Weight-loss jabs: What happens when you stop?
By BBC, December 23, 2025Weight loss jabs, or GLP-1s, have done for many what diets could never do. That constant background hum, telling them to eat even when they are full, has been turned off.
The drugs have given those who never thought they could lose weight a new body shape, a new outlook and in many cases, a completely different life.
But you can’t continue taking them forever, can you? Or can you? Well, that’s one of the issues; no one quite knows.
They are new drugs – which mimic GLP-1, a natural hormone that regulates hunger – and the potential side effects from using them in the long term are only just beginning to emerge.
And with an estimated 1.5 million people in the UK paying for the injections privately, staying on them for a long time is not a cheap endeavour.
So what happens when you try to stop? Two women, with two very different stories but the same goal – to lose weight and keep it off – tell us what it’s been like for them.
“It was like something opened up in my mind and said: ‘Eat everything, go on, you deserve it because you haven’t eaten anything for so long’.”
Tanya, a sales manager for a large fitness company, first started taking Wegovy to prove a point. She was overweight, felt like an “imposter”, and thought her opinion was not valued by her industry because of her size.
Would she be taken more seriously if she were slimmer?
Ultimately, she says her suspicions were proved right. After she started using the jabs, people would come up to her and congratulate her on her weight loss. She felt she was treated with more respect.
Sleeping struggles
However, during the first few months of the treatment, Tanya struggled to sleep, felt sick all the time, had headaches and even started to lose her hair, which might not be directly due to the drug but is a potential side effect of rapid weight loss.
“My hair was falling out in clumps,” she recalls. But in terms of weight, she was getting the results she’d hoped for. “I’d lost about three and a half stone.”
“It’s all about having an exit strategy,” Dr Al-Zubaidi explains. “The question is: what are these people’s experiences once they come off the injection?”
He is worried that without additional support for people making the transition, society’s unhealthy relationship with food means little will change.
“The environment that people live in needs to promote health, not weight gain. Obesity is not a GLP-1 deficiency,” he says.
In some respects, many people enter a game of weight-loss roulette when it comes to stopping their weight-loss medication. Factors like lifestyle, support, mindset and timing all play into how futures post-GLP-1s unfold.
Tanya is staying on the medication and is fully aware of the pros and cons of this decision.
Ellen feels that the chapter has now closed. She’s lost more than eight stone (51kg) now.
“I want people to know that life after Mounjaro can be sustainable as well,” she says.
Eli Lilly, the company which makes Mounjaro, says “patient safety is Lilly’s top priority” and that it “actively engages” in monitoring, evaluating and reporting information to regulators and prescribers.