The public story about GLP-1 medications skips an interesting step.
GLP-1 is a hormone your own gut releases after you eat. It has a short life in the body, a matter of minutes, and it does several things at once: it prompts the pancreas to release insulin when blood glucose is elevated, it suppresses glucagon, and it slows the rate at which the stomach empties. Taken together, that is a system for keeping blood sugar stable after a meal.
The drugs are engineered versions of that hormone, built to survive far longer than the natural one. They were developed for type 2 diabetes, and they work.
The appetite effects emerged from that work rather than the other way around. Slower gastric emptying means food sits longer and a person feels full sooner. That produced weight loss, weight loss produced separate indications, and by the time these medications reached the cultural conversation, all of it had compressed into a single sentence about eating less.
So it should not be surprising that something else got missed.
Then coaches started hearing something they had not expected. Clients on GLP-1 medications began mentioning, almost in passing, that they had stopped drinking. Or that they had lost interest in online shopping. Or that the thought they could not stop having had gotten quieter.
Nobody prescribed that. It was not what the medication was for.
“I’m diabetic and overweight, so my doctor prescribed a GLP-1 for me. Yes, I lost weight. Yes, my A1C became more stable. And then I noticed that my desire for my nightly glass of wine disappeared,” shares a 60-year old woman who has been taking the medication for 6-months. She has requested to stay anonymous.
“I’ve never been able to go to a party or dinner without having a few cocktails. Now, I am 8-weeks sober,” she shares.
Read more here on Coach360News.com.
