Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explains why GLP-1 weight-loss drugs cause muscle loss alongside fat loss. When you stop the medication, ghrelin levels rebound and hunger spikes, making it easy to regain weight faster than before treatment, often as fat instead of muscle.
to lose muscle mass while you're on a therapy that's supposed to be making you healthy is kind of backwards. And so what, what we're seeing is a lot of patients, they're losing the weight, and then now that they've lost muscle, the tissue that burns more calories than fat does, now they're gaining the weight back even faster.
Well, that's, that's because it actually suppresses ghrelin, right? Ghrelin is the brain peptide that basically stimulates appetite. So if you suppress that, then you're not hungry, But if it rebounds when you stop the medicine, you've got more of it. Now you're going to— now you're hungrier than you ever were, right? And now you're going to be putting on fat in place of the muscle that you lost. It's— it can be— it can be tricky to get people off these
