Is the new weight loss drug a panacea — or a peril?

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fter Johanna Eichenwald moved to the United States from Morocco, one of the first things she noticed was the different attitude toward food. Back in Casablanca, people made time to sit down for meals, and they were enjoyed with friends and family.

Here in America, she says, people eat and run. There’s also an abundance of kosher food available and so many kosher restaurants, creating a culture of eating highly processed, less-than-healthy foods.

Johanna was slender when she arrived in the US. After she married and began to have children, she put on a significant amount of weight. Over the years, she tried various methods —including the ketogenic diet and juice cleanses — to lose the weight she’d gained. Her lack of long-term success and the prospect of her daughter’s upcoming bas mitzvah prompted her to see a nutritionist last January. She hoped to look the way she had years ago in time for the occasion.

Her nutritionist’s program resulted in some weight loss, but the progress was slow. She was losing only one pound a week. “What do you do when you want to lose a hundred pounds?” she asks. “At that rate it would take me two years to lose the weight. It’s a long, hard process.”

Still, she followed the program, until she hit a snag. Delivering mishloach manos on Purim, she wanted a taste of some of the goodies. The cravings were strong. In the short term, Johanna says, a diet is doable, but in the long term, it’s very hard.

“Maybe it’s a matter of self-control, but I don’t think so,” Johanna says. “It’s emotional eating. When you’re young, your parents take that stress. Now as an adult, you have kids, you have bills. I take my comfort from food.”

Then there was the added stress of having all that extra weight and seeing only minimal progress. “Losing only four pounds a month was so frustrating, and so expensive,” Johanna says. She hired a personal trainer to make the pounds melt faster. She built muscle, and while that can be a benefit, it only made her look bulkier.

Johanna, who is 40, is a physician assistant who specializes in hand and plastic surgery at Harlem Hospital. Her patients were the first ones who mentioned the drug Ozempic to her. She’d never heard of it before, but went ahead and researched it.

“It sounded amazing,” she said.

Ozempic is intended to treat type 2 diabetes. People taking it reported weight loss as a side effect. Since then, Novo Nordisk, the company that produces Ozempic, created a sister drug, called Wegovy, specifically for weight management. It has almost the same ingredients as Ozempic, but in higher concentrations. Wegovy’s popularity has made it unavailable, and many doctors have been prescribing Ozempic off label in place of Wegovy.