Doctor Explains How to Make GLPs 10x More Effective

[00:00:00]So, you probably clicked this video because you want more out of your GLP-p1 medication, right? More results. Maybe you're thinking a higher dose, the next pin in the lineup, right? Right. A true type. Let me show you the one thing that actually decides whether this drug is working for you. And I mean it before you try to do anything wild here, because it's not the number on your scale. See, that's the trap. You can watch the scale drop every single week and still be losing because up to 40% of what comes off, right? You think it's this, but it's actually this muscle mass. This is one pound of each. Look at the size difference. And that muscle is the exact tissue that helps keep the weight off long term. The scale calls that a win, but your body, it knows better. So, by the end of this video, I'm going to show you a number from the newest research that proves that you can still lose weight and keep your muscle longterm, but only if you stop trusting the scale and you start pulling the right levers. That's how you can create permanent weight loss and permanent weight maintenance, which I think we want more than anything else, right? I'm Dr. Jones DC. I've lost over 100 lbs myself and now I lead the coaching team at our nationwide clinic where our medical providers handle the prescriptions and I coach people through the part of the medication that can't do that for you. Thousands of patients, 5 years of watching exactly how this plays out in my own body. So when I tell you the scale is the wrong thing to be watching, it's because I've seen what happens to people who only watch the number and I've seen what happens to the ones who do more. Let me tell you about one of our patients. I'm going to call her Jessica. So, she came to us thrilled that she was down 35 pounds on her GLP-1 med, the most weight that she'd ever lost in her life. The scale was her best friend. So, we had her do something most people never do. Get a thorough body composition scan. Now, that's a DEXA scan. That doesn't just tell you how much weight you have on your body. It tells you what you're made of, how much is fat, and how much is lean muscle tissue. And your muscle, the part of you that does the work, right? And that number stopped her cold turkey. of the 35 lbs that she lost, 15 wasn't fat at all. So, hold on to Jessica for a minute because what happened to her next changes everything. And I'm going to get there, but I got to build up a little bit. So, why those 15 lbs matter so much? That tissue is mainly muscle and it's your engine. It's what burns calories all day long, even while you sleep. So, for Jessica, between her resting metabolism and everyday movement, that was a few hundred calories a day of burning power that was just gone. Phonito, same person, same effort, running on a smaller engine. Now watch what that sets up. The engine shrinks, so everything slows down and things slow down. So the number stops moving. You hit a wall and what does almost everybody do at that wall? They reach for higher doses because they think that's the solution. more medication, more appetite suppression, which might produce in the short term some more weight loss, but it means eating even less and feeding the engine even less. The very thing that stalled you gets worse. I call this the metabolic time bomb. You see, it's a trap that builds itself. And every time you answer a plateau with a bigger dose, you light that fuse again. So sit with this for a second. That plateau that you're so afraid of, it isn't bad luck and it isn't your willpower failing in most cases. It's the trap doing exactly what it was built to do. And the higher dose instinct, the one that everybody just jumps to, it's the fuse. I know you didn't want to hear that. Don't let you have your moment.

[00:03:29]Okay, so remember that number. Up to 40% of what you lose on GLP1s can come from muscle tissue, not fat. And that's the whole reason that this trap exists. But there's some good news, right? It's not all doom here. I would never put you down without giving you a solution.

[00:03:44]which tissue you lose was never random.

[00:03:46]You see, you have levers, three big ones and two quiet ones. And the first one is something that you've heard a thousand times, but almost certainly not the way that I'm about to explain it. Okay? So, if you're sitting there doing the math on your own weight loss, wondering how much of what you've lost was the wrong tissue or whether that plateau that you hit was this exact trap, I want you to know we offer free discovery calls where our patient educators can look at your specific situation and help you figure out where you actually stand. And if this looks like the right fit, that's where you'd have the opportunity to work with our full team, including myself, coaches, medical providers who handle exactly what this video is about every single day. You can text the number on the screen or check out the link in the description if you want to explore that lever. Number one, you've heard eat more protein so many times it's freaking wallpaper. So, let me give you the version that actually changes behavior because the advice isn't wrong. It's just been explained badly in many cases.

[00:04:41]So, when you're losing weight, your body is in a catabolic state, meaning it's breaking stuff down. All that means is breakdown mode and it's taking your body apart for energy. That's the whole point. The question your body has to answer every single day is take apart what the fat you want gone right here like break this fat down or the muscle that you need to keep. That's a decision. Protein is how you answer that question for it. When enough protein comes in, your body reads a clear signal. This tissue is being used. The tissue is being fed. Protect it. Pull from fat instead. When protein is scarce, the signal flips. Your protein starts harvesting its own lean tissue for parts. Not because it's broken, because you told it to do so. Silence is an instruction, too. And here's why this hits GLP-1 users harder than anyone else. The medication, it shrinks your appetite. That's the feature. But when you're barely hungry, protein is usually the first thing that quietly disappears from your plate, right? We all know that. We're just trying to get something down, right? You're not choosing to skip it. It just stops happening. Which means the average person on these meds is sending the harvest signal without even knowing it. So, here's the rule that we run with every patient. Protein first.

[00:05:52]You're shooting for one gram of protein per pound of target body weight every day. Not your current weight, your target. So, if you're trying to get to be 150 lbs, that means 150 grams of protein. And first means exactly that.

[00:06:05]Protein gets eaten before anything else on your plate. Because when your appetite is small, whatever you eat first sometimes might be the only thing guaranteed to get in. Okay? So, that number probably sounds high. And that's the point, right? It's the difference between a body that spends the next six months burning fat and the one that spends it eating its own engine. Protein tells your body what to protect. But there's a second signal, one that decides where that deficit gets pulled from in the first place, and it's the one that most people on these medications skip entirely. But there's an earlier question that your body asks every day you're in a deficit. Where does the energy come from in the first place, fat or muscle? And the answer isn't decided in your kitchen. It's decided by what you ask of your body to do. So here's the principle and it's almost embarrassingly simple. Your body keeps what it uses and it gets rid of what it doesn't. It's ruthless about that. Tissue is expensive to maintain.

[00:07:00]Your engine burns calories just existing and a body in a calorie deficit is looking for budget cuts everywhere. If you're not using that tissue, it's the first line item to go. Why would your body pay, hey, in the form of calorie burn to maintain equipment that it never uses? Resistance training is how you flag that equipment as essential. Every time you lift something heavy enough to challenge you, you send a demand signal.

[00:07:26]This gets used. This stays. And once that tissue is flagged, your body has no choice but to pull the deficit from another column. And that's more of it'll be from here. See, that's the part almost everybody misses about training while losing weight. You're not lifting to build anything right now, although you might you will build some muscle.

[00:07:44]You're lifting to tell your body where to take the weight from and where not to take the weight from. Really, that's worth saying twice. While you're on a GLP medication, training isn't only about getting bigger or even getting stronger. Those are nice bonuses. Seeing a nice bicep every now and then is pretty cool if you're a guy or maybe having some toned triceps or stomach, any of my lady friends. No judgment what you want to see, but those are just bonuses. It's a routing decision. Same calorie deficit, same medication, same scale drop. But trained bodies take it from body fat. Untrained bodies take it from muscle. Jessica and the version of Jessica who lifted would have lost 35 lbs. Only one of them would have kept their metabolism. And the dose required is smaller than you'd think. So, we're not talking about living in a gym here.

[00:08:29]We're talking three sessions a week of solid resistance training. That could be weights, bands, even hard body weight movements is the target that we use to flag the tissue. The signal matters more than the volume. Show up, challenge your tissue, and then get home and live your life already. Now, if you want to break down the exact resistance training approach that I personally have used while on GLP1s, what actually protects you while you're eating less without living in the gym? Let me know in the comments and tell me what would help you the most. be the workout structure, the minimum that still works or how to train when you're in an energy deficit, let me know and that'll help us plan up our next future videos. Okay, so now protein and training are the two levers that you've least heard of. But lever three is the one that I spend the most time on with patients and it's the exact opposite of what the thumbnail of this video promised you. So let's talk about those pins from the thumbnail because I know what the escalating doses in that image whispered to you. more medication, more results. If it whispered anything, right? I'm telling you, after five years of coaching people on these meds, the patients who get the best results are almost never the ones on the highest doses. Usually, it's the opposite. So, here's the mechanism. All right, these meds work by suppressing your appetite.

[00:09:42]You know that. And you can have too much of that. It's called overuppression. The dose is so high you can barely eat.

[00:09:48]Sounds like a superpower, right? Let's walk it forward. So, you can't get your protein in. There goes lever one. You have no fuel and very little energy. So, your training falls apart. There goes lever two. And now you're in a massive calorie deficit with no protection signal and no demand signal. And in our clinic, that's the setup where we see the body start harvesting exactly the tissue that this entire video is about.

[00:10:10]Protecting the highest dose doesn't speed up the trap from earlier. It is the trap. Remember Jessica, the patient who lost 15 pounds of muscle? I told you we'd come back to her because that scan wasn't where her story started. Before the scan ever happened, she spent 8 months on a standard protocol, parked at about 10 milligrams of heret, nauseated, brain foggy, cold all the time. Those aren't side effects to push through.

[00:10:34]That's a body that's been told to stop eating and doing what it was told, suppress metabolism to survive. So, our medical team actually brought her dose down to five. And that reset is what made everything else in her story possible. So what we look for instead is the sweet spot, the lowest effective dose that still quiets the food noise, but it leaves you the appetite to actually eat your protein and the energy to train. So think of it like a stereo, right? The medication, it's the volume knob. Your protein and training are the speakers. And if your speakers are cheap, you crank the volume and everything distorts. You build better speakers and you barely need to turn it up. And quick, if you're getting value out of this video, hit that subscribe button because most of what I make is actually this the layer underneath the advice that you already heard. Okay, so here's the reframe that changes how you see the medication entirely. The pin was never the lever. The pin is what gives you room to pull those levers. And we call that the window of opportunity. The medication quiets the noise and it buys you time. And the whole question, what are you going to freaking build while the window is open, baby? Like, what are you going to do? That's the goal. And one important thing, where your dose should sit is a conversation for you and your medical provider. What I'm giving you is the question to bring to them. Am I suppressed enough to lose weight or so suppressed that I can't protect? What keeps it off long term? Those are the three big levers. There are two more quiet ones. Most people never connect them to their results at all. and one of them is doing more damage than the other four combined when it's off. Okay, so level four is sleep. And I meant what I said about the damage. Short sleep quality works against everything that you've been trying to set up here. Two things happen when you're running on freaking 5 to 6 hours of sleep. First, your hunger hormones, they start working against you. Your signal that says you're full gets quiet. The signal that says eat gets loud. And now you're fighting with your own medication. And then second, and this is the part that ties everything that we've covered, your body does its repair work at night.

[00:12:36]That's when the tissue that you've trained gets to rebuild and flagged as essential. Cut that night short and you've trained for a signal that never gets an opportunity to do its thing.

[00:12:45]Right? So, in our clinic, when someone's doing everything right and the results still look wrong, composition sliding the wrong way, cravings keeping back, having to increase doses, sleep is one of the first places that we look at. and fixing it is usually the cheapest win on this entire list. Same injections, same protein, same workout. The person sleeping 7 to eight hours gets a different result. Lever 5 is even more simple. Water and electrolytes. The minerals like sodium, potassium, magnesium that your body needs to actually run. Here's why it matters on these medications. Specifically, when you eat less food, you're also drinking less because a huge share of your fluids and minerals normally come from food.

[00:13:25]Most of the nausea, the headaches, the dragging fatigue people blame on their medication, a chunk of that is just dehydration wearing a disguise. And here's the real cost. Those are the exact symptoms that make people quit, not the dramatic stuff, the slow grind of just feeling lousy. Hydration isn't a performance lever. It's the lever that keeps you in the game long enough for the other four to work. That's the full set, guys. Protect the tissue. Send the demand signal. Find the sweet spot and sleep like it's part of your freaking full-time job. All right? And stay ahead of your fluids. Five levers, all free except the one that you're already paying for. Now, at the start of this video, I promised you a number. A number from brand new research that proves everything that I just walked you through isn't just my opinion. It's where this entire field is headed. Right now, drug companies are racing to solve the exact problem that this video is about. They've realized the same thing that I've been telling you for years, that the future of weight loss isn't losing more, it's losing better. And the most striking proof so far is a trial combining a GLP-1 with a new medication, Bimma Groomab, a drug designed specifically to protect lean tissue while you lose. The results, people on the combination lost weight that was almost 93% fat. The GLP1 alone about 72.

[00:14:40]All right, that's a big difference. Sit with that gap between those numbers.

[00:14:44]Same weight loss on the scale, but completely different bodies at the end.

[00:14:48]Now, one group kept their engine almost entirely intact, which means they kept their results. That's not my opinion anymore. That's the direction the entire field is moving. Fat selective weight loss on purpose. Now, that combination is still early in trials. It's not something that you can get. And that's not why I'm showing you this. I'm showing you because it's proof that the scoreboard that I gave you at the start of this video is the one medicine itself is switching to. And even when we do have access to muscle sparing medications, it's not going to change everything that I taught you in this video because if you just use that medication and you don't do the things that I taught you, you end up losing all the results still. It just takes a little bit longer because you got better results. You still need the foundation.

[00:15:31]Now, here's what should actually get you excited. You don't have to wait for that drug because the levers in this video close most of that gap for free starting today, right now. And I can prove it because I promised you the rest of Jessica's story. So after that scan, after eight months of over suppression and 15 pounds of her engine gone, here's what we changed. We got her to 150 grams of protein a day. We got her butt to the gym, solid weight training, hypertrophy style muscle building, progressive overload three times a week, and a dose that her body could actually live with.

[00:16:01]6 months later, she got scanned again.

[00:16:03]She had gained back 8 lb of muscle mass while losing another 10 lbs of fat. Read that again. She rebuilt her engine and she kept losing the right weight at the same time. See that trap? It could also run in reverse. And that's the endgame that I want for all of you watching this video. We call it metabolic independence. A body that holds its results because the engine is strong enough to do the damn holding. And for some people that means coming off the medication entirely. For others it is a future where you take a little tiny maintenance dose, micro doing maintenance. Both of these are wins because either way, your body is doing the work, not the prescription pad. So, before we wrap up, I want you to ask yourself something. If your scale dropped 20 lbs this year, do you know what your answer would be to the only question that matters? 20 lbs of what?

[00:16:52]And if you made it to this point, tell me in the comments what surprised you the most. How much of a typical GLP-1 weight loss can come from the wrong tissue or where the science is actually heading? See, here's the truth about everything that I just gave you. You can run most of this yourself starting tonight. The protein math, the three sessions a week, the sleep, the fluids, that's all yours. But what's genuinely hard to do alone is the calibration, the accountability, hitting your protein number when your appetite is barely there. Knowing where the wall that you've hit is a normal stall or if it's your engine shrinking, recognizing whether your dose is in the sweet spot or quietly oversuppressing you. And having a medical team that can actually act on it. That's the difference between knowing the levers and having every one of them dialed into your body at the same time. And that's what we do all day every single day. And if that's the kind of support that you want, it starts with a free discovery call. Just text number on the screen or check out the link in the description and you'll speak with one of our patient educators. They'll get to know your full story, where you've started, what you've tried, what medication you're on, and where you want to end up. It's also how you'll get a real feel for what working with me, our coaches, and our medical team is actually like. And then they'll walk through our programs and pricing so that you can see exactly what getting to metabolic independence with the team behind you actually looks like. Because the goal was never the highest dose. The goal is keeping the weight off. Whether that's with no medication at all or the smallest dose that does the job. And 6 months from now when you step on a scanner instead of a scale, you'll know exactly what kind of weight you lost.

[00:18:23]Now, I know a lot of you are wondering how to handle the dose side of this specifically. when a plateau means change your dose and when it means hold.

[00:18:31]I made a whole video on exactly just that. Check it out right there, guys.

[00:18:35]And for anybody who made it this far into the video, just this is more for my lovely future wife. By the time you're watching this video, we'll be married.

[00:18:42]And I just wanted you to know that because I love her very much. We'll see you guys later.