How Long Do You Stay on Semaglutide for Weight Loss?

Patients taking semaglutide for weight loss worry when they don’t see positive results after a few weeks. The truth is that it will take you a while to notice all the benefits this medication brings to the table.

Semaglutide helps you lose weight because it makes you feel full for longer. Now, how long will this treatment take to work? We have all the answers.

Read this page to learn the time you should stay on semaglutide for weight loss. Visit SEMA.bio for more information about the matter.

What Is Semaglutide for?

While it has become widely popular for its weight loss effects, semaglutide is also a treatment for type 2 diabetes. You will need to buy different versions of this medication depending on what you want it for.

This is an injectable treatment. Most health professionals recommend taking it once a week. Since it’s made to address specific medical conditions, people need a doctor’s prescription to buy semaglutide.

How Does Semaglutide Work?

Semaglutide is different from other weight loss medications. The reason is how it works. It mimics the glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) hormone in your body.

GLP-1 is in charge of many things. One of them is regulating blood sugar levels and appetite. Here’s a breakdown of how semaglutide works for chronic weight management and type 2 diabetes:

Chronic Weight Management

The main reason people take semaglutide for weight loss is its appetite suppression effect. In a nutshell, it makes you feel less hungry and reduces your cravings.

Even if semaglutide doesn’t affect your body weight directly, it makes you feel satisfied with smaller portions. That reduces your calorie intake too.

Getting to a more technical explanation, you need to know GLP-1 is an incretin hormone we develop in our gut after we eat. Since semaglutide acts like that natural hormone, it can have a wide variety of effects on our bodies. It meddles with the receptors in our brain, pancreas, and gastrointestinal tract.

Semaglutide goes to our central nervous system and activates receptors in the hypothalamus. It also decreases ghrelin release. That is a hormone in charge of stimulating hunger.

When you take this medication, you promote Peptide YY production. This hormone signals our brain to stop eating, similar to what GLP-1 does. Semaglutide can even enhance our dopamine and serotonin signaling. While that alone doesn’t help with weight loss, being in a better mood makes it easier to go through this treatment.

Type 2 Diabetes

Taking semaglutide has other effects apart from the weight loss benefits mentioned earlier. It improves your body’s blood sugar control. How? First, it boosts your insulin production.

Your blood sugar levels increase when you eat. This medication triggers receptors in your pancreas that stimulate it to release more insulin. Why is this important? Because this hormone allows your cells to absorb sugar from your bloodstream.

Semaglutide suppresses glucagon secretion, which also keeps you from getting high blood sugar levels. When this medication slows down how food leaves your stomach, it stalls the glucose increase you experience after meals too.

How Long Do You Stay on Semaglutide for Weight Loss?

Many factors alter how long semaglutide takes to reduce body weight. However, most patients reach their goals after 12 months of trying this treatment. Actually, most studies about taking this medication for weight loss are done on people who do it for a year.

Regardless of that, you can keep taking semaglutide after 12 months pass. In this case, it will help you maintain weight loss benefits.

You should still be able to see positive results before you get to a year of taking semaglutide. Patients taking this medication often notice a significant change after two or three months of doing it.

Keep in mind that semaglutide is often part of a bigger treatment that involves other things. Your results depend on your goals and what you do to achieve them.

Ask your doctor for the date of your final maintenance dose to know when to stop. You can still take semaglutide after a year if you get positive results. Remember, you won’t see major changes from there since it’s just a way to keep your body weight stable until you can do it without medications.

12 months is just the average patients take to see results. All bodies are different, and you could have a different individual response to the treatment. Monitoring your progress is essential to know if the medication is truly working.

Underlying health conditions could affect how long semaglutide takes to reduce body weight. They may also determine if you are compatible with the whole treatment.

Factors That Could Affect How Long Semaglutide Takes to Promote Weight Loss

Many factors determine how long it takes to lose weight after starting a semaglutide treatment. Most of them are related to your personal health condition. These are the most important ones:

Body Mass Index

Body mass index (BMI) is one factor that affects how long semaglutide injections for weight loss take to work. People with a higher BMI often experience faster results. Why? Because they have more body weight to lose.

That’s one reason researchers calculate the results of weight loss treatments using the percentage of body weight the patient loses. Doing that allows them to measure the results of people with different health conditions.

Other health factors, such as metabolism, could also make this medication take longer or shorter to make you lose weight. You should have clinical obesity or be overweight to start a semaglutide treatment.

Health professionals often state you should have a BMI of 30 or higher to try this medication. If your body mass index is 27 or greater, but you suffer a weight-related condition, you can take it too. We are talking about high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, or high cholesterol levels.

Lifestyle

Semaglutide is not a magical weight loss tool. You must make some life changes to see real results from it. If you take this medication but don’t follow a healthy diet or exercise often, you may take way longer than expected to get in better shape.

Clinically obese and overweight people can’t always lose body weight just by making lifestyle changes. However, once they mix physical activity with a potent medication that helps them from the inside, they see a real change.

Other Medications

Semaglutide is a diabetes medication that strongly influences your body. The way it mimics GLP-1 could cause different reactions depending on your health condition.

Going through specific treatments could negatively affect how semaglutide works in your body and slow down weight loss.

Mixing semaglutide with other obesity or diabetes treatments is not a good idea. It could cause hypoglycemia and other severe side effects. In general, avoid anything that alters your hormones or stomach-emptying process.

What Do Studies Say About the Matter?

Researchers have conducted several studies about how semaglutide promotes weight loss in obese patients. In 2022, a study performed by the doctor Andres Acosta showed promising results.

In the study: “Weight Loss Outcomes Associated With Semaglutide Treatment for Patients With Overweight or Obesity,” the doctor discovered people could achieve a 5.9% reduction in their body weight after taking this medication for three months.

Six months later, the patients studied by the doctor lost 10.9% of their body weight. Naturally, they could only achieve that by following strict habits and lifestyle interventions.

Jamie Mullaly, author of “Semaglutide for Weight Loss: Was It Worth the Weight?” compared the results obese patients experienced after taking this medication with people using placebo options. Semaglutide, again, showed great potential for weight and blood pressure control.

How Much Body Weight Can People Lose with Semaglutide?

Clinical trials show that patients taking semaglutide can lose between 5 to 10 percent of their body weight after a year. As mentioned before, people with a higher baseline weight will start losing pounds faster than others.

We just gave you an average of how much semaglutide can help you. Regardless of that, this medication holds the potential for more. If you have a healthy lifestyle, you could lose up to 15% or more of your body weight.

Your weight loss progress will be gradual, so don’t expect a huge initial drop. You must be patient when trying this treatment.

How Long Do Semaglutide Side Effects Take to Kick in?

Taking semaglutide for weight loss could trigger side effects.

These side effects are most likely to appear during the first few weeks of the treatment. If you need a dose increase, you will see them too. This comes from your body trying to adjust to the hormonal changes semaglutide causes.

Nausea, vomiting, and fatigue are the most common side effects of this medication. They last a few weeks.

Headaches, indigestion, and dizziness could also happen, but they are less common. Similar to the others, they should disappear after the initial adjustment period.

What doctors do to minimize the side effects of this weight loss medication is start with a low dose and increase it gradually. Taking semaglutide with a meal could reduce nausea.

Staying hydrated could also help patients avoid many side effects. While not all patients taking semaglutide suffer these effects, most do, and the severity of them depends on the person.

Tips You Should Follow When Taking Semaglutide for Weight Loss

There are several ways to optimize your semaglutide therapy treatment and get results faster. We have a few tips that can help you with that.

Even if you eat less, keeping habits that promote weight gain will stall the effects of semaglutide injections. Not getting enough sleep could keep you from losing weight. Try to sleep a decent amount of time.

The best way to adapt to the appetite suppression effects of semaglutide is to have small frequent meals. This will maintain the feeling of fullness these injections cause and reduce stomach discomfort.

We have already told you that following a healthy diet helps you lose weight. More specifically, reduce high-fat and sugary foods from your meals. Apart from being bad for your body, they could trigger gastrointestinal disorders and side effects.

Some doctors recommend over-the-counter medications to control the side effects of semaglutide injections. Taking them will help with nausea and fatigue.

Once you start a semaglutide treatment, you should continue it without interruptions. If you run out of injections, ask your supplier to refill your prescription.

When Should People Stop Taking Semaglutide?

While most treatments last a year or two, there isn’t a specific answer to how long people should take semaglutide injections. Make a choice after consulting with a doctor. Nevertheless, there are a few factors you can consider before stopping your treatment.

If you start taking semaglutide for weight management, you should have a clear goal in mind. Once you reach that objective, check if you can keep that weight with diet and physical activity. You can start thinking about dropping this treatment if you can.

Stay tuned to what researchers say about the matter. This is a new approach to weight loss, so people are still learning new things about semaglutide.

Patients suffering intolerable side effects should stop taking this medication too. Regardless of that, stopping this treatment should be gradual. Doing it suddenly could make you return to weight gain and worsen your blood pressure/sugar levels.

Final Thoughts

Semaglutide is a game changer for people with high blood pressure, obesity, and other weight-related conditions. The significant weight loss it produces after just a year of taking it is unique among any other options on the market.

Many patients taking semaglutide lost an average of 15% of their body weight. Don’t worry if you don’t see clear results after a year of trying this treatment. All bodies have different ways of reacting to this medication, so 12 months is just a time average.

Doctor supervision is essential when trying this weight loss medication. Health professionals can tell you if the side effects you suffer are normal and what life habits you should change to get better results.

If you are looking for semaglutide injections, go to our website! You will find all the information you need on the matter there.