Or that's who you notice. My husband takes ozempic for type 2 diabetes and it completely fixed his blood sugar while causing very moderate weight loss.

What the people in this study have causes abnormal visceral fat accumulation in the belly and back and itself causes disturbing changes in body shape and appearance, does not respond or normal weight loss, and hasn't had real treatment options. That ozempic has beneficial effects for it in an RCT is actually awesome, it's the framing given by the headline that is bad.

Any means of attaining weight loss at a similar rate will tend to do the same thing. Especially if you’re starting from quite-heavy, not just dropping 20lb or something.

> lose all that buccal fat that defines your young adult face

The people who should be taking Ozempic aren't lacking in buccal fat.

Sure. But plenty of seemingly not fat people take it which is when things go awry with the gaunt look imo. Lots of celebs in their 30s 40s 50s with transformed skin on bone faces as a result of this stuff.

I've dropped about 1/3rd of my bodyweight on retatrutide. The 2nd most common comment I receive is that I look 5+ years younger.

I notice it in people who have never been the weight that they're suddenly walking around as, with them it often looks overdone, too thin for their features etc, but in those who have used it to get back to weights where I've seen them before...I didn't guess. They had to tell me.

I've lost weight the natural way and people will tell me the same thing. People are just rude to fat people

I wonder how much of that is losing weight too fast and having floppy skin because of it.

Losing facial fat will only make you look older if your skin has low elasticity and/or if you lose too much fat, too much fast. Also, it is very common for people that start eating dramatically less to also reduce their water intake too much and become dehydrated.

Besides ensuring you're getting sufficient water, there are a lot of dermatologic procedures that can help you to recover at least some of your skin elasticity. And in more dramatic cases, there's a plethora of options, from fillers to lifting procedures.

Fillers and facelifts also look bad and don’t last

Nonsense. Most procedures have excellent results if done by a skilled professional. And yes, things don't last forever, news at 11.

It varies. People are often thinner in their twenties than their thirties and forties. If you browse some before and after pictures the ones who have had their skin tighten tend to look younger for that reason alone.

Even naturally thin people have buccal fat and healthy looking cheek and jawlines.

That's just what happens when you get skinny. People who have always been skinny just look sickly always so we don't notice.

I've always been naturally slim and people my whole life have been telling me I look 10-15 years younger than my actual age... the "Ozempic face" is a totally different look, it makes you look gaunt and dying.

This is just not true, and as I've stated, it's because you've always been skinny.

There's no magic sauce in ozempic that makes you lose more buccal fat than other weight loss methods. That's just not real, it doesn't exist.

When you go from lots of buccal fat to no buccal fat, you will look gaunt in comparison. You've always had low fat so there's no frame of reference, so nobody calls you gaunt.

But, if you gained say 30 pounds, you would look much less gaunt than you currently do.

Either that or you're not as slim as you think you are. At 5'9 a normal BMI sits at 135 pounds for a man - you need to get very thin to have thin cheeks. Its possible you're slim, but not slim enough to have slim cheeks.

Also you lose buccal fat as you age. But ozempic does not age you.

And then of course fat distribution varies person to person. You might be slim but have abnormally large amounts of buccal fat. That can happen, but it doesn't mean that if you got thin via ozempic you'd lose the buccal fat. Again, there's no mechanism for that.

If you still don't believe me, just compare someone thin via ozempic versus someone naturally thin at the exact same weight and height and gender. Notice the buccal fat - the naturally thin person doesn't have more. It just feels that way, because you've never seen them with more buccal fat so the amount they have seems "right". Whereas, for the ozempic person, it seems less.

You're dismissing a claimed observation without evidence. I have no horse in this race but I'll comment that you appear to be attempting to claim that there's no difference between "skinny" and "crypt keeper". That's a preposterous position to take. The various terminology exists because people use it to describe real world differences. For example skinny, gangly, and gaunt aren't the same thing (although there is often significant overlap).

I'm explaining why your claimed observation is bullshit.

And, for the record, you haven't provided any evidence either. You're just "saying your observations".

And, let's all be real here, skinny person to skinny person. Most skinny people are extraordinarily biased against ozempic because they lose moral high ground to people they dislike.

I think a lot of skinny people want to desperately believe they are special or better in some ways than ozempic users. For a lot of them, being skinny is all they have: (

But that's not the case. That's something I'm fine with, I suggest you get there too.

I'm not the same person you were responding to earlier? You seem rather emotionally wound up in all of this. Someone doesn't need "evidence" to say "I noticed A". The evidence is right there - they're claiming to have seen it.

Among other things, you've put yourself in the position of claiming - but not arguing, because you provide no reasoning to engage with - that there are no black swans in the world. It's entirely untenable.

What they saw might have been an outlier. Perhaps they misunderstood. They might be confused or uniformed or any number of things. They could even be lying outright! But to respond by dismissing a claimed observation without evidence or reason is not a constructive attitude and I would even argue anti-intellectual.

What I'm claiming is there's zero evidence that ozempic causes buccal fat loss more than any other weight loss methods. There isn't even a mechanism for that. We even know for a fact that spot reducing fat is impossible.

If you claim differently, the burden of proof is on YOU. Not me.

Your observations be damned. Elephant in the room: observations from biased actors are less than worthless.

The reason this observation came to be is because people seek an easy way to punch down on ozempic users and differentiate their weight status from ozempic users. I've already explained that.

> You seem rather emotionally wound up in all of this.

There is no reasonable response once you turn the conversation into this, please don't do that.

I agree, I'm 46. I dropped from 240lbs in January to 209lbs in June. I have maintained that weight. Recently went to a beach resort for a vacation and the number of random people that commented on my build was embarrassing. From bar tenders making a point of serving me first and asking me how much I benched to the literal wives of other men saying "Hi Vin Diesel" (3 times) in front of their husbands and my wife. I have a shaved head and tan so its going to always be Vin Diesel or the Rock. My wife even commented that people keep staring at me.

I literally realized how amazing life must be for a hot girl.

Must have been because of how disgusting I look...

I think you may be making things up to make yourself feel better friend.

People who lose a lot of fat generally end up with loose skin, regardless of the mechanism they use to lose the fat.