Guide//5 min
Bloodwork on a GLP-1
Most people on these drugs are monitored on a bathroom scale and nothing else. A short, cheap panel twice a year would catch nearly everything that quietly goes wrong.
Practical
Maintenance
Staying on, tapering off, and what happens after goal weight.
32 pieces
Guide//5 min
Donating blood on a GLP-1
No blood service in the United States defers you for taking one of these. What will defer you is the iron, the weight and the hydration — three things this drug class makes considerably more likely.
Guide//6 min
Exercising on a GLP-1
The advice to exercise while losing weight is correct and almost always delivered by someone who has not tried doing it on nine hundred calories and a stomach that empties at half speed.
Explainer//5 min
GLP-1s through menopause
The weight that appears in the forties and fifties is not a failure of discipline. It is a redistribution driven by falling oestrogen, and it responds to a different set of interventions than the ones that worked at thirty.
Explainer//5 min
GLP-1s and cancer risk
The thyroid warning, the pancreatic scare and the colorectal signal are three different arguments with three different evidence bases, and the most consequential finding points the other way entirely.
Explainer//6 min
GLP-1s after 65
The cardiovascular benefit holds in older adults. So does the muscle loss, onto a body that was already losing muscle, in a person for whom a fall is a different event than it was at forty.
Deep Dive//6 min
GLP-1s versus bariatric surgery
Surgery still produces more weight loss than any injection, and it is now being declined by people who would have accepted it three years ago. Both of those facts deserve more scrutiny than they usually get.
Guide//6 min
Loose skin after a GLP-1
Skin keeps tightening for a year or more after the weight stops coming off, which means most people who panic at month eight are looking at an unfinished result.
Explainer//6 min
Ozempic face, explained
It is not a drug side effect. It is the face doing what the face has always done during rapid weight loss, in front of an audience that has never watched it happen this fast or this often.
Explainer//5 min
Sleep on a GLP-1
Most people sleep better on these drugs within a few months, for reasons that are entirely mechanical. A minority sleep considerably worse first, and almost nobody is warned about the interval.
Guide//5 min
Switching between GLP-1s
The most common error when moving from semaglutide to tirzepatide is assuming your current dose buys you a head start. It does not, and the week you find that out is memorable.
Guide//6 min
Why weight loss stalls
Every weight loss curve flattens. The trial curves flatten, the surgical curves flatten, and yours will too. The question is whether you have hit a plateau or simply had a fortnight.
Guide//4 min
Best creatine for GLP-1 users
Creatine monohydrate is a commodity costing pennies a gram, and it is the single best-evidenced supplement for holding on to strength while you lose a fifth of your body weight. The interesting question is what else is in the scoop.
Guide//3 min
Best GLP-1 supplement brand
Every brand in this category claims transparency. Only some of them print the numbers that would let you check, and the gap between those two groups is the most useful thing a buyer can know.
Guide//4 min
Best GLP-1 supplement stack
Most of the supplements sold to people on Ozempic are designed to raise GLP-1. You are already injecting a GLP-1 agonist. The useful question is what the drug leaves behind, and which stack is built to replace it.
Guide//2 min
Best GLP-1 supplements over 50
Age-related muscle loss was already running before you started. A GLP-1 adds a second subtraction on top of the first, and the arithmetic of that is the whole reason this ranking looks different.
Guide//4 min
Best metabolic supplement on a GLP-1
Berberine got called nature's Ozempic by people who had not looked closely at either. It is a real compound with real effects and a real interaction profile, and it is the one shelf in this market where I would want your prescriber involved before your wallet.
Guide//3 min
Best muscle supplement on a GLP-1
A quarter to a third of what you lose on these drugs is lean tissue. No powder changes that on its own — but two of them meaningfully help, and the rest are selling you the idea of help.
Guide//3 min
Best probiotic for GLP-1 users
Slowed gastric emptying is the mechanism that makes these drugs work and the mechanism that stops your bowels. Whether a probiotic helps depends entirely on which of those two problems you actually have.
Guide//3 min
Best skin support on a GLP-1
The hollowing people notice at month six is lost facial fat, not tired skin. Nothing in a bottle puts that back — which makes the honest question what a serum or a supplement can still usefully do.
Guide//2 min
Best supplements coming off a GLP-1
Appetite returns faster than muscle does. The months after you stop are when the lean mass you did not defend becomes a number you can feel, and the supplement priorities invert accordingly.
Guide//2 min
Best supplements for training on a GLP-1
Resistance training is the highest-leverage thing you can do on these drugs and the hardest to sustain, because you are being asked to train in a deficit with an appetite that will not cooperate.
Guide//3 min
Best value GLP-1 supplements
Creatine, psyllium and a multivitamin are commodities. Put a GLP-1 label on the tub and the price roughly triples, which is a marketing achievement rather than a pharmacological one.
Guide//10 min
The GLP-1 companion app I recommend
Almost every avoidable failure I see in the first year of treatment traces back to the same thing: nobody wrote anything down. Here is what is worth recording, why it matters more on these drugs than on anything else I prescribe, and the tool I have settled on.
Deep Dive//5 min
Food noise
Nobody measured it, no trial listed it as an endpoint, and it is the single most common thing patients volunteer unprompted. The most consequential effect of these drugs may be one we have no instrument for.
News//4 min
Employers and states are pulling back
Having your GLP-1 covered today tells you very little about January. Employers are narrowing benefits, states are dropping them, and the people affected usually find out at the pharmacy counter.
Deep Dive//5 min
The muscle question
Roughly a quarter of the weight lost on a GLP-1 is not fat. Whether that matters, and what — if anything — you can do about it, is the most consequential unsettled argument in this field.
Guide//5 min
Lifting on a GLP-1: the minimum that works
You do not need a program, a coach, or a gym membership you will cancel in March. You need six movements, twice a week, and enough load that the last two repetitions are genuinely difficult.
Deep Dive//5 min
Microdosing GLP-1s
Taking a fraction of the standard dose is now common enough to have its own vocabulary and its own influencers. Some of the reasoning is sound. Almost none of it has been tested.
News//4 min
Drugs to protect muscle alongside GLP-1s
If a quarter of the weight you lose is lean tissue, the obvious pharmaceutical response is a second drug to stop that happening. Several are now in trials, and the questions they raise are more interesting than the marketing.
Deep Dive//5 min
Year two on a GLP-1
Every article about these drugs ends at goal weight. That is roughly the midpoint. The second year is quieter, stranger, and the part where most of the decisions that matter actually get made.
Deep Dive//4 min
Coming off a GLP-1
Regain after stopping is not a failure of willpower or a scandal about the drugs. It is what happens when you withdraw treatment for a chronic condition — and it is entirely predictable, which is why it should be discussed in month one, not month twenty.
Also in Practical
On The Jab
The
GLP‑1
Handbook
Dr. Nick Robertson
MD
The book · 14 chapters
The GLP-1 Handbook
Everything I tell my own patients before their first injection. 214 pages of what actually matters in the first year — dosing, side effects, food, muscle, cost, and the part nobody prepares you for: maintenance.
$4Less than your morning coffee.
Priced at four dollars because it should be affordable to everyone taking these drugs — not because it's worth four dollars. No upsell, no course, no supplement line.