The side effect of drastic muscle loss isn't quickly reversible though.

Because muscle is about 3x as expensive to maintain as fat, unless you are on some major strength training to maintain, muscle is the very first thing that your body gets rid of when losing weight.

So now you are off the GLP-1. But you also have to eat fewer calories to maintain a calorie deficit because you no longer have all that calorie burning muscle.

* And depending on when you start your GLP-1 journey, men when they hit 40 naturally lose between 5% and 8% of their total muscle mass ++a year++ a decade (women, probably earlier). In addition to the muscle loss due to weight loss.

* And it takes approximately 3 times longer in your 50s to create a pound of muscle that it does in your 20s.

* And you can't train like you did in your 20s or you will hurt yourself.

* And as you age, your body can't absorb the protein it needs to build muscle as efficiently as it did when you are young. So you need to eat even more food to compensate.

Ok. This is now more of a rant about getting older than it is about GLP-1s.

-- Edited to reflect that muscle loss % is decade, per the corrections in replies.

I think they mean they're drugs you have to keep taking forever (for the rest of your life) to keep the effects.

Which means if you want to maintain their effect, you need to keep taking them forever. So maybe GP used the wrong term but I suspect they meant exactly this.

In any case, we just don't know what kind of long-term effects these drugs have. No one knows what happens if you come out of them 30 years after you started.

It's possible to secure those independently in a wide variety of scenarios. It's harder to DIY your own GLPs.

Oh god… if only I could quit food, too.

Water and food have a milder risk profile. The FDA (https://glp-1.health/blog/glp1-obesity-eligibility-bmi-chart...) recommends "GLP-1 weight loss medications (Wegovy, Zepbound) if your BMI is 30 or higher, or if your BMI is 27 or higher with at least one weight-related health condition such as high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, or sleep apnea". This is because there are side effects such that GLP-1 meds have not been shown to produce a net positive benefit-to-risk ratio for people who are only mildly overweight.

If it sounded like I don’t think other people should take them, that was a mistake on my part.

I’m just really not what you’d think of as a model candidate for them, so I’m not quite ready to commit to my first and only, not exactly free, rest of my life pharmaceutical dependence.

That may not seem perfectly rational to some… but ya’know… I’m the one who has to live with my brain.