Wegovy, Mounjaro help Korean doctor navigate lifelong struggle with obesity

By Hankookilbo

• Published Sep 22, 2026 2:31 PM KST

Doctor argues that severe obesity requires rapid medical intervention rather than moral judgment

The after school meal never varied. He laid grilled pork belly in the largest pan in the kitchen to grill. After finishing the meat, he made instant noodles, tossing in generous helpings of rice cakes, dumplings and cheese before finishing the meal by stirring cooked rice into the remaining broth.

As a high school student, Chang Hyoung-woo cooked this meal alone in the kitchen whenever he could, trying to avoid comments from anyone wandering in. The meal was so heavy that he would sleep hard for an hour or two before waking up to study. Looking back, he said the routine resembled how sumo wrestlers and traditional Korean "ssirum" wrestlers gain weight.

Ate like ssireum wrestler

Lavish meals had been his primary indulgence since childhood. While other boys his age were outdoors playing with friends, Chang had little interest in exercise. Instead, he favored fried chicken, hamburgers, red meat, snacks, cola and ice cream.

He hated meals like sukiyaki and shabu-shabu that mixed thin slices of meat with vegetables to cook in broth. Why would anyone spoil quality meat with unwanted greens? His baseline meal consisted of massive portions of rice, meat and kimchi. Meals with lots of vegetables in the stew provoked visceral distaste. "How can anyone charge money for something like that?" Chang wondered.

Vegetables held no appeal for him. He questioned the very purpose of perilla leaves and or seasoned bracken. He disliked the prolonged chewing fibrous vegetables required, asking restaurants to omit the leafy vegetables used to wrap grilled meat from his orders entirely. The aversion was so pronounced that when he worked at a university hospital, junior doctors gossiped, "When you order food, always order him plenty of meat."

Nothing baffled him more than people who said a dish was too sweet or too greasy. When someone claimed to have a weak stomach or failed to gain weight despite eating heavily, he suspected an underlying medical disorder.

Patient with severe obesity

His weight climbed into the 110-kilogram (242-pound) range. Standing at 178 centimeters (5 feet 10 inches), his body mass index (BMI) reached approximately 37. A BMI of 35 or above qualifies as Class 3 severe obesity under domestic clinical guidelines.

Chang did not passively accept his condition, especially after his parents intervened.

"What parent doesn't want to see food go into their child's mouth? But this isn't right," they pleaded.

Urged by family and colleagues, he started dieting aggressively. He cycled through fad regimens, including low-carb diets and intermittent fasting.

They worked. Every one of them worked — for a while. Dropping below a BMI of 25, where the guidelines put the start of obesity, meant losing more than 30 kilograms, and losing that much meant methods so punishing that exercise and diet left room for nothing else. It was not sustainable. Other methods that were designed to be sustainable for years, on the other hand, seemed to have little impact.

Weight-loss drugs lower BMI to 25

Wegovy and Mounjaro did what the diets could not. The injections brought his weight down quickly into the low 80-kilogram range, achieving a BMI of roughly 25. He took up running alongside the medication, and before long he could cover 5 kilometers in under 30 minutes. Compared to the years when he could not run a single kilometer, he said it felt like finishing a marathon.

More significantly, he has maintained the weight loss for over a year — an impressive achievement.

Chang Hyoung-woo, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, who struggled with severe obesity for most of his life has chronicled his experience in "Record of Obesity: I Am a Doctor Who Takes Mounjaro," published earlier this year.

The conventional view is that people have to lose weight through exercise and diet first, or they'll just gain it back. Chang rejects that view, arguing that if medication can eliminate excess weight, patients should use it immediately. That position has drawn criticism from others who say he promotes drugs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro too aggressively.

Severe obesity is disease

Before Chang started on Wegovy and Mounjaro, surgeons removed part of his stomach in an effort to help him reduce his weight.

Chang's book argues that obesity at this level is a disease and not a failure of willpower, and that the public should stop thinking of it as a character problem. If medication is available, he said, using it to lose the weight as quickly as possible may be a better option.

As a thoracic surgeon, he understands that obesity does not remain localized. Severe obesity carries a well-documented risk of cardiovascular complications.

Fat builds up on heart, too

Chang recognized the severity of his condition, with complications including obstructive sleep apnea. The critical turning point came when he was diagnosed with arrhythmia — an irregular heartbeat marked by sudden, violent palpitations and lingering pain.

His heart would suddenly pound and beat erratically, and the pain would spread through his body. He thought he could die at any moment, and for a long stretch he was badly frightened. The heart muscle is enclosed within the pericardial sac, where excess fat frequently accumulates. It is called epicardial fat, and recent medical research links it to cardiac arrhythmia.

This article from the Hankook Ilbo, the sister publication of The Korea Times, is translated by a generative AI system and edited by The Korea Times.