89. No Guilt, Just GLP-1: A Smarter Approach to Weight Loss

In this episode of Weight Loss Made Simple (Episode 89), Dr. Stacy Heimburger dives deep into the guilt and shame many people feel about using GLP-1 medications for weight loss. She reframes this common struggle and explains why using these medications is far from cheating. Dr. Heimburger discusses how GLP-1s act as an antidote to the addictive nature of modern food and offers insights on how they can support sustainable weight loss when paired with mindset work and lifestyle changes. Tune in for a compassionate take on using medication to help you succeed on your weight loss journey!

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Transcript

Hey everybody, welcome back to the podcast. This is episode 89, and I just want to talk today for anyone thinking about being on GLP-1 medications or anyone on them that feels maybe a little guilty or a little embarrassed that they're on them. So I want to talk about the guilt, shame, and judgment around these medications.

Because I think it's important, and I think a lot more people are on them than you think. The more they study these medications, the more uses and indications we're going to find for them. So I just want to say from a food standpoint how I think they fit in and how I think they're pretty useful. You might be wondering thoughts or have thoughts like, "I'm cheating, I'm not doing it the right way, I should just be tougher."

I want to tell you it's fine, all thoughts are fine, but I want to give you some reframes—some alternative thoughts that you might take.

I especially want to talk about how I think we should be thinking about these medications in 2025. Society looks down on weight loss drugs, but historically, if we look, society likes to have a reason to think badly of people. We like to marginalize people. We like to put people in different buckets and treat them certain ways based on those buckets. I think there is a fear that now we won't be able to fat shame people, honestly. I think that's a part of it. So we liked being able to say that people were lazy or failures or bad because they didn't have an ideal body type. Meanwhile, what we were doing as a society was really detrimental to that population of people, which, by the way, was the majority of people and still is. More than half of our country is overweight or obese. So the fact that anyone's sitting in judgment is a little bit ridiculous.

Our food industry specifically targeted all of us to make our food as addictive as possible. I read a horrifying article that they have actually put people on task to find a way to make our food so addictive that it overrides the benefit of these medications, right? So these medications, as far as food chatter and food desire goes, really do readjust our dopamine reward center in a way that we are not getting the over-stimulus, the overproduction of dopamine with our food. Our food is over-processed, so high in sugar, so high in chemicals, and all of that is done to make food very addictive, right? It is engineered to hit these dopamine centers in our brain and to make our food like a drug. So these medications kind of silence all that. It changes it. It doesn't let the dopamine overreact. I think it's the easiest way to think of it.

So I like to think of it as like an antidote to our modern food. Our food is produced in a way to chemically alter our brain; these medications are turning that off. So if nothing else, these medications are the antidote to the poison of our food. If you like that thought, I offer it to you and would love for you to share it around because I don't think it's that crazy or off-base. I think it's a very, very simplified way to think about the way we produce our food in this country and the way these medications work.

So I'm absolutely going to say that's an oversimplification, but I think it's true. And just in the same way that if we had a bacterial infection, we would take an antibiotic and no one would think twice about it. I think these medications are the same. If we had high blood pressure, we would take a blood pressure medication. If we had asthma, we would take an inhaler. If we have a food addiction, we can take these medications. If our food has been made to be addictive and it is acting against our will, we can take these medications. They are not going to do all the work, okay?

So this idea, here's another idea, right? People are cheating. They're taking the easy way out. There's not one overweight person I know—Not one person that has struggled with food that I know that has taken the easy way out. That is such a hard thing to live with. And most people have lived with it for a really long time until these medications came out. Always trying everything new, just destroying our body's relationship with itself and with food in an effort to lose weight. The struggle is real.

Okay, people have struggled with weight and struggled with their relationship with food. And as a society, our food is produced to not help, but to do more harm. So if you have eaten the food that has been given to you, that has been mass-produced for you, it has altered your brain. These medications help undo that.

I think taking these medications in a... we can talk about the ins and outs of like how to take them smartly, but I think it means you're being smart and you're using all the tools available to you to succeed.

I don't think that this is cheating. I really don't. And I have lost weight all the ways. And I have lost 90 pounds not using these medications. But I know how these medications work, and I think they're very, very, very helpful.

Helping figure out when we're hungry is a struggle when you are eating a modern diet. Again, it's this dopamine, it's this urge-reward cycle, it's all of it. We are punishing our body against our will by taking in all of the sugar, all these processed foods, all of these chemicals. So I still think my favorite way to think about these is as the antidote to our modern food system. Most people are pre-diabetic. So if you want to say you're preventing pre-diabetes, if that's a thought you would like to borrow, please have it. It's true. If you continue to gain weight or continue to stay overweight and continue to eat an American processed diet, if you're not already pre-diabetic, you will be. And so these medications can prevent that.

So if you like that way, please, I love that thought as well. The thing is, weight loss is not a one-size-fits-all. And as we talked about last week, these medications are not gonna do the mindset work that needs to happen for sustainable weight loss. So the medicines are not gonna do the work. The medicines are giving you the ability to not be so hyper-stimulated by food, and it gives you the opportunity to do the mindset work, to do the difficult work.

You're still gonna have to really concentrate on your nutrition. You're still gonna have to exercise. You're still gonna have to do the mindset shifts, the stress management, the good sleep, the drinking enough water. Lifestyle medicine changes were part of every single one of these studies. And if you want to have the best success and maximize your success while on these medications, you have to do all of those things.

So none of that sounded easy to me. So the idea that this is the easy way out is kind of silly too. We have a lot of work to do, okay? We still, we have to work on our nutrition. We have to have fiber, we have to have protein, we have to have water, okay? So we're still gonna have to come off processed foods for the most part. That is gonna be much easier when they're not calling our name from across the room.

We're still gonna have to work on our stress management, work on our emotional IQ, work on our sleep, right? The medicines aren't doing anything about those things. Not a dang thing. That's all us. And then we're still gonna really have to work on our muscle preservation, muscle growth, especially as we get older, especially as women, so, so, so important. These medicines aren't going into the gym and lifting weights for you. Not happening.

Okay, so these medications are super, super helpful. I think anyone who's thinking about using them should absolutely do so. I think that is so important that you find someone to teach you the lifestyle changes that need to accompany these medications. Otherwise, it's going to be very difficult to have long-term success. And I know financially, it's difficult to stay on these medications a long time.

So if you make that financial commitment, you should certainly be looking for someone who can teach you all of these other things so that if you get to a point where you can't afford the medication or you get to a point where you want to come off the medication, then you can be as successful as possible. I think we should use all the tools available to us. If you're listening to this podcast, I am one of those tools for you, right? You're listening to my tips and tricks and trying to get some mindset and tools and some nutrition tidbits. So you're doing work already as far as your health and wellness and your weight loss. If you're using one of these medications, you just need to double down on that, okay? So I think of it as the opposite. I don't think you can take this medicine and just like sit back and be like, "Perfect." I think it's the opportunity to like double down. Like now that I am not having these over-desire and horrible urges because I have treated the poison in my body from these processed foods, now I have the opportunity to do this really hard work. And this work might be easier for someone else, but if you're taking these medications, it means this work was not easy for you and that's okay. There is literally nothing wrong with that. It's just hard to do this work when there's so much over-desire for food.

So I think these medications are a valid, helpful tool. I don't think they need to come with guilt or shame. I think if you think it's cheating, I disagree, okay? Because there's still a lot of hard work to be done. All of these things that I teach and the mindset and the nutrition and all of this, you have to do those things too. And in some ways, you have to do them sort of with double the effort, right? Because it wasn't something that we were good at before these medications. So we have to double down so that when these urges come back, when we're off the medication, if we choose to go off the medication, we have a whole new toolbox of how to handle it. We have a whole new toolbox of how to handle triggers. We have a whole new toolbox of how to maximize our nutrition, a whole new toolbox of how to preserve our muscle and get some exercise in, how to think about movement. We have a whole new toolbox on how to just emotionally regulate and how to be really smart about our emotional IQ and naming our emotions and processing our feelings. And then we've done all of our tips and tricks with our new habits in our water and everything else that I teach.

If you're struggling with the decision, I totally understand that. If you're struggling because you're afraid of what someone will think, that's not a good reason, okay? Nobody knows you except you. Nobody knows your struggles except you. And these medications are very powerful, but really can only be maximized. Your success can only be maximized if you're willing to do the hard work. So it's not an easy button. It's not the easy way out, okay? Just eating to feel better, that's the easy button. And none of us want that anymore, or you wouldn't be listening to me.

If you have more questions, please follow me on social. I'm giving out GLP-1 tips and tricks every day because I do think that there needs to be more discussion about how to maximize results on these medications. I see too many people getting these medications with no lifestyle medicine instruction at all, and that's not how these are intended to work. That's not how we're going to maximize our results, and it's certainly not how we're going to sustain our weight loss. So please share this if you thought this was helpful. Share with a friend, and I'll talk to you next week.