways intermittent fasting helps us lose weight is it gives our body time to burn fat. Normally when we eat food, our body has to store some of it to use for energy later. Two of the key stores of energy in our body are glycogen and fat. Glycogen is made up of sugar and glucose that we eat in our diet, and it's usually stored in the liver. A little bit is also stored in the muscles of our body. When we start fasting, our body actually goes for the glycogen stores first and uses that up for energy.

RELATED: 20 Things to Avoid While on Ozempic

Why Fasting Helps Burn Fat

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However, with prolonged fasting, our glycogen stores will become depleted, and the body has to look for another source of energy. This is when your body will start burning fat through a process called ketosis. This is why fasting is so important: if you're eating three meals a day plus snacks, you're not leaving enough time to fast for the body to get through those glycogen stores and start burning the fat. So this is why I encourage patients to embrace fasting, and I do see patients that can stick to long periods of intermittent fasting and maintain their weight loss." And if you enjoyed this article, don't miss 20 Incredible Ozempic Success Stories of All Time.

Do you want to lose weight but aren’t sure if you want to take medication to do it? You don’t have to, according to one expert. Susie Matychuk, AKA Coach Sooz, is “the world’s nerdiest personal trainer,” according to her YouTube bio. “The thing that is more effective than Ozempic is a healthy lifestyle,” she says at the start of the viral YouTube clip. In it, she discusses alternatives to the drug for weight loss in the form of foods and fitness.

She Grew Up Believing Medication Should Be a “Last Resort”

She starts by discussing her experience with medication. “I grew up with very traditional values, and I remember my mom telling me that medication should always be the last resort. In my early twenties, I started getting chronic strep throat, joint pain, and rashes. I had no idea that it was because of my poor diet and stress level,” she says in her post.

She Has Tried Taking Typical Medications But They Haven’t Worked

“I went to the doctor and got prescribed antibiotics and painkillers. My symptoms got worse, and I went to the emergency room thinking that I had rheumatoid arthritis or something, which is typical of Susie being overdramatic. The doctors were just as confused as me, and I realized the medical system is not made to help people with symptoms,” she says.

However, Healthy Lifestyle Has Helped Her Ailments Over the Years

She reveals that when she “started taking vitamins, eating a paleo diet, and spending more time outside, and I stopped taking medications,” her symptoms gradually went away. “That's a little bit about my story and why I am so passionate about a lifestyle approach instead of medication,” she says, adding that there are specific types of food and exercises that stimulate GLP-1, “which is the hormone that Ozempic” targets.

She Believes a Healthy Lifestyle Can Work Just as Well as Ozempic

She notes that while doctors are “prescribing it very generously,” they wouldn’t need to if people understood nutrition and exercise. “If we understood how to make our body have nutrients, then we wouldn't gain fat and feel the need for weight loss drugs at all,” she says. “I would definitely describe myself as anti-medication and pro-healthy lifestyle.”

These Foods Increase the Production of GLP-1

“GLP-1 is a hormone that is produced in the gut and the brain that slows digestion and lowers appetite. Your body is really good at making it on its own without any medical intervention,” she claims. “There are foods you can eat that increase the production of GLP-1, which will make weight loss easier. Eggs, avocado, nuts, and complex carbohydrates all have been shown to increase GLP-1,” she says. Yerba mate tea and black coffee also lower appetite.”

RELATED: She Dropped 50 Pounds in One Year Without Strict Diets By Walking Every Day

The Best Diet Is “Pretty Close” to Keto

The ideal fat loss diet that “stimulates a lot of GLP-1” is “pretty close to a ketogenic diet, which is very effective for reversing insulin resistance and losing fat,” she reveals. “Remember that fat loss is the goal, not weight loss because we wanna keep our muscle and lose the fat.”

Exercise Also Releases Chemicals That “Benefit the Body”

Exercise does not stimulate GLP-1,” but it does stimulate a whole bunch of other chemicals that benefit the body,” says Susie. “One of them is growth hormone or GH, and another one is BDNF,” she says about brain-derived neurotrophic factor. “GH is what starts the process of muscle growth. BDNF is what makes you smarter. So basically, exercise makes you jacked and smart.”

RELATED: This Nutritionist Lost 15 Pounds by Eating These 7 "Busy Woman" High-Protein Foods

Ozempic Stops You From Releasing GH, Which Is the Hormone That Helps You Build Muscle

“Ozempic actually stops you from releasing growth hormone, which is why those who take it tend to gain fat and lose muscle. So in most cases, ozempic actually makes us lose the wrong type of weight,” she reveals.

These 5 “Primal Movements” Are the Best Exercises for Weight Loss

According to Susie, the best exercises are called primal movements. “They are movements that your body is actually designed to do. Injury and pain are the result of not being able to do primal movements. There are five of them, and they are squatting, hinging, lunging, pushing, and pulling,” she says.

RELATED: She Tried Every Diet for 8 Years Then These 5 Changes Got Her Perfect Body

The Most Effective Equation for Fat Loss? Diet and Exercise

“Basically, all you need to do to live a healthy lifestyle that is more effective for fat loss than ozempic is one, eat the GLP-1 stimulating diet, and two, practice your primal movements,” she says. “Every day, big pharma will keep making drugs and selling them to us as long as we are asking for them. And by taking them, you're still asking for them. So hopefully, this provided some clarity on what to do instead, which is to be healthy.” And if you enjoyed this article, take advantage of these 15 Quick Ways to Lose Body Fat Percentage in a Week.