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Let me tell you a little secret: I’m taking medications for my high blood pressure — and thanks to my doctor and the quality of the drugs he prescribed, my blood pressure is solidly under control.

I’m fully aware that my medications are not a curative therapy, a treatment that can completely eliminate a disease and prevent its recurrence. Nor are they a vaccine that has a lasting effect but may require periodic boosters.

I need to take my medications regularly, and if I stop, my blood pressure is likely to return to the previous, unhealthy level.

Could I do something to prevent this from happening? Sure. I can exercise and watch what and how much I eat. (Which I do.) The combination of a healthy diet and regular exercising may not completely eliminate my dependence on the medications but could allow me to reduce their dosage.

Is there anything unusual, surprising in what I’ve just said? I don’t think so: it’s Medicine 101 and pure common sense.

So, why then are we witnessing such a public outrage — with celebrities getting involved — at the fact that weight-loss drugs do not cause irreversible reduction in body weight?

What does science tell us?

Science tells us that by suppressing appetite and reducing food cravings, the new class of GLP-1 diabetes and weight-loss drugs (Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, and Mounjaro) help people shed up to 20 percent of their body weight while they take the medications.

But once they stop taking them — because of the medications’ cost or side effects — the lost pounds come back.

However, if the people who stopped taking GLP-1 drugs exercised — regularly and vigorously — the weight reversal could be avoided or, at the very least, significantly reduced.

How is this any different from taking blood pressure drugs?

Ah! We’re told that the weight-loss drugs cause side effects, such as diarrhea and nausea. This is unfortunate, but every doctor will tell you that there are no truly effective drugs without at least some side effects. For example, high blood pressure medications may cause diarrhea and nausea too, in addition to occasional headaches.

We’re also told that they’re expensive. True, but the existing market is so vast that new weight-loss drugs keep entering the development pipeline. Sooner or later, the competition should (at least theoretically) result in cost reduction.

Finally, we’re told that overweight and obese people don’t need weight-loss medications at all. All they need to do, according to “experts,” is to keep a healthy diet and exercise. (“Instead of taking pills, better stop eating shit and hit the gym,” as a popular advice would put this wisdom in wording.)

This is not generally true. As a disease — and obesity is a disease — obesity has a strong hereditary component. Healthy diet and exercising can and will help but to an extent and not to everyone.

Besides, many people suffering from high blood pressure also got to this point by unhealthy life choices. Yet, I never heard anyone calling on them to “stop eating shit and hit the gym.”

Let’s face it: the real explanation for why some of us are having “a problem” with Ozempic & Co. is our obsession with body shape. But these days, instead of habitually shaming overweight and obese people, we began shaming those who try losing weight with Ozempic and Wegovy.

The danger here is that obesity may join the list of the so-called stigmatized diseases, such as lung and liver cancer, the diseases presumably associated with patients’ “bad behavior” (smoking for lung cancer and alcohol consumption for liver cancer).

Another example of stigmatized diseases are sexually transmitted diseases (STD), viewed by many as a personal problem, not a public health issue. (Sounds similar to the public perception of obesity to me.) As a result, funding for STD research has been declining for decades, which made STD more difficult to diagnose and treat.

Truly effective weight-loss drugs are a new phenomenon in our public life, so a certain level of excitement can be understood. But there is no need to inject the elements of a Jerry Springer Show in a discussion of how to treat a medical condition.

Let’s remember: Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, and Mounjaro are drugs.

No less. But no more.