Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the hottest new spot in town: The Weight-Loss Casino! Here, you don’t need poker skills or luck, just a willingness to roll the dice with your health.
Our grand prize? A slimmer waistline, with the magic of unapproved, customized weight loss drugs like semaglutide that act to slow gastric emptying and reduce appetites. Side effects? Oh, those are just the slot-machine cherries of uncertainty. Will it be mild nausea, pancreatitis, or perhaps a jackpot thyroid tumor? Place your bets and find out!
In today’s world, losing weight is no longer about diet and exercise. No, that’s old-school. Now, we gamble on miracle drugs marketed through telehealth companies like Hims & Hers, whose recent Super Bowl ad felt like the glittering grand opening of our very own Health Vegas.
Not only will your waistline shrink, but your self-esteem will skyrocket, and your social media likes will multiply, they say. Rumor has it that even your IQ might increase. After all, only geniuses realize you can outsmart the system by skipping the gym and opting for a quick injection instead!
Of course, celebrities like Elon Musk use the U.S. Food and Drug Association (FDA)-approved Wegovy, a similar weight-loss drug. But Hims & Hers is offering something even better — a customized, or compound, version that skips the whole “FDA approval” formality.
The FDA warns of severe gastrointestinal issues and potential thyroid tumors as side effects for the unapproved drug.
According to a statement by the FDA, “Compounded drugs pose a higher risk to patients than FDA-approved drugs because compounded drugs do not undergo FDA premarket review for safety, effectiveness, or quality.”
Pfft. Clearly, they’ve never heard of doubling down. Life’s a gamble, and I’m all in, baby!
The drug’s lack of FDA approval is just a minor technicality in our game of high-stakes body roulette. According to a 2023 Kaiser Family Foundation health tracking poll, around 68% of adults actively trying to lose 20 pounds or more stated they would be interested in taking a prescription weight loss drug if they were informed it was effective, even if it meant potentially experiencing side effects.
On Feb. 10, Hims & Hers debuted a flashy minute-long Super Bowl commercial entitled “Sick of the System” that was filled with imagery of a scale, indulgent foods like pies and cheeseburgers, and a refrigerator stocked with vials of Hims & Hers-branded medications. The narrator dramatically stated, “Something’s broken, and it’s not our bodies,” before claiming that effective weight-loss medications exist but are “priced for profits, not patients.”
The ad further positioned Hims & Hers’ compounded weight-loss drug as a cheaper alternative to FDA-approved medications like Ozempic and Wegovy while conveniently omitting the fact that compounded versions are not subject to the FDA’s rigorous approval process.
The day after the Hims & Hers Super Bowl ad aired, Novo Nordisk, the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy, fired back with a full-page ad in The New York Times and USA Today, dramatically asking: “Do you really know what you’re injecting into your body?”
Of course not! That’s half the fun. We squint at the label, shrug, and type “Is compounded semaglutide the same as Ozempic?” into Google, hoping for the best.
Take my friend who rolled the dice on a compounded semaglutide cocktail last spring. She lost 15 pounds in a month! Sure, she also lost her appetite, regular bathroom habits, and the ability to keep down solid food. But hey, she won the skinny jeans sweepstakes!
Sure, this approach overlooks the realities of potential long-term damage. But let me tell you, long-term thinking is for retirement accounts, not waistlines. Who wants to spend hours at the gym when you can lose weight faster than you can say “fad diet?”
Plus, the Hims & her website boasts that 87% of customers are working toward, nearing, or have already met their weight loss goal.
“This doesn’t meet the demand for safe drugs,” people whine. Well, guess what? Safety is the house’s problem. I’m here to play.
The beauty of our Weight-Loss Casino is the thrill. Every pill, every injectable, is a spin of the wheel. Will I hit the bank of effortless weight loss or land on “Consult Your Doctor Immediately”? The suspense is exhilarating! The adrenaline rush from gambling with your health might just burn enough calories on its own.
So come on down, grab a bottle of mystery meds, and join the ultimate gamble for only $165 per month. Remember, the house always wins. But with weight-loss drugs, even those that the FDA has not approved, maybe, just maybe, you’ll walk away with the prize of a smaller pants size.
