In the summer of 2018, Lisa Robillard left her doctor’s office and walked down the long corridor of a medical complex in suburban Virginia. She’d just had an appointment with yet another physician who could only recommend “diet and exercise” when she brought up her life-long struggle with her weight. Robillard was 11 when she attended her first Weight Watchers meeting with her family, who celebrated hitting their dieting goals by going out for ice cream. Later, when her first fiancé proposed, the ring was conditional on dropping several dress sizes. She lost the weight but, when they split, it piled back on. Now, after 40 years of yo-yoing, she was dispirited.
Then Robillard glimpsed a sign hanging on one of the doors along the corridor: “Struggling to lose weight? You don’t have to do it alone.” Inside, she found a somewhat grim clinic of aged vinyl chairs and wall-to-wall beige that didn’t much look like the birthplace of a wonder drug. But she also learnt that more and more scientists believe obesity is a disease rather than simply resulting from unhealthy habits and that, for the seriously overweight, lifestyle changes will never be entirely effective. Eventually, she joined a trial the clinic was running for a new drug called Wegovy. “I wish I had known sooner that it wasn’t just a lack of willpower,” says Robillard, who is now 55. “The many dollars spent on going to weight-loss [meetings], the years of beating myself up, the years of self-hate. I wish I had known that it wasn’t my fault.”
Wegovy, made by Danish drugmaker Novo Nordisk, is the first in what is shaping up to be a new generation of obesity treatments, which use a hormone to regulate appetite. (The name is the result of a nebulous bureaucratic process involving pharmaceutical regulators and the company’s marketers.) The average patient in the study in which Robillard participated lost 15 per cent of their body weight, about three times more than on previous drugs. Nearly a third of them lost almost as much as they would after weight-loss surgery. Robillard lost 57 pounds. The US Food and Drug Administration approved Wegovy for general use in June 2021.