In today’s newsletter

✅ My unhealthy relationship with food. ✅ How the new weight loss drugs actually work. ✅ The monster breakthrough. ✅ How a Danish pharmaceutical giant became the most valuable company in Europe. ✅ The promises and perils of Ozempic and Wegovy. ✅ Obesity is now considered a disease - aging should be next.

Before we begin, some housekeeping.

📖 This is a long read. You might want to come back when you have some time to spare. This is also why there are no sections at the bottom this time - but they’ll be back in my next newsletter.

⏳To clarify: In the healthspan vs lifespan debate I am very much in the lifespan camp. Meaning I am of the opinion that life is good and death is bad. We should be able to live indefinitely, not only seek to improve our health and then be satisfied with the ridiculously short amount of time we get as it stands right now.

Yet this installment of LEVITY has nothing to do with treatments and interventions that might take us to 120 and far beyond. So why bother? Well, we need to be around when new revolutionary technology arrives and it seems to me that the medications discussed below might help millions of people live longer than they otherwise would have.

🙏🏼 I’m so grateful to all of you who signed up to subscribe! It’s still early days but the response so far has been very encouraging! ❤️

Alright, let’s get this show on the road!

”Their brains actually do tell them to stop eating. I had no idea”

Keeping a healthy diet is tricky even if everything in life is going according to plan. And as you are well aware, many times it doesn’t. At which point those pesky emotions starts calling the shots. Disrupted sleep and hormonal imbalances can lead to a cascade effect, impairing the decision-making and self-control centers of the brain. In such moments, the pursuit of instant gratification takes over, driven by the craving for that sweet dopamine release. I am pretty sure there was some ice cream left in the freezer.

I know this all too well. The battle is ongoing.

For those that read my book this might come as a surprise. Wasn’t that a success story? Yes, in many ways it was. I went from obese to pretty much normal weight. My biomarkers became much better across the board. I started going to the gym and I still do. Overall I would say my training regimen is perfectly okay.

About a year ago my personal trainer and I agreed to set a new ambitious goal. I would start counting calories, weigh my food and follow a meal plan to get rid of that last remaining belly fat. I really thought this would do the trick - to be held accountable by my PT. Instead it exposed how troubled my relationship with food is and has always been.

Whenever I’ve lost one or two kilos there’s been one or two (or three) days of binging. Sooner or later I am so fed up (both literally and figuratively) that I force myself to start over. Doctor Google calls this a binge eating disorder.

In the course of writing my book I was sufficiently motivated to shed a lot of weight. But I also did three rounds of Prolon, the fasting-mimicking diet, and was knocked out for a few weeks with Covid. So I got thinner, but my relationship with food - and my tendency to binge - did not really change.

I’ve been obsessing over food since my late teens. That’s around 11 000 days of constant thinking about what to put (or rather what not to put) in my mouth. Different diet regimes, calorie counting apps, time restricted eating, setting up new rules and regulations in my head only to go on a high fat-high carb bender for the weekend.

It also doesn’t help that I’m on mirtazapine, an antidepressant* that makes it easier for me to fall asleep. A common side effect of that drug is weight gain, as it stimulates your appetite (for which it’s sometimes prescribed off-label).

* I go through this in my book in more detail but tl;dr: I have had bouts of depression since I was 19 (and my eating habits is somewhat related to this in so far as when you are very depressed you don’t care much about of such pedestrian things as a balanced diet). My most severe one arrived about ten years ago. I fell deep enough that I was offered - and accepted - electroconvulsive therapy. When the lights started flickering again I was put on a combination of venlafaxine and mirtazapine which, I must say, has worked extremely well. And just recently a doctor told me that this particular combination is called California Rocket Fuel so there is no way I’m getting off these meds now.

And now I hear of people for which this endless bickering about food between different parts of the brain has ceased. People who report that a new patch for their wetware has fixed their broken signaling system. One of them is quoted in New Yorker:

”All I can say is that it is no wonder that skinny people think heavy people have no willpower. Their brains actually do tell them to stop eating. I had no idea.”

Yes, this is of course someone taking the medication semaglutide, better known under brand names such as Ozempic and Wegovy. It’s a type of drug called GLP-1 receptor agonist*.

* An agonist, as opposed to an antagonist, is a chemical that activates a receptor.

A lot of people call this drug a game-changer. I think it’s more apt to call it a world-changer.

But is it related to aging? Yes, very much so, and in more ways than one. I’ll return to that after our history lesson.

Subscribe to Premium Membership to read the rest.