My Weight Loss Drug Saga, Continued: Saint Bernice Saves the Day

Quick recap: I went on semaglutide two years ago, posting columns in February, April and September 2024 documenting my 17-pound weight loss. Since semaglutide was too expensive for my taste, I went off the drug at that point, and gained back all the weight in less than a year. Unwilling to spend hundreds of dollars a month for the rest of my life, I tried to make my peace with it.

Not to give you whiplash, but now I’ve re-lost those pounds and more, using a gray-market version of retatrutide, a drug from Eli Lilly that’s presently in late clinical trials. It does what semaglutide does, but a lot better, and it’s actually beneficial for your liver and kidneys. According to the New York Times, it also helps with arthritis and knee pain. 

Though Marion Winik’s weight loss journey has possibly already received all the ink it deserves, it doesn’t seem right to leave readers with the impression that I gave up. I un-gave up, but that’s because I lucked into a better drug at an unimaginably cheap price.

I first learned about retatrutide when my neuroscientist friend, who has lost 53 pounds with peptide drugs paid for by health insurance, forwarded me an article from The Atlantic by Pam Zhang that calls it the most powerful weight-loss drug ever created and documents the gray market operating around the country, selling a copycat drug made in China through social media networks and online retailers. (If you are seriously interested in taking retatrutide, I strongly recommend you read this article.) I got access to this gray market thanks to one of the readers of that “boohoo-I-gained-it-all-back” column in Baltimore Fishbowl last September.

If it’s just the money holding you back, she wrote me, I can connect you with a supplier who has much better prices. 

But cheap enough that I could stay on it forever? I wondered. Because otherwise it’s just more see-saw.

Enter a character we will call Saint Bernice, a California real estate agent and online crypto broker (whatever that means) who has a sideline in weight-loss drugs but no interest in turning a big profit. Saint Bernice told me about retatrutide and revealed her sources, urging me to download Telegram, go to nexaph.com, read up on the trials of the drug, already in Phase 3, etc. Perceiving that I was a little overwhelmed by this, she also said she could just send me a couple of vials, plus syringes, alcohol wipes, and sterile water, for $120. $60/vial. 

A vial has about 27 mg in it. My weekly dose is something like 3 mg/week. So I’d be spending $13/week. $52/month. 

Back when I gave up on semaglutide and decided I’d just have to put up with the extra pounds, $50/month was the dream number I imagined I would feel okay about if I had to be on it forever. I also have to be on blood pressure medication, statins, and valacyclovir forever, and they, too, cost money, so it’s not a new concept for me.

Thanks to Saint Bernice, I’ve been on reta since November and have lost about 20 pounds from my original starting weight. I don’t need to lose any more: 122 is a good size for a little old lady. As far as side effects go, I don’t have the crushing fatigue I sometimes had with Ozempic. I do think I’m a little bit weaker, gauging by the weights I’m choosing in the circuit class I frequently attend, and also by the wrinkly extra skin around my biceps and quads. It looks like I may have lost some muscle mass, but if I keep exercising and eating protein I don’t think it’s a serious problem. 

For me this is about how I feel, more than how I look. I mean, I’ve been single for 20 years and plan to stay that way, and nobody expects a nearly-70-year-old woman to be a decorative object. And I know that even at my high weight I was not obese. But as I’ve explained before, I just can’t be happy when I’m carrying extra pounds. I end up thinking dark thoughts about feeling fat on and off every single day. For me, that brainwashing is irreversible. 

I think it’s important to say that cooking, eating and drinking are still among my top pleasures in life. Just yesterday I made an amazing Cajun-style okra stew, served with cheese grits and eggs fried crisp in olive oil. Clearly this is not spa food. It’s quantity that makes the difference. Eating smaller amounts feels so normal now that I could easily make the mistake of thinking that it’s me and not the drug I’m injecting once a week. And apparently this drug is also doing good things for my liver and kidneys, so there’s that, too.

Now my big problem is that Eli Lilly is supposed to get retatrutide to market either late this year or sometime in 2027 or 2028. According to the Atlantic article and other sources, the price will be nothing like what we’re paying now. AI says it will cost between $1,000 and $1,500 or more per month, even more than its pricey predecessors. Go, capitalism.

Saint Bernice is concerned that the closer we get to FDA approval, the more the powers that be will crack down on the gray market, though it’s unlikely to ever disappear entirely. She recently urged my neighbor and me (this is the same neighbor that has appeared all through this series, and she has also achieved weight loss nirvana through Saint Bernice) to stock up on the vials at the $60 price. We did. I bought enough to last about a year, maybe longer if I can work out a lower maintenance dose. And then what? 

I don’t seem to be able to think any farther ahead than that. With the horrors going on around us, from the ICE killings to last week’s closing of the Washington Post Book World and the firing of all my friends there, to the cruel winter weather, rising prices and the shutdown of cancer research, not to mention the death of poor Tatiana Schlossberg and all the other nightmarish aspects of our Trumpian dystopia, it’s sort of embarrassing to even be writing about weight loss drugs. So I’ll stop here. But I thought you might want to know.