For decades, Dr. Christle Guevarra carried a secret burden that no amount of willpower, education, or discipline could overcome. As a board-certified family and sports medicine physician who serves as the traveling team physician for U.S. Figure Skating, she appeared to have it all together.
But beneath the surface of her impressive achievements lay an exhausting battle with uncontrollable hunger that affected every aspect of her life—until she made the decision to start taking Wegovy, a GLP-1 me**cation, in January 2022.
Dr. Guevarra’s struggles with weight and hunger began early. By middle school, bullying prompted her to try extreme diets including the cabbage soup diet and eating nothing but fat-free cottage cheese and saltines.
“I vividly remember at one point praying that if I could just trade this to be a little bit thinner, I would just trade all my straight As,” she recalled in a recent podcast episode. The dieting became so restrictive that it impaired her cognitive function. “I was dieting on such low calories that trying to do homework just seemed really tough. I just remember staring at the same paragraph over and over.”
Despite her intelligence and academic success, the constant food noise followed her through undergraduate studies, medical school, residency, and fellowship. She tried every intervention—quitting smoking cold turkey, working with nutrition coaches, attempting various weight management me**cations including Contrave and Topamax—but nothing addressed the core issue: an insatiable hunger drive that consumed her mental bandwidth.
The turning point came after completing her fellowship, following conversations with her husband Dr. Mike Israetel about why she continued to resist GLP-1. “Why am I making this thing so hard on myself? I’ve made it so hard on myself for the last how many decades,” she questioned. In January 2022, she finally decided to try Wegovy.
The transformation was immediate and profound. On a dinner date in San Diego, she experienced something she’d never felt before: peace with food. “I just remember looking at him and just being able to have a conversation with him without thinking about how starving I am,” she explains. “It was just this sense of inner peace that I just didn’t know existed.”
But Dr. Guevarra emphasizes that the m**ication’s impact extended far beyond weight loss. “These last three years has been a period of tremendous growth that I didn’t realize was possible, because now, I can show up and I can be my best self at work. I can be my best self as a spouse and as a friend,” she shares. With the hunger drive no longer consuming her thoughts, she finally had the mental capacity to engage in therapy and personal growth work that had previously seemed impossible.
Currently maintaining a weight where her BMI is still technically overweight, Dr. Guevarra challenges conventional narratives about weight loss medi**tions. “I’m living my best life. I’m not super shredded, but I’ve done all these amazing other things outside of just the diet and exercise that I didn’t realize was possible because I’ve been thinking about this hunger drive for so long.”
Her experience has made her a passionate advocate for GLP-1 m**ications, though she’s careful to emphasize they’re not for everyone. She encourages case-by-case evaluation, considering each patient’s complete history, comorbidities, and struggles rather than just BMI numbers. She also stresses the importance of pairing the medication with resistance training and adequate protein intake for optimal outcomes.