Dr. Terry Dubrow gave Ozempic a shot — but he missed out on “the joy of eating.”
“I’ve tried it. I thought it was amazing. I … didn’t have that much weight to lose,” Dubrow, 65, told Page Six. “But I wanted to try it because so many of my patients were on it and I wanted to see what it was like when you’re not diabetic and you only have 10-15 pounds to lose.”
While he still supports the medication, he didn’t feel the side effects were worth the reward. In addition to “low-grade nausea,” the Botched star lost interest in food. “I thought, ‘You know what, I kind of want to get my appetite back. The holidays are coming, I want to enjoy myself,’” he explained.
The plastic surgeon, who is married to The Real Housewives of Orange County star Heather Dubrow, noted that Ozempic “really took … all the joy of eating away.”
Dubrow added, “You go on vacation, maybe you don’t exercise, you eat too much. It was kind of like, ‘Well, I want to go on a food vacation,’ meaning I want to be able to eat again.”
In addition to wanting to enjoy food at the holidays, Dubrow also needed to be off the semaglutide injections if he wanted a Christmas cocktail.
“You can’t drink on it,” he said. “You’ve got to be really careful with alcohol because people are being put in the hospital with pancreatitis.”
While Ozempic isn’t right for Dubrow, he still thinks it’s a huge breakthrough that will help many people.
In August, he exclusively told Us Weekly about the positive effects of the injections, which were designed to treat Type 2 diabetes.
“These Ozempic-type drugs aren’t the new Botox. They’re better. They’re Botox, liposuction, breast augmentation, facelifts,” Dubrow shared with Us. “Put it all together, and you’ve got a drug that’s not only making people look better and feel better, it’s treating the No. 1 risk factor for heart disease, diabetes and cancer. So, this is an incredibly powerful positive thing that is truly the most significant, I think, medical breakthrough in history.”
Some celebrities have spoken out about using Ozempic and other similar medicines to quickly shed pounds — and many face backlash. However, Dubrow wanted to “stop immediately the ozempic-shaming,” noting that doctors need people to speak clearly and accurately about their experiences on the drug.
“Listen, we don’t know how to use these miracle weight loss drugs in non-diabetics particularly. We don’t know how to use them in patients who only have five to 20 pounds to lose. So we need to share our experiences,” Dubrow explained to Us. “We’re learning as the patients are learning what the side effects really are. … So it’s really an exciting time, but it’s also a very scary time. It’s gonna change the very nature of our bodies and what’s happening with our physiology. And it’s a new frontier. It’s exciting, but it’s also very dangerous.”
