Ozempic’s ‘food noise’ side effect shocks users: ‘A switch flipped’

It’s food for thought.

Users of Ozempic and Wegovy say the drugs have miraculously stopped their obsessive thoughts about binge eating.

The injectables, which have been hailed as a quick fix for shedding unwanted pounds, have hit headlines for an array of odd side effects, including sagging faces, thinning fingers and drooping butts — but the ability to stop food fantasies may be the most bizarre of all.

“I don’t think about tacos all the time anymore,” Wegovy user Staci Klemmer, 57, told the New York Times about the phenomenon. “I don’t have cravings anymore. At all. It’s the weirdest thing.”

Klemmer spent years being plagued by “24/7” thoughts about eating — a compulsion that some on social media have dubbed “food noise.”

The Pennsylvania resident says she was stunned when she started taking Wegovy back in February and “a switch flipped in her brain” almost instantaneously, shutting off her incessant thinking patterns about unhealthy foods.

Similarly, Wendy Gantt, 56, told the Times that her “food noise” went quiet within a day of her first injection of Mounjaro — a prescription drug in the same vein as Ozempic.

“It was like a sense of freedom from that loop of, ‘What am I going to eat? I’m never full; there’s not enough. What can I snack on?’” Gantt gushed. “It’s like someone took an eraser to it.”

Meanwhile, Kelsey Ryan, 35, was also crippled by constant food thoughts before her doctor prescribed her Ozempic.

She concurred that the drug eliminated any thinking about binge eating — but says those thoughts have slowly started to creep back into her brain as she’s failed to fill her prescription in recent weeks.

Injected once per week into the stomach, thigh or arm, Ozempic and Wegovy are semaglutides, which help the pancreas release the right amount of insulin when blood sugar levels are high.

“Semaglutide is produced while we eat; it tells the brain that we are full,” Dr. Katherine H. Saunders, a New York City physician, told The Post. “It helps people to feel less hungry, to feel full faster and to stay full longer — but it does so when we are actually less full.”

So while it might seem bizarre at first, it’s perhaps unsurprising that incessant thoughts about eating disappear given the signals that are sent to the brain, it’s somewhat unsurprising that incessant thoughts about eating — dubbed “food noise” — disappear.

Klemmer said she experienced other side effects after taking Wegovy, including constipation, nausea queasiness and fatigue.

And although she’s worried about any possible long-term impacts of injecting the drug, Klemmer believes it’s worth it for peace of mind.

“It’s worth every bad side effect that I’d have to go through to have what I feel now,” she declared.