GLP-1 weight-loss drugs cause muscle loss, which lowers your metabolic rate. When you stop taking them, hunger hormones rebound and you regain weight faster than before, mostly as fat. Dr. Jeffrey Gladden explains why the combination makes weight stick.
So GLP-1s are being used to help just about everything. 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 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
