Welcome to another Medical Minute.

Today I have a very simple, or maybe not so simple, question and it’s,

Should I take a weight loss medication?

What we also call an anti-obesity medication.
And I think there’s two criteria that first have to be met to consider taking any weight loss medication.

The first is, that you’ve struggled in the past, either losing weight or keeping weight off. And the second is by the FDA is, do you have certain criteria? And the first criteria is that your body mass index is 30 or greater.

And the second, if you’re not over 30, is that your body mass index is at least 27, but you also have a secondary weight related risk factor, such as type two diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or sleep apnea. Once you determine if you should take a weight loss medication, the second part of that is actually much more difficult.

It’s figuring out which medication is best for you.
One of my pieces I pride myself on is, I think I’ve gotten pretty good at helping people pick weight loss medications.

There is not one weight loss medication that will work for everybody.

Each person has different pieces that go into their hunger. Some people are hungry in the daytime. Some people are hungry in the nighttime. Some people like volume eating. Some people eat a little bit of food all day long. Some people aren’t actually hungry at all and work a lot with cravings or struggle a lot with cravings and such. Those are questions I ask, or ones like it, when trying to decide what is the best one to put you on.

In the next several weeks, I will talk about several of the weight loss medications that we use, both on-label and off-label.

Hope to see you then.
Have a great week.