Weight Management Advice

Your Health Notts

Your Health Notts is a free service available to Hucknall residents to lose weight, get more active, eat healthier, drink less and quit smoking.

Losing weight and keeping it off can be hard. They take a realistic approach to weight management, no strict/expensive diets or exhausting exercise routines but a positive, regular, practical, and realistic changes to achieve a healthy weight.

All interventions are free and are with the support of friendly and positive advisors, who will offer encouragement, advice and maintain a positive approach to managing your weight and health behaviours.

For more information or to make a quick, easy self-referral visit https://yourhealthnotts.co.uk/ call 0115 772 2515

Weight Loss Injections

As a response to a significant number of enquiries about weight loss injections (Wegovy, Mounjaro etc), we advise the following to our patients:

As NHS GPs, we cannot currently prescribe these drugs or endorse you buying these drugs privately. Neither can we support you in the dosing and management on privately purchased injections.

We understand how desperate some patients must feel to turn to these drugs because most have tried absolutely everything. We are also concerned that some patients may be using these injections for inappropriate weight loss.

These drugs are not safe for everyone.

Those who should not take these drugs include patients with a history of pancreatitis, kidney disease, type 1 diabetes, diabetic retinopathy, pregnancy, breastfeeding, under age 18 years, personal or family history of thyroid disease, personal and family history of hormone diseases.

As with all drugs, there are risks as well as benefits. Common side-effects include nausea, diarrhoea, abdominal cramps and even severe vomiting. There have been reports of patients being critically unwell and ending up at the hospital.

The injections can help lose weight, but they are not selective for lowering fat alone – they also reduce protein and muscle – which isn’t beneficial for your health.

We also know that when these injections are stopped, most patients regain nearly all and sometimes even more weight than what they lost. In that case, you may be even worse off because the protein/muscle that was lost with the injections, has been replaced by fat.

Making long term lifestyle changes

Whether you choose take these drugs or not, any sustained weight loss should involve lifestyle changes including your diet, changing what you eat, regular exercise, good sleep, and stress management.

Will guidelines change?

Local NHS guidance may be changing later this year, and some patients may become eligible for NHS funded treatment. It is likely this would be via a service that the GP would refer to, rather than being prescribed by the GP. We will update this page and our Facebook when information is available.

In the meantime, patients can self refer to local NHS weight loss services via Your Health Notts: call 0115 772 2515 or online https://yourhealthnotts.co.uk/weight-loss

Page last reviewed: 08 May 2025
Page created: 13 July 2020