Victoza for Weight Loss...NOT!

So I briefly alluded to my run-in with a drug last week, and I want to share the whole story with you. I’ll give my regular readers a heads-up though…it’s not all pleasant. So if you can’t stand talk of adverse bodily functions and reactions, just skip this post and wait until I get wound up with the deals again.

The name of the drug is Victoza, and it’s a relatively new (I think it was given the go-ahead by the FDA in early 2009) drug in this country. I believe it’s been in use a little longer in Europe, but not very long, even there. It’s a diabetes drug, and while I do not have diabetes (yet) my doctor has told me I am hyperinsulinemic and basically pre-diabetic. He wants me to get my excess weight off in the hopes that this will reverse my inevitable slide toward diabetes. And believe me, I’m with him! I watched my father die of complications of diabetes almost a decade ago, and it is not a pleasant path to follow.

My problem is that, being insulin resistant makes it even more difficult for me to lose weight. There’s a whole long medical explanation for this, but basically my body doesn’t make good use of the fuel it has and instead stores it as fat. Enter the drug Victoza. My doctor has several patients taking this drug, both diabetic and pre-diabetic, and says it has worked wonders for them, especially as far as weight loss is concerned. Of course I am skeptical, because despite his excitement, it sounds too good to be true. Plus this stuff costs $300 a month(!), and since it’s so new almost none of the insurance companies cover it. But he has a sample he can give me to try it out, so I don’t have to take that big of a monetary plunge to find out if it works for me. In the end, I gratefully accept the trial offer, because if it really can help me lose this weight, it would be a major blessing, even if it does come with a hefty price tag.

I waited a few days before taking the first injection (it’s an injectable, btw ), and took it at 7:30 in the evening, as one of the most-reported side effects of this med is nausea. I was hoping that if I had nausea, it would pass while I was sleeping, and I’d wake up ready to roll. The rest of the evening after the injection actually went pretty well; I had a few muscle aches (similar to what had forced me to stop taking Metformin) which worried me a tad, but they weren’t as bad or as widespread, so I decided not to jump to any conclusions based solely on that side effect. Other than the muscle aches, I had a pretty nice evening, no nausea, no gastric problems (diarrhea is another common side effect), and when I checked my blood sugar before bed it was nice and low…around 96, if I remember correctly.

Rewind a little bit here; the previous Friday I had had blood work done at the office, and my fasting blood sugar, around 8:45 or 9:00am, had been in this range also; 93 if memory serves. So you’re probably wondering why the doc thinks I’m pre-diabetic…well it’s because my blood insulin levels were very, very high. If they have to go that high to keep your blood sugar in a normal range, it’s a very bad thing indeed. So anyway, while my blood sugar before bed was a little lower than what I might normally have had, I didn’t consider it any cause for alarm. Still, I put some soda and other high-sugar items next to the bed just in case (yeah, I’m a cautious person by nature. Thank goodness).

Another side note…although it is an injection, Victoza is NOT insulin. From what I understand it stimulates your pancreas to make more insulin, and also helps your body use it more efficiently. And one of the other effects it has is to slow the emptying of the stomach. So in addition to the nausea, vomiting & diarrhea reported as side effects, even once those wear off, the slower stomach emptying helps keep you from eating too much. Sounds great, right? Now, back to our regularly scheduled train wreck…

I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom (nothing uncommon for me), and felt a little odd, so I decided to check my sugar again, just to be on the safe side. It was 88 around 3am, so, again, it was low, but still not anything I saw as cause for great concern. Still, I took a couple of swigs of the soda I had put next to my bed just to be on the safe side, and went back to sleep.

When I woke up a few hours later, my blood sugar was down to 80, and by the time I got up, did my usual morning routine, got dressed and went downstairs, I was starting to feel faint and panicky. Not good, not good at all. So I start eating every fruit I can find (since I don’t have any fruit juice handy), sit down on the couch, and wait for my blood sugar to rise. Which it eventually does, back up in the 90s. When I go to stand up and start my day though, I’m still shaky.

Long story short, pretty much as fast as my sugar would rise, the extra insulin I was producing would take it back down again. And as luck would have it, after I managed to get that first dose of food in my system, the nausea kicked in, and I really wanted absolutely nothing to do with more food. But since I was home alone, and I know what a diabetic coma is, and what it can do (kill you, in case you’re not familiar with them), I stubbornly kept eating the sugariest thing I could find and stomach, which was sweetened dried mango. I got my blood sugar up over 100 at one point, and ventured out to the store for some OJ, since that’s what we had often used to correct my dad’s hypoglycemic attacks. It worked, but it isn’t a particularly long-acting sugar to begin with, so my sugar would swing wildly between 110s and 80s.

Needless to say I was not thinking very straight through most of this. I finally called a friend who I thought might be able to come “babysit” me for a little while, and she suggested milk, as the sugars in it take a little longer for the body to break down. So the next time I got my sugar up into the teens, I made another quick trip to the store and got some chocolate milk (I was allergic to milk as a kid, so I hate the taste of plain milk, hence the chocolate). This of course combined with the fruit and OJ in my stomach to cause a VERY unpleasant reaction (I swear I could feel the bubbling as acid met base), which eventually sent my nausea over the edge and resulted in a trip outside to heave the entire contents of my stomach onto the grass (trust me, I didn’t want to be using the toilet; the diarrhea side effect had kicked in during this time period as well, so…yuck).

Interestingly, I felt a lot better after that. Still, I kept checking my sugar every half hour, and finally got it pretty reliably above 90, consuming the only thing I could keep down…chocolate milk. My friend finally came to babysit me, and stayed with me a couple of hours. I had also nabbed some nice, bland mashed potatoes during one of my store visits, and I managed to get those to stay down too, with a little gravy to help the carb breakdown take longer. Just a half cup or so, but it worked. So the rest of the day I lived on mashed potatoes, gravy and chocolate milk.

And I was afraid to go to sleep, for fear that my sugar would drop again. Needless to say, I did NOT take a second dose of Victoza!

But as anyone who’s been afraid to go to sleep knows, eventually biology takes over, and you do. And so I did, but with my quick sugar at the bedside, just in case. Which is where the cycle started all over again. Luckily, at least the nausea did not come back on day 2. The diarrhea…I think I finally got rid of that on Sunday.

You see, Victoza has a half-life of 15 hours, meaning that it takes 15 hours for half of it to be excreted from the system. So by the next morning, I still had almost half of the dose in my system. And apparently I’m REALLY sensitive to this stuff, because I’m STILL having to modify my eating behavior in order to ensure that my blood sugar stays up. Now I eat a large meal, late in the evening, and many small snacks throughout the day. One dose of this crap, and I suddenly go from being hyperglycemic to hypoglycemic. Granted, both conditions are manageable, but they are somewhat different skillsets. Will I ever get back to “normal” (which, for me, was slightly hyperglycemic)? Who knows? But I am still more than a little angry about the way this has affected my life.

Could Victoza help you lose weight? Oh, I’m sure. There are lots of other “little” side effects that I didn’t mention above. Like how, after I filled myself with fruit, I tried to eat my normal breakfast, which consists of oatmeal sweetened with a little (just a little mind you, not gobs of) maple syrup. It tasted AWFUL! Since sweet didn’t sit well on my palate, I tried a little hummus on whole wheat bread (still trying to get some long-acting carbs into myself). Again, two bites was all I could stomach before giving up. Finally, I went for broke on the sugar meter and attempted a strawberry Pop Tart. I have never tasted anything more foul in my life! So yeah, it will make food taste so awful you put yourself on a starvation diet out of necessity. Guaranteed to make you lose weight, but not even close to healthy.

Bottom line, if you hear about any of your otherwise healthy friends considering using this stuff for weight loss, DISCOURAGE them LOUDLY and REPEATEDLY. And maybe point them to this blog entry. While I can’t say that this drug would have such a strongly negative effect on everyone who is not diabetic, I would hate to think what might happen to someone who wasn’t so vigilant about monitoring their blood sugar (or, God forbid, simply didn’t have the tools to do so because they’re not diabetic).