…in my Mounjaroville

Yep, as I predicted last week, Facebook removed my Mounjaro update once again because they think I’m spamming the six people who read the updates. Sure, that’s what I’m all about, right? So I’ll obfuscate the name of the drug and I’ll post an innocuous parrot head picture once again. Screw Facebook and their dumbass spam algorithm.

I’ll remind you that you can subscribe to this blog via the tool on the right. You’ll get a notification when I post something, but otherwise, you won’t be spammed or harangued. This is a non-commercial blog, written for my own amusement, not for money.

But I am not here to write about Facebook. Mounjaro therapy–mine, specifically–is the topic at hand in this corner of The Nittany Turkey blog. It is mostly about me, but I also cover other subjects related to the vogue drug my doctor prescribed for my type two diabetes. Each week, I share an update of my progress getting my blood glucose under control. Boring, I know. So, I throw in frequent editorial rants to spice things up.

Just view this as a curmudgeonly old fart kvetching about his ailments and dishing out some impertinent opinions about human behavior, healthcare, and social media warriors. Take some TUMS and read on. Today, after a couple of irascible, stream-of-consciousness, somewhat redundant pontification, I get around to telling you how I am doing.

Don’t Stop Believin’ (in YouTube)

The pop musical group Journey recorded the song “Don’t Stop Believin'” in 1981. Since then, Forbes rewarded Journey by declaring it “The Biggest Song of All Time.” That’s all I want to say about “Journey” here, before my weak segue to the spurious topic at hand. I abhor using the word journey to describe drug therapy or other medical treatment. Tune into YouTube sometime. You’ll hear lots of wanking about Mounjaro journeys. Hell, if I wanted to know about frigging journeys, I’d watch travel videos instead. Characterizing serious medical therapy as something akin to a pleasure cruise is simply bullshit that I lack the patience to process, especially when that pleasure cruise is most often like The Poseidon Adventure.

“Learn to Eat!”

And, hey, I won’t tell you what to eat while dealing with Mounjaro therapy, either, like some YouTubers. Recently, I saw a disgusting video by one of the YouTube “influencers” chronicling her “journey”. She was showing what she ate on a particular day. I nearly vomited, watching her add processed crap like mayonnaise and bottled ranch dressing to her indulgences, with the happy approval of her canine meal companion. She not only wants to preserve her shitty eating habits, but wants to tell us all how to do it. Some “influencer”!

As a lifelong friend’s now dearly departed mother used to say, “Learn to eat!!!”

Abominations abound in the YouTube milieu. Watch those videos with a jaundiced eye. (My ocular bilirubin count increases every time I fire one up). Be a cynic. Most of these people are repackaging readily available information to get click counts, likes, thumbs-up, subscriptions, etc., to feed YouTube’s monetization algorithm. They have links to sponsoring organizations to further augment their coffers. Some even ask outright for donations! How the hell would you expect to get unbiased information from them?

Fortunately, a few unsponsored YouTube channels provide good, non-opinionated, firsthand individual experiences with Mounjaro. They are not obsessed with weight loss but with getting diabetes under control. Seek them out and appreciate them for their honesty and sincerity. As for the others, I’ll tune into them for brief entertainment, then throw up and leave.

Let them eat cake!

Soapbox Time — a Non-Mounjaro Odyssey

Not being a doctor, I do not presume to offer medical advice here. But I will tell people who need to lose a few pounds for aesthetic reasons to fix their diet and go to the gym. They should not look for miracle drug cures to fix their laziness and their unabated desire to stuff their face with ultra-processed crap. To them I say save your money and spend it on a dietitian and personal trainer. That’s my layman’s prescription for you! Vanity of vanities. All is vanity.

I saw one bodybuilder/body-worshipper type guy on YouTube reporting that he uses GLP-1 drugs when he wants to go from 10% body fat to 5% after his primordial winter hibernation. Give me a break, nut case!

As you can glean, I’m neither a doctor nor a great motivational speaker.

I disdain people buying into Big Pharma’s government supported position that obesity is a chronic disease we can conquer only with their highly profitable drugs. Obesity is a societal disease, alright! With the complicity of government, those of us who have been around long enough have seen our Western societies fatten up increasingly during the past half-century. Encouraged by “trusted” sources, we opt to eat crap that makes us sick. So, we buy into Big Pharma’s logic we can easily cure our behavioral problems with expensive drugs. Then, being human, we bitch that the drugs are too expensive.

We Want Our Mounjaro!

So, what do we want? Will our happiness eventually depend on our increasingly socialistic government providing free tirzepatide (the generic drug in Mounjaro and Zepbound) to every man, woman, and child who destroyed their health eating the food they prescribed in their flawed food pyramid? They designed those corrupt nutritional guidelines while succumbing to the lobbying power of Big Agra. Thus, the fox is guarding the hen house.

They vilified fats and lionized sugar, creating a high-carb, inflammatory lifestyle that is anything but healthy. Even the American Diabetes Association buys into that bunch of bunk. Of course, that association is also corrupt, taking major ongoing funding grants from major self-interested pharmaceutical sponsors like Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk, who among others are Banting Circle Elite supporters at over $1 million per year. Food industry National Sponsors who provide at least $150,000 per year include Splenda and the Idaho Potato Commission. Nothing spikes your blood sugar quite as effectively as the lowly potato!

Who can we trust nowadays?

Compounding the felony, the food industry hired scientists who were about to become unemployed due to the collapse of the tobacco industry to research how to addict people to their ultra-processed, sugary food abominations. These top minds in addiction science have figured out how to put sugar in just about everything, with the happy collaboration of Big Sugar. Lobbyists from the food industry swing considerable weight with our corrupt government (pun intended), which is complicit in promoting the obesity causing foods. And that will cost us all, one way or the other.

Follow the Money

Just keep following the money. You see the theme here. Ultimately, we will demand that government pay for the drugs, because we “need” them but we can not afford them, which is not “fair”. Government has no money of its own. It can either tax us, borrow money, or print money. Government-supported drug addiction would lighten each citizen’s wallet, either in the form of increased taxation or rampant inflation. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch

So, from Big Farm-a to Big Pharma, the vicious circle is all about money, which they cleverly shroud in a cloak of altruism. “We The People” are being fed a bunch of sweetened, highly processed crap. Then, thanks to big business, we can buy an expensive drug to erase the fat created by ingesting this manufactured garbage. And it works so fast! We can further satisfy the same need for instant gratification that got us there, while suppressing any evidence of harmful adverse effects. Thus, they addict us to the expensive drug for life with unknown long-term consequences, because if we stop, we’ll be that fat person we don’t want to be. Big Pharma shakes hands with Big Fooda, and they live happily ever after.

The Latest Travesty: The Chillllldren

Big Pharma, namely Novo Nordisk, makers of Saxenda, Ozempic, and Wegovy, and Eli Lilly, makers of Mounjaro and Zepbound, have been testing its drugs for use by children. They have sought regulatory clearance for prescribing GLP-1 drugs for kids as young as six years old. Holy moly! Let’s prey on our children to expand their drug market!

Using that familiar guise of altruism, which the self-interested YouTube “influencers” have swallowed hook, line, and sinker, Big Pharma aims to save these unfortunate, disenfranchised fat kids from the abuse and humiliation that the fat “influencers” suffered on the playgrounds of their youth. Yeah, maybe, but today, fat kids don’t bother with the playgrounds. Instead, they stay inside playing video games. From the family room sofa and the game console, the only bullies they will confront can be switched off. Game over!

Fix the Parents, Fix the Child

Any parent who would give a chubby six-year-old a weekly injection of Mounjaro or similar GLP-1 drugs with that ridiculous justification needs to undergo a parental competency exam. They would be creating lifelong drug dependency in a helpless child under their control, parentally promoted addiction to an expensive substance whose long-term adverse effects are not yet thoroughly studied. They would be playing into the position advocated by Big Pharma, who fund studies to influence Big Doctra, filtering down to their grass roots pediatricians who pervade the parental sphere of influence with trusted, albeit misguided, advice. I can almost hear the direct-to-consumer ads: “Ask your pediatrician whether Wegovy is right for your toddler.”

Let us all pray that we can return to a saner situation where parents can once again control their children’s eating and exercise habits, promoting healthy diet and activity. Alas, by stuffing their faces with oversize portions of highly processed, sugary, inflammation promoting junk foods throughout the day and allowing them to sit on their fat asses playing video games while drinking Mountain Dew and Dr. Pepper instead of playing outside, parents and guardians have enabled a nation of fat kids. The CDC tells us that 22.2% of U.S. adolescents and 20.7% of children from six to eleven years old are obese. Lifestyle factors and poor parenting account for most of those cases, which we can not fix with weekly injections, unless it is an injection of common-sense responsibility in parents, teachers, doctors, and the screwed-up government on which our society is becoming increasingly dependent.

My Weekly Mounjaro Update

Now that my highly opinionated rant has driven away four of my remaining six readers, I’ll favor the remaining stalwarts with my weekly progress on Mounjaro. Oh, all right! Given the significant possibility that I have chased even the other two away, I’ll just amuse myself with my health update.

Aches and Pains

At the risk of becoming my hypochondriac grandmother of blessed memory, my self-diagnosed ailment of the week is meralgia paresthetica. In other words, weird numbness, burning, and pain caused by an inflamed nerve in my thigh. The nerve in question is a sensory nerve called the lateral cutaneous femoral nerve. It runs over the hip to the outside of the thigh. The causes can be clothing, like a belt, that is too tight, but pressure on the nerve can come from elsewhere, like my lumbar stenosis. This started before I got my physical therapy evaluation, which exonerates PT as the cause. We’ll see how the nerve acts through the remaining PT sessions.

Physical therapy is otherwise going well, although I can not gauge how it will help my screwed-up back. I am doing a total of twelve forty-five minute directed sessions at the rehab, including five minutes on the traction table. I visit the rehab twice a week and do prescribed exercises every day at home for fifteen minutes. The object of the PT is to reduce back and leg pain and numbness to a level that will allow me to resume my normal exercise program with minimal pain. In the meantime, I can do cardio, but no heavy weights.

Ironically Speaking…

Another investigation result during the week concerns low iron. Being blessed with a rare blood type, I donate blood as often as the blood bank allows. They measure iron using a non-invasive machine called Orsense, which typically shows my iron as slightly low. Yet they allow me to donate, so it is not dangerously low. On the other hand, being an old fart, I want to exclude anemia due to internal bleeds or whatever. So, I got blood tests for iron, iron uptake, and ferritin. I have shared the results with my doctor and will discuss with him whether supplementation would help.

He recommended good old Feosol to supplement my iron, with a follow-up in two months. He said it was strange that I wasn’t anemic, given the low iron. I’ll get a CBC before my annual physical exam at the end of November. It is my hope that it will confirm the strangeness of my non-anemia.

HIPAA, HIPAA, Hooray!

I’m a HIPAA disaster! From this platform, I tell you the world (all six of you) all about my ailments while the rest of the paranoid patients in the U.S. are worried about their insurance companies finding out they have AIDS or something. HIPAA, the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act, is a pain in the ass that, contrary to its title, effectively gets in the way of portability. (Government has a habit of misnaming legislation, the most recent example of which is the Inflation Reduction Act. But I digress.). Big Brother must do what it must do to secure the votes of various otherwise disenfranchised potential voters, the reasoning behind HIPAA. Wouldn’t it be nice if we did not need to fill out the same damn questionnaire each time we went to a doctor’s office? What a ridiculously inefficient waste of time! Don’t get me started!

The Mounjaro Numbers, Already!

Yeah, I know. I am so full of myself that I can’t focus. Let’s get down to business. As of twenty-two weeks on Mounjaro, I can report that my glucose progress is good. Starting this week, I’ll make it easier for non-U.S. readers to follow my progress by reporting SI units along with the conventional measurement system most familiar to us backward Americans.

Morning fasting blood glucose is down slightly, at 94.3 mg/dL (5.2 mmol/L), and my Stelo glucose biosensor tells me my average for the week was 102 (5.7), down from the prior week’s 114 (6.3). My next HbA1c lab test is coming up in a couple of weeks. However, if I can continue that 102 average, I will be right at my target A1c of 5.2% (33.3 mmol/mol).

I observed one glucose spike that took me out of range. At Thursday’s lunch at a local lobster joint, I had a cup of lobster bisque, which precipitated a spike to about 145 (8.0). Other than that, I stayed well within my target range of 70-140 mg/dL (3.9 – 7.8).

My weight was nominally stable, with a minuscule gain of 0.4 lb (0.2 kg) for the week. My absolute weight loss since the start of Mounjaro therapy on June 3 is still about 45 lbs (20.4 kg). I now weight 200.6 lbs (91 kg) buck nekkid.

So, That’s It

I’ll be back next week with more of the same. Other than my progress, a topic worth following is the ongoing court battles between Big Pharma and Little Pharma, the latter being the moniker I hung on the compounding pharmacy industry that bet big on the fatso drug market and is now clinging to it by the skin of their teeth. I find the legal machinations a rather interesting market case study featuring Big Pharma’s use of its financial muscle to exert control.

Some of the other topics I will cover in subsequent weeks are increased muscle loss during rapid weight loss episodes and the effects of serial crash dieting on one’s metabolism. The rebound effect after significant reduction after discontinuation of drugs like Mounjaro is another topic worthy of examination.

See you next week!