Think about how it feels when you’re prescribed most medications. Your doctor or pharmacist gives you specific instructions to follow—“Take it in the morning with food,” or “Avoid eating grapefruit while on it,” that sort of thing—and you go on your merry way, feeling pretty confident you’re handling it correctly. But if you’ve started taking a GLP-1 to lose weight, you may be feeling a little lost, almost like you’re being left to figure things out on your own.
One reason is the increasing popularity of these medications being prescribed in a nonpersonal way. “These treatments have exploded online, and there are a million different websites you can access them from,” says Michael Glickman, MD, a physician in New York who is triple board-certified in family medicine, lifestyle medicine, and obesity medicine. “[The experience is] fully digital, and you aren’t seeing a provider in person—and maybe you’re never speaking to a provider at all.”
Even if you’re prescribed a GLP-1 during an in-person doctor’s appointment, you may not know which questions to ask to ensure you really understand the medication.
This opens the door to making mistakes—ones that could worsen your side effects, affect how much weight you’ll lose, or even cause new health issues. Read on for five of the top things doctors told SELF you definitely should not do while taking a GLP-1.
1. Overlooking the importance of nutrition
Will you still lose weight while eating mostly pizza, chicken nugs, and bowls of cereal? Probably. But you won’t be doing your health any favors. “When our appetite is reduced—and it can be quite significantly reduced on a GLP-1—it becomes even more important to have really good-quality nutrition when we do eat,” says Brianna Johnson-Rabbett, MD, an obesity-medicine physician and endocrinologist and the medical director of obesity medicine at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. It makes sense: You’re likely eating less, but you still need to supply your body with the key nutrients it needs, so every bite matters.
Dr. Glickman recommends eating fresh foods rather than highly processed ones and prioritizing fiber-rich foods like fruits and veggies, as well as protein from sources like chicken, tofu, and eggs. This last nutrient is especially important when losing weight, since you’re shedding muscle along with fat. “If you aren’t eating enough protein, you can lose too much muscle mass,” says Dr. Glickman. While the exact amount of protein you should aim for is personal, some research suggests a daily intake of between one and 1.5 grams per kilogram of body weight to reduce your risk of losing muscle. That’s around 80 to 120 grams a day if you weigh 175 pounds.
