Can Ozempic Cure Addiction?(newyorker.com) |
Can Ozempic Cure Addiction?(newyorker.com) |
I've been smoking on and off for 20 years. I have stopped (and relapsed) many times, so I believe I can compare. This was a lot easier. I mean, I had cravings, but they weren't really that bad, and while the first week is generally the difficult part, I only had a couple of days with issues. I did not lose weight that month, though, which is fine as I would normally gain a lot due to compensating for cravings.
I increased the dose again and started losing weight. I guess some people gain weight when they stop using GLP-1. Even if that happens, I'm fine with stopping smoking without weight gain.
Congrats. Smoking is a bitch of a habit and extremely hard to quit.
I started a GLP-1 in February of 2025. Lost a bunch of weight, etc.
What I wasn't expecting was that I'd have such an easy time dropping the daily drinking habit. I'm not convinced GLP's will help if you're truly addicted to alcohol to the point where you need AA and structured programs to break free. But I do think GLP's have the potential to give you the initial "kick" you need to drop the habit if you're otherwise motivated to.
In the first few months of starting the GLP-1, I remember losing enjoyment for eating (and drinking) a lot of things, especially unhealthy stuff (unhealthy foods/drinks tend to not combine well with GLP's). The taste of a cocktail wasn't as appetizing or appealing as it used to be, hard to explain.
I'd love to see more research around this.
Looks like we posted around the same time, but see:
There is a point you made here "losing enjoyment for eating (and drinking)" that I think is The Key, but also not what people think when they hear it without experiencing it. Someone hearing that line might think it makes food "unenjoyable," as in "bad." That is not the case. It is "unenjoyable" as in "lacking in a joyful experience."
After talking with friends of mine who are similarly aged to me but have not had the major weight struggles I've had, I realized one of the biggest differences between us is not our drive or discipline (they envy me in many of these areas), it's in the sheer level of enjoyment that I get out of food and drink that they do not.
There are certain foods that, if I have them, they make me more hungry. I can't physically fit enough spaghetti or chocolate pudding into my mouth to satisfy my craving for it. My favorite beer feels glorious all the way down my throat and into my stomach; I can go from depressed to happy in 10 seconds just from that first gulp. And it's just those specific things. I'm not going to scarf down hard on lasagna or chocolate ice cream. While I enjoy whiskey, wine, cocktails, and other beers, I can have one in a night and be done.
There are also foods that are the opposite. I physically cannot stomach muscles or cuccumber. Putting cauliflower--in any form--on my plate is likely to start an argument. All leafy greens feel like a punishment; I can choke them down, unlike muscles, but I'm not going to like the person who made me do it.
But my friends without weight issues have never had these experiences with any foods. Food is just a way to avoid hunger. Booze is just a way to get drunk. There's no strong emotional connection to any of it.
And GLP-1 agonists completely remove that. I've heard it called "The Food Noise." It's basically a re-baselining of my relationship to food back to what should be "normal." Nothing has a feedback loop of pushing me to consume more anymore. Nothing gives me such strong revulsion that I can't eat it anymore. It's just food, on my plate. I don't even feel hungry, the only reason I'm eating it is because I understand at an intellectual level that I have to in order to not pass out in the middle of the day.
I still enjoy drinking an IPA just as much, and really I enjoy it much more since I have one every few months instead of 5 every night. I could enjoy one every night, but I don't really need to have it, even though it would be delicious and the buzz is enjoyable, I just don't feel compelled to get it and I know it's not good for me. I knew before it wasn't good for me, believe me as the child of an alcoholic I knew it wasn't good to drink every night, but I did anyway because I had something inside pushing me to do it.
So maybe that is what you are describing, that thing that pushes you to do things you know are bad for you, and which you will regret immediately, but yet you feel like you have to do anyway. It's not enjoying something more, it's more like feeding withdrawal.
Overall I feel like there is someone in control now. I can just decide that drinking a beer every night is bad for me and not aligned with my goals and then I don't do it, and when I rarely think about it I'm just not a person who drinks alone anymore and my thoughts quickly move on to figuring out how to make croissant dough or looking for a scene to post to instagram or some work problem that has been bugging me.
Now, I wish it could do this for late night sugary snacks as well since that's my crux.
Are you doing the action because you want to do it, or because your body is responding to that mild trigger that occurs, but your pavlonian response is so strong you can't differentiate.
The thing is, those trigger mechanisms break after weeks without doing them, whereas it is very hard to break them normally without some more extreme measure.
This was largely portrayed as a great result in the popular press although personally I think it was a bit of a disappointment given all the amazing anecdotes https://dynomight.net/glp-1/
Seeing such an effect in just 9 weeks, 90% of that time being at low ramp up doses, is astonishing.
>> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
>> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html#:~:text=Are%20payw...
9 times out of ten it's because sites use cloaking and serve up all of the contents to search bots, but then paywall out end users, so it's kind of a hoisted by their own petard kind of situation.
And, I mean, people can choose to not follow those links. To the rest of us they're often very welcome, and we aren't subscribing to every random site for the once in a millennia worthwhile article.
It IME doesn't act like an anti-depressant/SSRI which can affect your enthusiasm/desire for your job.
Absolutely life changing drug for me.
(I'm just concerned; I've seen many people good at and super into their job end up with burnout, often multiple times because they keep thinking "I used to be good at this!", "I enjoy this!", etc instead of accepting that it was never sustainable in the first place. I suspect people's nervous systems etc are more resilient in their 20's, which is why most people with burnout only start to run into it in their 30's)
What GLP-1 did (initially) was give me horrible insomnia that peaked a couple of days after taking the injection so I had to time my dosage so that I suffered through that on the weekend. That got better over time and eventually went away after about 6 weeks.
Regardless, as another poster mentioned, it's a weekly injection and if you don't like the effects you can stop taking it.
> I’d already understood addiction to be a treatable disease, not a personal failing. Still, these scans helped me appreciate how deeply addiction is rooted in neurobiology. A mere photograph of alcohol—to say nothing of a sip—was enough to send a person’s reward centers into a frenzy.
Ban alcohol advertising now and I’m not kidding or being hyperbolic.
Agree. Don't need to make it illegal. Free speech doesn't mean the right to say anything to anyone at anytime.
Meaning, it is performance-degrading to be overweight. When you remove that? you sleep better you breathe better you move better and therefore think better.
If they are directly performance enhancing, it is in an extremely subtle way- far less than a soda’s worth of caffeine.
I saw a thread on reddit where a GP chimed in and mentioned that he was giving urusodiol to all his patients at the same time as GLPs, to help prevent the associated issues.
Either way, modern science is great. Just do your research.
Since I already knew that rapid weight loss is very unhealthy, I intentionally eat very nutrient dense foods in order to keep my weight loss in a reasonable range.
During this same period, I left an abusive marriage and started exercising extensively. While the causes are complex, I attribute the loss of desire to drink primarily to the GLP-1. Subjectively, I now see drinking as a distraction from programming and other things I enjoy. This feels like my early 20s, when I saw getting drunk as a waste of time, rather than later years when I pushed for another round.
I would love for it to be miracle it appears to be, since I hate trying to maintain my desired weight. I don't qualify for GLP-1 due to my BMI being too low, but I sure would like to stop the constant cravings for food and my love of beer. Everyday feels like a struggle to maintain a healthy lifestyle.
Is India about to make Ozempic-like weight-loss drugs a whole lot cheaper? - https://edition.cnn.com/2026/02/07/india/india-semaglutide-p...
now, alcohol has become the least interesting thing in the world, I just can't make myself drink it, it is so strange
That said, there are some that have reported it also lessens desire for things they want to desire.
Did a writeup on this back in summer '25:
https://glp1guide.substack.com/p/glp1s-vs-addiction-a-quick-...
Paywalled so direct links to notable papers through the years below:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8517504
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8820218
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36031011
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10684505
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39764175
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39032839/
https://www.science.org/content/article/obesity-drug-cuts-op... https://www.statnews.com/2024/02/17/opioid-cravings-glp1-wei... (The science.org article is paywalled IIRC)
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39535805/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39937469/
Addiction comes up in anecdata all the time so I've written about it a few times but these papers are a good place to start to find more rigorous data points.
Eli Lilly has taken to calling GLP1s "anti-hedonics" as well
- Intermittent fasting (16x8 or at least stop eating after sun down)
- Daily morning pranayama (or 'breath work' if you prefer that term)
- Daily morning intake of copper utensil stored water (~8 hours or overnight)
- Weekly oil pulling for gum health.
This approach feels a bit stoic and neanderthal initially, less attuned to our modern and progressive society, but as effective as Ozempic in long-run (minus the side-effects or addiction).
There are known side effects, mostly gastrointestinal issues, and they don't work for everyone. That being said, I'd recommend you make your own risk assessment and consider getting on GLP-1s if you have the cash to spare. You might find that GLP-1s increase your quality of life so much that it's well-worth it (or that you get terrible nausea and immediately quit, and then you no longer need to wonder).
Potential risks have to be weighed against potential benefits. There are robust RCT results showing GLP-1s reduce all-cause mortality, major cardiovascular events, and stroke among patients with obesity or T2D by 13-14%, and suggestive evidence that some of these benefits apply to non-overweight people, though this hasn't been confirmed in RCTs and is likely smaller in magnitude.
"Cardiovascular and renal outcomes of glucagon-like peptide 1 receptor agonists among patients with and without type 2 diabetes mellitus: A meta-analysis of randomized placebo-controlled trials": https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S266666772...
One reason to believe that cardiovascular benefits might apply to non-overweight people is that among the available evidence on overweight and obese people, weight loss doesn't seem to explain all benefits. See Figure 1 or the analysis section of the SELECT trial.
"Semaglutide and cardiovascular outcomes by baseline and changes in adiposity measurements: a prespecified analysis of the SELECT trial": https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
The main plausible long-term risk is thyroid cancer. Data from a meta-analysis of RCTs suggests a 55% (large error bars) increase in thyroid cancer risk.
"GLP-1 receptor agonists and the risk for cancer: A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials": https://dom-pubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/do...
This is concerning, though it's worth noting that thyroid cancer is rare (1% lifetime incidence) and unlikely to kill you (98% 5-year survival, 99.9% when caught early). No studies have linked GLP-1s to a statistically significant increase in cancer-related mortality. I don't want to be too confident because RCTs have not yet shown this and I'm not an Eli Lilly shill, but cohort studies suggest GLP-1s are associated with reduced risk of other cancers. This is a good overview:
"Glucagon-like peptide-1 medicines and cancer": https://www.nature.com/articles/s43018-025-01110-1
And as for cure rather than suppression - yes, according to that definition, no medicine that is intended to be taken indefinitely to manage a condition is a cure. But nevertheless, high blood pressure medicine, statins, anti-inflamatories, HIV antiretroviral therapy, and many other drugs have saved many millions of people from an early death. We should keep looking for one-off "cures" for all conditions, but let's not limit ourselves to them.
The only way I found to reduce cravings is to be a hermit because there is food absolutely everywhere all the time
But for many it's considered a shortcut and there's a big network of dubious online shops and weight loss clinics that sell it. It's not unlike crash / fad diets in that regard.
Most people would already benefit from lifestyle adjustments, but those are hard to do for most people - for starters, most people don't even have regular eating habits to begin with, no baseline to even make adjustments to.
I quite smoking with cytisine, a drug that basically makes nicotine useless by taking it's place. The pitch is that it's just easier to quite cytisine than nicotine, because unlike nicotine it leaves your system easily.
Wouldn't the same principle work with Mounjaro? Ease off the drug evenly, so you would wouldn't have to overcome big bad addiction all at once, instead you face just a bit of addiction one at the time.
But forming habits / making lifestyle changes is hard. And when people hear they can just take an injection instead of make lifestyle changes they're like oo, easy!
I've heard very addictive personalities describe it as a light switch being turned off, people who have been on a whole host of different things across time.
Individual differences in medication response isn't just placebo.
Why make medicine at all if essentially you think you just have to convince people of fairy stories well enough for literally anything to work?
there are GLP-1 receptors on neurons, the drugs cross the blood-brain barrier, they are active in reward centers.
these drugs directly affect the behavior of neurons, it's not some chain of effects that result in behavior change
A major part of this story I think is especially important, the last time this sort of thing happened was about a decade ago, when I lost 90 pounds without any medical intervention. At that time I learned to code, fixed up my credit, and went from being front line technical support to junior software engineer. Quite a transformative time in my life.
I think curing my sleep apnea due to substantial weight loss means I sleep better, so I just feel more ready to tackle the things the world throws at me. Weight loss is a skill I had, but it required absolute commitment to avoiding sugary foods, eating right every single day, and as soon as I strayed the weight would creep back up over the course of a year or two.
It makes me think of the huge immeasurable economic costs that are happening in the shadows because of obesity, how many people like me are there other aren’t achieving our full potential because we’re just too tired and have too much brain fog to seize the day?
I used to smoke a pack a day for years, but switched to vaping in the 2010s when nicotine salt juice became more available. It was a massive quality of life improvement. Though initially this unlocked a much higher dose of nicotine I'd ever get smoking, I eventually brought it down and regardless my lungs were doing better.
Around 2020, I switched to the pouches and since then I'm down to using maybe like two a day if any at all. Since they are a slower delivery method, the nature of the cravings has changed too. I can easily hold off for hours or even days since they're less intense. I have zero desire to go back to smoking or vaping ever again. I've never experienced any oral health issues from the pouches either. X-rays on my mouth and lungs now show no damage.
The only thing I will say is nicotine itself isn't entirely harmless and can trigger some mild anxiety. It seems to be related to keeping blood cotinine levels in check.
I'd never recommend people start a nicotine habit, but I think we're at the point where it's not much worse than caffeine if you take it orally. There is some research out there about the potential benefits of both preventing dementia, but I won't link anything. People can argue about that somewhere else.
I would recommend nicotine as a stimulant, though. It is a solid adjunct to caffeine.
Why are you eating less, if you enjoy eating just as much as before?
Is it that you feel physically full (would be uncomfortable to eat more)? Or is it that you aren't hungry (but you're also not particularly "full")?
I would say it takes longer to get hungry even though I eat maybe 1/3 to 1/2 as many calories as I did before (that is to say 2/3 less than before). If I ate this little before GLP-1 I would have felt like I was dying and would have been thinking about food and hunger all day and night.
Yes you do fill up faster, and your stomach empties slower, so there is actually a physical 'being full' that happens with less food than previously.
The purpose of the system is what it does. Yet the system routinely persecutes ordinary people for this criminal offense while giant IP corporations just treat it as an opening move in corporate deal-making.
Where people on GLP-1s -- in a randomized, double-blind study, notably -- chose to partake of less. I cannot fathom how you dismiss this.
It's a 9 week study at very low doses, and already a significant measurable effect was seen. Now if this wasn't a double-blind study I would dismiss it, but otherwise yeah, it matters.
People who have drinking habits will take a long time to adopt new habits. I would never expect to see baseline behaviour changes in so short a time. But their non-habit desire for alcohol clearly was diminished, hence the lab outcomes.
Meanwhile the evidence from actual drinking levels was much stronger (far fewer dropouts) and showed zero effect. Before this trial was done, you may have predicted that there would be positive results for the lab experiment but zero results in ecological conditions. But I think that prediction would be quite unusual. For anyone who expected results in ecological conditions (like me), this was disappointing.
"But I think that prediction would be quite unusual."
Would it? Who in the world would guess that small ramp-up doses of a semaglutide (0.25, 0.5, and 1mg, the first two doses over 89% of the study duration. The average maintenance dose is 2.4mg) would immediately undo long-earned core habits over just two months? It's a rather absurd study.
The site existed for most of a decade before it had any particular paywall bypassing. It's an ondemand archival site that saves the DOM in such a way that redisplay is faithful, unlike archive.org.
It's a key resource in court cases for purely archival purposes and the fact that it bypasses paywalls is essential for its archival purpose to function.
The site/org has no office and is anonymously run virtually. Exists on random, essentially free for all TLDs, does not honour take-down requests, does not respect robots.txt, masquerades as the Googlebot...
...yeah, I happen to have not been born yesterday so I'm not going to play along with a fiction.
(Not all fat people are idiots btw)
They don't. People on GLP-1s lose weight the same as you or I, through diet and exercise. It just makes it easier to build those habits.
Which I think reveals the obvious. Diet and exercise ARE NOT root cause solutions. Meaning, the root cause of obesity IS NOT eating too much. Rather, it's a propensity to eat too much. And, in that regard, GLP-1s are a root cause solutions, whereas diet necessarily is not.
My sarcasm was to the purported original goal, when it has always, since day one, been a fake Googlebot known, again since day 1, as a circumvention of paywalls for sites that cloak.