The Dynamic Duo for Slimming Down: Semaglutide with B12

June 5. 2023

Battling obesity or excess weight can be stressful enough. If you add an underlying condition that prevents you from losing weight, the challenge can become even more stressful. Health conditions such as diabetes, hormonal changes, your body not absorbing nutrients, and vitamin deficiency can make losing weight feel like an uphill battle. Luckily, when diet, committing to regular exercise, and healthy habit changes don’t seem to work, you can resort to medical options. Semaglutide with vitamin B12 quickly becomes a favorite duo for those struggling to lose weight.

For years, thousands of people have included vitamin supplements in their diets to obtain different health benefits. Peptide therapies for weight loss have become very popular in the past few years. Can combining semaglutide with B12 lead to greater and more substantial weight loss? In this article, our weight loss clinic in Chicago will discuss the topic further, exploring the health benefits of semaglutide and vitamin B12.

What is semaglutide?

Semaglutide is a medication that mimics the naturally occurring hormone called glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1). Therefore, to understand what semaglutide is and how it works, we must first talk about the GLP-1 peptide hormone. What are peptides? While the word peptide may be new in your vocabulary, we bet you’ve already heard of some highly popular ones used for many health and beauty benefits. For example, collagen is a peptide used for beauty purposes, such as increasing skin health, and other health advantages, like reducing joint pain. Peptides are short amino acid chains – like proteins, but shorter – that have many functions in our bodies.

This particular peptide, GLP-1, is naturally produced in the intestinal tract as a response to the food we eat. Whenever you have a meal or eat a snack, your body releases this peptide hormone. GLP-1 helps regulate blood sugar levels by indicating the pancreas when to release insulin and how much, depending on how much you’ve eaten. At the same time, it controls the liver’s glucose production. While our bodies do all this on their own, individuals with type 2 diabetes can not regulate insulin correctly, which can lead to high and dangerous blood glucose levels. That is why semaglutide is one of the main active pharmaceutical ingredients in many type 2 diabetes mellitus medications.

How does semaglutide work for weight loss?

Now you know how glucagon-like peptide-1 works and its function in our bodies. Semaglutide essentially mimics GLP-1 effects, and when used for diabetes management, it helps to keep high blood glucose levels at bay. But how will semaglutide help you with your weight loss journey?

When semaglutide promotes insulin secretion from the pancreas, besides helping with glycemic control, it also produces slowed gastric emptying. Gastric emptying is the process the food you eat makes when traveling through your stomach into the duodenum. How fast or slow food leaves your stomach will determine when you’ll feel hungry again. With a slow gastric emptying, food will stay longer in your stomach, making you fill fuller with small portions and preventing your appetite from returning as soon as it normally would.

In other words, semaglutide injections produce a decrease in your appetite. This drug works like other popular appetite suppressants, such as Phentermine for weight loss. However, clinical trials showed that semaglutide’s effects are highly efficient and almost unparalleled. Due to that, thousands of people are using semaglutide injections to achieve weight loss. Two of the most widely known brands of this drug are Ozempic and Wegovy. Both medications include semaglutide as their principal active compound.

Benefits of semaglutide peptide therapies

Semaglutide helps diabetic patients with glycemic control. Besides that, semaglutide peptide therapy for weight loss help individuals to reach their dream weight. But this medication offers you many health benefits beyond slimming down. These are some of the benefits of using semaglutide injections in your weight loss journey:

• It helps you prevent weight-related conditions: obesity is a serious condition that can potentially lead to other health disorders. For example, individuals with obesity tend to develop heart disease, high blood pressure, or type 2 diabetes. By tackling excess weight with semaglutide, you can overcome, control, or even prevent those weight-related health conditions.
• Easy to use: you must take semaglutide only once a week using injection pens. These devices are very easy to use and relatively painless. You can apply the injection yourself in the comfort of your home or ask a friend or family member to do it. You can also have it administered by your physician.
• A well-tolerated medication: most patients don’t have any problem adjusting to the medication. Some of the common side effects of taking semaglutide are nausea and vomiting. But generally, those side effects only appear right after the weekly dosage or when you increase the dose.
• Fast and efficient method: how long does Ozempic take to work? Semaglutide starts working right away. However, how fast patients experience weight loss depends on each person and their particular health and biological conditions. Generally speaking, most people start seeing substantial weight loss within the first eight weeks. The average weight loss with this medication varies depending on the brand, but we’re talking of around 10-15% body weight reduction.

What is vitamin B12?

Vitamins are part of the crucial nutrients our bodies require to function correctly. These organic compounds are needed in small quantities, but even so, they are vital for our health. A vitamin deficiency can cause many problems, such as fatigue, lack of energy, yellow skin, and weight gain. With most vitamins, we must obtain them from our food intake because our bodies don’t produce them or produce them in small quantities. Due to that fact, many people who fail to include foods rich in vitamins in their diets resort to vitamin supplements. Vitamin supplementation is also a very common ingredient in most weight loss programs or medications. Lipo C injections, for example, have vitamin B12 as one of their main ingredients.

Vitamin B12, also known as cobalamin, is found primarily in animal meat. Other foods rich in this vitamin are fish, eggs, and dairy. If you are vegan, vegetarian, or lactose intolerant, your diet is likely lacking vitamin B12. Vitamin B12 is a vital nutrient. Its deficiency can cause many symptoms, from lack of energy and headaches to more serious ones, such as extreme tiredness, vision problems, and dementia.

Health benefits of vitamin B12

As mentioned, vitamins are essential nutrients our bodies need to work correctly and perform many vital functions. Some of the health benefits of vitamin B12 include:

• Bone health: maintaining a diet rich in vitamin B12 can support bone health and prevent osteoporosis. Studies have shown that individuals with low levels of vitamin B12 suffer a decrease in mineral bone density. With time, low mineral bone density can make the bones fragile, leading to fractures and osteoporosis. Including this essential vitamin in your diet will increase your bone health. 
• Energy boost: chances are, if you have a vitamin B12 deficiency, you are struggling with fatigue and weakness. By enriching your diet or taking vitamin B12 supplements, you can regain normal energy levels.
• Improved brain function: vitamin B12 is essential for our brain health, especially as we get older. This vitamin deficiency can negatively affect memory and cognition. Some studies suggest that vitamin B12 supplements can prevent cognitive decline that comes with age. 
• Improved mood and depression prevention: vitamin B12 plays a crucial role in producing, synthesizing, and metabolizing serotonin. Very low levels of this vitamin can increase the risks of depression. Knowing you have a vitamin B12 deficiency and tackling it with an improved diet or supplements can improve your mood and prevent depression.

Can vitamin B12 promote weight loss?

Can this vital vitamin help with weight management? Studies conducted on this subject suggest that vitamin B12 has a crucial role in fat metabolism. Another study of over 9,000 individuals showed that participants with obesity have very low levels of vitamin B12. Everything seems to indicate a direct link between vitamin B12 deficiency, fat accumulation, and obesity.

A simple blood test can tell you if you are suffering from a vitamin deficiency. By incorporating more vitamin B12-rich foods in your meal plan, you will avoid unwanted weight gain.

How does semaglutide work with B12 for weight loss?

Besides lowering blood sugar levels, semaglutide weight loss helps with weight management by suppressing your appetite, reducing food cravings – particularly your craving for unhealthy foods – and helping you improve your eating habits. Using this insulin secretion medication along with lifestyle changes, such as an appropriate semaglutide diet plan, will lead to losing weight quickly. The average weight loss with semaglutide weight loss therapies, such as Ozempic, is about 10 to 15% of body weight reduction.

Semaglutide is already highly efficient on its own; still, there are always ways to keep improving a weight loss journey. Dietary changes and more frequent physical activity are two ways to enhance the process. For those struggling to achieve rapid and substantial weight loss, including vitamin B12 supplements or injections can do the trick.

The health benefits of vitamin B12 complement well with the ones from semaglutide. B12 will improve your metabolism, helping you burn more fat, while semaglutide will decrease your hunger levels, making it easier to eat fewer calories. This duo is the perfect combination to battle obesity or shed away extra pounds.

For semaglutide to work, you must commit to lifestyle changes. Reducing your food intake will be easy with the help of this drug, but you have to also start making healthier choices regarding food. Some people turn to fasting and learn the fasting timeline to enhance their efforts. Keeping a good level of physical activity is also vital. For this step, the extra energy boost from vitamin B12 injections will be beneficial. The benefits of combining semaglutide with B12 are many; this duo can make your weight loss journey a straightforward path.

Are there any possible interactions or side effects?

Medical research didn’t find any interactions between semaglutide and B12. Semaglutide weight loss can cause the following side effects:

• nausea
• vomiting
• diarrhea
• constipation
• stomach pain
• headache
• fatigue

Some people experience the mentioned side effects right after their weekly dosage. Other individuals only develop symptoms when they increase their dose, which usually happens once a month until your reach the maximum allowed dosage. Another advantage of including vitamin B12 in your semaglutide program is that it can help you with semaglutide tolerance. B12 will also ease some of the common gastrointestinal side effects of semaglutide, such as nausea and constipation.

Another good news is that there aren’t any significant risks associated with increasing your vitamin B12 intake. Using B12 supplements for weight loss shouldn’t provide any adverse side effects.

Diet to follow when taking semaglutide with B12

As mentioned, semaglutide with B12 and habit changes go hand-in-hand. Unlike some highly-restrictive diets, there are no forbidden foods when taking semaglutide. However, staying away from unhealthy, fatty foods is key to achieving rapid weight loss. Some patients ask: Why am I not losing weight on Ozempic? but they never stop indulging in sweets and high-calorie treats. Semaglutide will reduce your cravings, but you must also do your best to stick to a healthy meal plan.

Since a semaglutide die doesn’t have any restrictions, you can customize the diet to your unique needs and preferences. A nutritionist professional can help you craft the perfect meal plan for you and give you tips about keeping weight off after semaglutide with B12.

Final thoughts

Trying to lose extra pounds or dealing with obesity is a challenge that sometimes can become too much. Making habit changes is crucial to attaining weight loss, but sometimes people need something to boost their journeys. Combining semaglutide with B12 creates a powerful tool to tackle the struggles that come with trying to lose weight. This weight management option will absolutely change the game and make your efforts worth it. Would you like to learn more about this weight loss program? Schedule a call with our team, and let’s start working together toward your goals!

Author

Nurse Walton

Born and raised in Chicago, IL, Chanay received her Practical Nurse licensure and went to work in clinical specialties such as Home Health, Assisted Living, Long-Term Care and Dialysis Centers. Through this work, she realized the importance of diet, nutrition and weight loss among her patients. This led her to open A Better Weigh, Inc. Medical Weight Loss Center in 2009.