Choosing to start taking medication like Wegovy can be an important step in your weight loss journey. But it’s important to remember—weight loss doesn’t happen overnight. 

Losing weight with Wegovy is a gradual journey, requiring sustained effort in order to see any meaningful impact on your health. Results happen over weeks, not days. Moreover, you need more than just medication to see the real benefits, with diet, exercise and other lifestyle modifications including sleep and stress management playing a huge part.

So what might weight loss progress look like when you’re taking Wegovy? Here, we share a rough outline of your first eight weeks, and beyond, when taking Wegovy, and the impacts you may start to see over the course of the prescription. 

Wegovy weeks 1 & 2

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The first few weeks of taking Wegovy are all about getting used to the medication. These are the first steps on a long weight loss journey, and it's really important to start implementing habits and routines at this stage. This might include establishing a day of the week, and time, at which you take your injection. This sort of routine will ensure you don’t forget to take the medication. 

You’ll be starting on a dosage of 0.25mg. Although this is a small dosage, your body will start almost immediately recognise the effects of the medication. One of the key effects is the sensation of feeling full. Your appetite will be noticeably smaller than previously, and you will feel much fuller for longer after meals. 

At this stage, however, this sensation will start to wear off after 4 to 5 days of being on the drug. Your level of semaglutide in your body is not steady yet, so will fluctuate depending on how long it is since you took the injection. 

The other thing you may start to feel is some of the side effects of the drug—after all, your body is still getting used to the medication.Nausea, constipation, mild abdominal pain and diarrhoea are not uncommon at this stage.  This shouldn't feel unexpected, and only need to be reported to a doctor or medical professional if they persist or worsen.

You’re unlikely, at this stage, to start to see any meaningful loss in weight. You may potentially lose a couple of pounds here, but this will be too small to notice any physical change. So don’t be dismayed if you feel like you’re not seeing an instant impact. 

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Weeks 3 & 4

This is still early days in the course of your medication, but this is an important stage for committing to your weight loss journey. You are still, at this stage, on a 0.25mg dosage of Wegovy. 

This is the point where your body is starting to reach a more steady stage—rather than the levels of medication fluctuating in your body, it is becoming more constant. That means that the desired feeling of fullness should be more consistent throughout the week. 

Again, weight loss at this stage may start to be limited, but you may have lost somewhere around 5-6 pounds, or even more. It may still be too soon to see any physical signs of weight loss, but you are certainly heading in the right direction. 

Now is a really good time to double down on healthy habits. Many people talk about the 21/90 rule—that it takes 21 days to make a habit, and 90 days to make it a permanent lifestyle change. So if you’ve not done it already, which ideally you’d want to have done from the start, put some real consideration into the habits you want to implement permanently into your day to day life. How much sleep are you getting and how is your sleep hygiene? How frequently are you doing exercise, and what kind of exercise? What sort of meals are you eating, how are you approaching snacking, and are you allowing yourself treats? These are the sorts of questions that you should be asking yourself to formulate your habits going forward.

Weeks 5 & 6

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After four weeks on a 0.25mg dosage, and if you are comfortably coping at this dosage, you should titrate your dosage up to 0.5mg. Your body gets used to medication at this level, and knows how to counteract it, so to see real results it is advised to increase the dosage. 

As a result, many doctors say that this is the point at which weight loss really starts to happen. This stage, you can imagine, is one of the more satisfying points in the journey. The benefits of four weeks of hard work are starting to show, and can be a timely reminder as to why you started taking Wegovy in the first place. 

It differs for each person, but you can expect to see roughly a 2 to 4% reduction in body fat. This means you’ll start to see physical signs of weight loss in different parts of your body—smaller stomach, more defined muscles in your legs and arms, and so on. This of course will be helped by the regular routine of exercise you are undertaking, which should be helping you to build muscle across the body. 

As you increase your dosage, you may start to see the return of certain side effects of the medication. This is expected, and there are a number of ways that you can help your body manage these side effects—such as keeping well hydrated, knowing which foods to avoid, and getting plenty of fresh air.  

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Weeks 7 & 8

At this point, you will still be at a 0.5mg dosage, provided that you are coping well with side effects. 

Weight loss should be well underway, and hopefully you will start to see some of the secondary benefits of losing weight and eating more healthily. This might include feeling generally fitter, whether this is when you are exercising or just in your day-to-day life. You might also expect to be sleeping better and see overall improvements in your mental health—both things that can be intrinsically linked to your physical health. 

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Weeks 9 & beyond

You’ve now completed eight weeks on Wegovy! If you are coping well with medication, you’ll titrate the dosage every four weeks from this point onwards. The dosage schedule looks like:

• Weeks 9-12 at 1mg 
• Weeks 13-16 at 1.7mg
• Weeks 17-onwards at 2.4mg

Eight weeks might already feel like a long time, but you have a long way to go. And it won’t be plain sailing from here. Maintaining healthy habits over a long period of time can still be a challenge, and may require creativity in order to keep it up. You may also find that, for a certain period of time, you’ll stop losing weight and may even start to put it back on. This is known as the weight loss plateau, a common feature in most weight loss journeys, and something that you can break through with the right approaches. 

Experts feel that Wegovy is safe to use long term. This journey will most certainly have its highs and lows, but with a healthy target weight in mind as the end goal, you should be able to navigate it comfortably.