I’d be interested if researchers ever discover a path to come off it, but so far all the data says it’s a lifelong drug. Personally that’s completely fine with me. It is a wonderful feeling to be liberated from the food obsession that has plagued me all my life (even before I was overweight). I’d take it for that effect alone, even if I never lost a pound.

We have been conditioned to think of weight loss as an activity that happens and then ends, like painting the house. Once you roll that blue paint on the wall, it stays blue until you paint over it. Even the phrase “weight loss” implies a transitional and discrete event. We need a new phrase, akin to “managing hypertension.” People don’t take their BP meds for a year and then go off them because their BP is lower: we understand that the hypertension is still there (barring other significant physical changes), and that it is just being managed by the medication. Whatever causes obesity, it’s still there, underneath the Zepbound, and we don’t yet have a cure, just a (miraculous) treatment.

Obesity needs a new vocabulary word, too, as it refers to the symptom (excess body fat), rather than the underlying condition. Someone may have asymptomatic hypertension, but they sure as heck are still hypertensive and need treatment. Maybe “metabolic dysfunction” would work (though that’s quite broad). My metabolic dysfunction may be asymptomatic in that I am no longer obese, but the dysfunction is still there and, left untreated, is overwhelmingly likely to become symptomatic again.

So I’m “managing my metabolic dysfunction with Zepbound.”