How Your Emotions Affect GLP-1 Drug Results!

GLP-1 receptor agonist drugs (such as Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, and others) have a good reputation for working well, and the most talked-about downside is that they often have unpleasant side effects:

Most People Who Start GLP-1 RAs Quit Them Within A Year (Here’s Why) ← there are 4 main reasons

…and of course, some do work better than others: Better Than Ozempic?

As with almost any drug, some people are simply “non-responders”, meaning that for some reason (often a genetic factor, often not known for sure why), the drug will simply not work as it does for most people.

For GLP-1 receptor agonists, there is a portion of the general population for whom they simply will not work, and so far there is no known way of predicting it (probably at someone point it’ll be figured out, and this writer’s money would be on it being either a SNP mutation or a microbiome thing). So, you roll the dice, you take the GLP-1 drug, you wait and see, and there’s a 15% chance (that doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s about 1 in 6, in other words, the same probability as rolling a “1” on a fair, six-sided die).

You can read about how that can go, here: Ozempic didn’t work for me. I was furious—and ashamed

But why?

The key is in why you are overeating in the first place (and if you’re looking to lose weight and/but are not overeating, then probably GLP-1 drugs are not for you, since that is primarily how they work).

In few words:

• If you are overeating in response to the sight and/or smell of tasty food, then probably you will benefit well from GLP-1 RAs in the long-term
• If you are overeating for emotional reasons (e.g. because of depression, or as a coping strategy to deal with stress/anxiety, for example) then probably GLP-1 RAs cannot be replied on to help you.

By “cannot be relied on” does not mean you will necessarily be a “non-responder” as described above, but it does mean that it’s likely your results will be intermittent at best. Which, after all, is not a big improvement on regular yo-yo dieting, an approach that is famously Not Good™.

Indeed, per the categories in the study we’re about to cite:

• Emotional eaters (eating due to negative feelings, not hunger) responded best to glp-1 drugs, showing greater weight loss and better blood sugar improvements
• External eaters (eating because food looks or smells appealing) were less likely to benefit in the long term
• Restrained eaters (deliberately restricting diet to lose weight) exercised more restraint temporarily, but returned to baseline by 12 months

Notably, all three categories of eaters here were people with type 2 diabetes—in other words, the very people that GLP-1 drugs were first developed to help, before they took off as weight-loss drugs.

So in theory, these should be the people for whom GLP-1 RAs work best—and yet, as we see, it’s still not always so, and is highly dependent on what goes on between one’s ears.

You can read this paper in full, here: Association between eating behavior patterns and the therapeutic efficacy of GLP-1 receptor agonists in individuals with type 2 diabetes: a multicenter prospective observational study

Want a different approach?

It is possible to get many of the effects of GLP-1 RAs without taking GLP-1 RAs, by enjoying foods that increase incretin, a hormone group (the most well-known of which is GLP-1) that slows down stomach emptying, which means a gentler blood sugar curve and feeling fuller for longer. It also acts on the hypothalamus, controlling appetite via the brain too (signalling fullness and reducing hunger).

For what foods to focus on, see: 5 Ways To Naturally Boost The “Ozempic Effect” ← this is from Dr. Jason Fung, who is perhaps most well-known for his work in functional medicine for reversing diabetes, and he’s once again giving us sound advice about metabolic hormone-hacking with dietary tweaks!

Or to curb emotional eating specifically, check out: Emotional Eating And The Five Pillars Of Craving Control

Or for a deeper dive, you might like this book we reviewed not long back:

Breaking Free from Emotional Eating – by Geneen Roth

Take care!