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GLP-1 Weight Loss Drugs: Why Nutrition Still Matters (Ozempic, Semaglutide, Mounjaro Explained)
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You're listening to Mondays with Matt. I'm Matt Reynolds, the founder and CEO of BarbaLogic and Turnkey Coach. Each week I share lessons from decades of lifting, coaching and business to help you get stronger, coach better and take action. Let's dive in. Hey, happy Monday everybody. Welcome to Mondays with Matt. I am Matt and this is Monday. So glad you're here. Hey, we're going to dive in today on a super hot topic, probably the a controversial topic and probably the hottest topic that I have seen in the past at least decade, if not more, and that is GLP1s and peptides in general. And so before I dive in, and then we'll take any questions you have about GLP1s and peptides specifically, but also you're always open to ask about anything on this live. So let me say all the things that I need to say to cya, which is that I am not a medical professional. This is not advice, it's for entertainment purposes only. I'm not trying to diagnose or treat any of your ailments or deficiencies. So if you know, you know. And we'll dive in on peptides and GLP1. So first off, there is a ton of controversy about GLP1s, about is it cheating? Is it the easy way out to lose weight, lose fat? And I wanna get out of that for just for a minute. We will definitely come back to it. But the thing that is killing America and the west just in general is rampant obesity, metabolic syndrome, diabetes, heart disease related to those things. And peptides are an amazing way. It is literally reversing these things, insulin resistance, it makes you much more insulin sensitive. And so from a health perspective, if we get out of just the weight loss, so and think about longevity, GLP1s are amazing and they continue to get better. I don't know if they'll continue to get better. My thought is that they probably will. I'll talk about the one that's gonna hit the market very soon, which is the one that allegedly I've been experimenting with for some time. So first off, let me give you a little bit of background on me over the past several months. Probably many of you who've followed me for a while know that I've lost a fair amount of weight. I actually just stepped on the scale just now is 237.6. I started at 2 90, so I'm down, what is that, 53 pounds? My body fat's gone from 33% to 16%. My waist has gone from 48 inches to 37 and a half. So 10 and a half inches lost in the past month alone. In the last month my lean mass has gone from 176 pounds to 190 pounds. I've gained 14 pounds of muscle. In the last month alone my fat mass has gone from 52 pounds to 41. So I've lost 11 pounds. So people that have said can't gain muscle and lose fat at the same time, that is not true. But certainly there are factors involved including peptides and TRT and very high protein and lots of strength training and eating very clean. And so I want to get into why those things matter. And so it has really transformed my life. I've become very obsessed with learning everything I can about these things. I'm going to try to keep it as 30,000 foot view as I can for you today. So let's get into a little bit about what they are. So GLP1s these are injectable, typically weekly subcutaneous injectable with a little baby like insulin type syringe. And it's a drug that really, it's a peptide. It's a signaling mechanism that signals your brain. These GLP1s target gut or mimic gut hormones to target the receptor signals in your brain to reduce your appetite, slow gastric emptying, improve insulin sensitivity and promote fat loss. And there has been a tremendous progression. The big one that came out years ago you've all heard of is Ozempic, otherwise known as Semaglutide, that has one agonist in it. And so it's a GLP one. That's all it is. And it, and it did great. On average people lost 15 to 20% of their body weight that were on it over extended period of time, six months to a year. And then a few years ago Tirzepatide came out which is known by the trade name Mounjaro and that has two agonists in it. So it has the GLP one similar to Semaglutide, but it also has a GIP agonist and so which is a insulin type agonist that helps with insulin sensitivity as well. And, and those are the primary two that are out on the market. There was a, there was one before Ozempic, I think it was called Lirotide, something like that. And, and it wasn't as popular and it didn't cause as much fat loss or, or body weight loss. It was under 10%, was like 7 to 10%. Uh, but they continued to get better. If you are on X or Twitter, you've probably heard of Reta trutide, typically called Reta. It has three agonists. It has the GLP one, the gip, and also a glucagon. Excuse me, glucagon agonist. Which, that glucagon piece is really like the thing that makes everything. It just, it's just synergistic, all three of these things. Glucagon causes increased energy expenditure. Basically your basal metabolic rate goes up and you just burn more calories. It helps your liver to dump fat and get rid of fat in the liver, tremendously helping the health of the liver. Visceral fat has been fantastic with really all three GLPs, but certainly the right at True Tide. And so they're fantastic. However, they come with some drawbacks. So one is that some people have gastric distress for some, and I have not had any of that. I've titrated up from very low dose to kind of the standard dose and. But some people have some problems, some nausea, some, some diarrhea or, or even vomiting. Again, that doesn't sound very appetizing and. But I haven't had any of that. But I certainly know of people who have. I want to be careful with my, my words here, but this is, this is just what it's called the medical community. It's almost forced anorexia. So for those of you who are overweight, your BMI is, you know, way over 30, 40, somewhere in that ballpark. This is excellent. But for people who are already struggling to maintain a healthy body weight, this is probably not a wise choice. There are people that are taking it from the longevity measures. They've really got to make sure that they keep their protein and their calories up, which is very difficult to do. You typically have to drink a lot of calories, a lot of protein shakes, because you just don't have the appetite to eat much food. And so that can be a drawback for some. And then the biggest one, I think, for our community is that they're not muscle sparing, at least, least the two that are on the market now. And I'll talk about reta here in a minute. Semaglutide and tirzepatide. What we've seen, especially with semaglutide, is that when people lost weight, they lost almost equal amounts of fat and muscle, almost exactly. And tirzepatide was a little better. And we don't have published studies on retatrutide yet because it's in its final stages of FDA approval. And the studies and so we just have to go by experience what we hear other people are on and kind of gather that information. But it seems like Retichrutide does a significantly better job at burning fat and preserving muscle as well as it doesn't seem to have the, the anorexic effect or the lack of appetite that's quite as intense as the other two. And so again, that could be, you could still overeat on this, but you just kind of don't want to. And on top of this, for those of you who have been here the last several weeks, you know that I gave up alcohol over three months ago, three, four months ago at this point. And it's really, it helps with those things. So people who have tend to have addictive personalities not just towards food, but towards alcohol or gambling or whatever. The thing is, it seems to shut off some of those mechanisms in your brain to help you get over that hump. And so I'm a big fan. Again, I'm not telling anybody to do this thing, but I've got tons and tons of questions that are coming in about it. So it is not cheating and I don't want to overstate the case, but I would call it a cheat code because when combined with, especially for those of you who get it from a doctor, as you should, TRT high dose creatine. We're seeing creatine intake of 10 grams, 15 grams, 20 grams. I'm taking 10 grams a day of creatine. Strength training, absolutely. To make sure you maintain or even build muscle mass, cardio work. I'm doing sauna every day, excellent sleep and recovery, excellent nutrition, cooking everything from home, you know, single ingredient foods, things like that. The results, the combo results are unbelievable. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. And so again, I've never heard of. I don't even know if I've read other people who have been able to six months in on this stuff, gain 14 pounds of muscle and lose 11 pounds of fat. Like that's crazy. And so I just don't look like the same person. And, and I don't feel like the same person. I feel like I'm 27 years old, not 47 years old. And so you can tell that I'm pretty excited about it and the way it's made me feel. And so peptides have changed. You always had exogenous hormones or drugs that people could take and abuse. And then probably 10 years ago we started to see maybe more than that. We started to see SARMs selective androgen receptor modulators. And these were something between what a peptide and an exogenous drug was. And so it was still an exogenous drug. But what it really did is it went and spoke to the receptor or actually inserted itself into the receptor to do a thing your body, you wanted it to do with the peptides. It's a signaling mechanism. It signals the receptors to make your body do this thing. So to tell your body, tell your brain to tell your body, I'm not really hungry, I don't need to eat, I don't need to overeat, I don't really want alcohol, whatever those things are. Or tells the liver, you should, you should dump fat. You should start getting rid of some of this visceral fat around your organs, which is, you can't see it as much, but it's certainly from a health perspective, it's the more dangerous of the fats as opposed to subcutaneous fat, which I've also lost a ton of. But on top of those GLP1s, there are many other peptides that have kind of taken the industry by storm. Things like BPC157, you've probably heard of, or TB500, GHKC, that BPC157 is a, is a NTB500 are recovery, like tissue repair peptides. You got GHKCU, which is a copper peptide. That's fantastic for collagen repair, collagen synthesis. You've got ipamorelin and cjc, which is like a growth hormone stimulating peptide. It's not grow, you're not taking growth hormone. It helps your body stimulate and secrete those things like Mot C and SS31, which helped tremendously with mitochondrial repair. Uh, it's almost like exercise in a bottle. You still need to exercise. Um, and then there's, we've really started to see some of the brain peptides come out. And so a lot of these peptides that are physical come out of China. And the ones that are brain oriented tend to come out of Russia. Not always, but things like CMax, S E M A X, which is kind of a focus or a drive, like a, like a type A personality type peptide. And then you have C link, which is a calming version, almost like anxiety medicine without the sedative effects as well as others. And so there's a ton of stuff out there. What I'm not gonna answer today is where you can get them. That's, that's over the line. So if you're interested, you can do research just Like I did. And if you're interested, that's up to you. Currently, they're for research purposes only, the retatrutide, as I said, they're in the final stages of clinical trials to get FDA approval. Eli Lilly has the patent on it. And so right now you can get it at hundreds of thousands of different places that are sort of gray market labs. They're not illegal, but they're not exactly legal either. But it's not a scheduled drug. But when that final approval comes in and they're FDA approved, I guarantee you that Lilly is going to shut that down, they're going to go after all of them and every one of those labs are going to close. That's the bad news. The good news is it's going to come to the market and be available to many, many people. And many people who have been on semaglutide or tirzepatide will end up going on Retotrew Tide and I think they'll have much better benefits from those. So again, use your own judgment there. But it's super exciting what's going on in the peptide world. The, the focus of this live stream is to help you understand that while it's not cheating, it can be a cheat code, but it's only a cheat code if paired with the other stuff almost perfectly. Because if you are not using these things and you're just trying to go at it, you know, kind of white knuckle discipline, you need to eat really healthy, you need to keep your protein high, we always keep protein high. And you need to manage your carbs and fats. If you're trying to lose weight just to stay under your total caloric expenditure for the day and, and it's, it's difficult to lose weight and to gain muscle and do all those things, but if you only take the peptides and you don't pay attention to your nutrition and you don't pay attention to strength training, you are going to burn a ton of muscle, not just fat. And so when I decided to do this and kind of go all in, I really ramped up my strength training, I really ramped up my protein. I'm taking 225 grams a day, every single day. I've tracked every single thing that I've put in my mouth since the holidays and no alcohol at all, all home cooked meals, all those sort of things I was talking about, even focused on cardio accessory circuits, sauna, all that stuff and sleep, making sure I'm getting to sleep at the same time. Every single night which is early for me. So that I get the greatest benefit out of these peptides and it. And certainly I have. And so it's been fantastic. I'm not gonna talk about em too long. I just wanted to give you a quick overview and then I can answer questions that I know we have a bunch of questions that are coming in and, and we'll dive in. So there you go. So there's GLP1s again. Remember they're on kind of three tier system. Semaglutide first because the first one only has one agonist, Tirzepatide or Mounjaro has two and Retatrutide has three. Retatrutide is not officially on the market yet but easy to find and it's been pretty amazing. So it's been a fun learning experience to learn all about these things and see how they interact with the other things that I take. And I'm just on very low dose testosterone like true TRT from my doctor creatine, high protein, et cetera. And that combination, it definitely doesn't. It seems like it's not one plus one plus one plus one equals four. It's one plus one plus one plus one Equals about 12. They're extremely synergistic with each other and so it works incredibly well. I don't feel like I'm living a lifestyle like a bodybuilder. I'm not eating chicken and boiled chicken and broccoli. I'm eating good meals at dinner every single day. I eat relatively low calorie throughout the day but very high protein, lots of protein. Shakespeare. I don't. Since it's a live stream, I'll shout out whoever I want to shout out. I don't have any relationship with these guys but if you have a membership to Sam's Sam's right now they just came out with their version of like the Fairlife protein shakes. Pre made but they're not fair life, they're Maker's Mark. No. Yeah, whatever it is Maker's Mark I think. And they, they. I picked up another, I don't know, six cases I was the other day. They're a $47 a piece for 30 grams of protein. There's almost no fat and there's almost no carbs. And so you just get a shot of 30 grams of protein for under $1.50 which is very difficult. And they taste delicious. I only drink the vanilla because I'm. I've had too much chocolate protein over the last 20 years and I don't want to drink chocolate protein anymore. Another really good one, then, at a decent price is. Is molk M O L K. And it's also. It's about the same sort of thing. It's like 30 grams of protein. It's got a few grams of carbs, a few grams of fat. It's gonna be more like 3 bucks a piece somewhere in that ballpark, if you look a good deal. And so I've done a lot of those. I do a lot of egg whites. I actually put the egg whites. I mix it with the protein shake to bump up my protein. And then, you know, usually have a healthy lunch, which is maybe leftovers from dinner the last couple nights. It could be rotisserie chicken and rice or couscous. It might be kind of my version of a monster mash, which is really just lean ground beef rice. And a lot of times I'll put in, like, sweet potatoes or butternut squash or something like. And it works great. And so that has been my journey so far. Again, down £53. I'd love to get down somewhere in that ballpark of 12%. So I'm at 16% body fat now. I don't know what weight that would be. I'm not worried too much about my weight. I'm worried much more about my waist measurement. By the way, my waist measurement has gone from 49 inches to 37 and a half. So pretty. Pretty insane. 11 and a half inches reduction there as well. So with that said, let's dive into questions. Um, so I had a question that came in before I explained this. The difference between the different GLPs. How is Mounjaro different and riders true Tide, et cetera. So we answered that. Have I noticed or read anything about side effects? We talked about that as well. Affecting dopamine activities, nausea, et cetera. So I haven't noticed anything with dopamine activities at all. Um, I certainly feel like, and some of this may be being completely off alcohol, um, that my dopamine and serotonin levels are. Are probably back to a good baseline where they should be when they probably hadn't been for years. Again, I've had no nausea whatsoever. That's, I think, important to titrate up from a very low dose. Again, it's that minimum effective dose. If one or two milligrams work. Why would you take 12? You can get to 12 eventually if you need to, but there's no reason to jump there. Like, if it does what it's supposed to do, you're not overeating Ride it out and see how long it goes. GLP1s. Do they change mental activity? How does it feel to be on a GLP1? I don't really think they do, outside of the fact you almost don't notice it, that you just. But you just don't desire the stuff that maybe you struggle with in the past, whether that's overeating, food or alcohol or again, any other addictive behaviors. However, there are other peptides that very much do change mental activity. I feel super sharp because I did not necessarily do this in a true minimum effective dose manner where I changed and got off alcohol on very healthy nutrition on a bunch of peptides to increase my creatine all at once. I can't point exactly to the thing and say that's the thing that worked. I just know that collectively they're working awesome. So if you've got the time and you don't have as much weight to lose or metabolic issues, I'm having my blood taken every single month through a company called Rhythm. Again, don't have any connection to them, pay full price for them, but you do that. It's the thing that goes on your arm. You click it and does a blood draw and gives you a full blood panel every month. And so I can track all of that sort of stuff. It's been really, really good. And so I've just made sure that all of my health metrics continue to improve. My triglycerides are a third of what they were. My cholesterol is much better. My blood pressure this morning was 115 over 70, so it's been excellent. So blood pressure, blood sugar, resting heart rate has come down. And with retatrutide, one of the other side effects is it tends to increase resting heart rate just a little bit. And probably something to do with the thermogenesis effect of the basal heart rate or the basal metabolic rate increasing. But mine was already high. And since I started, so mine at times, especially if I was drinking too much or not training enough, mine might be in the low 90s when I slept or in the high 80s and now it's in the 60s. I certainly would think that that would continue to come down over time. So all of the things certainly I don't think that my experience has been. I don't think that I'm necessarily the norm. I think that I've gotten obsessive enough that I want to make sure I was doing everything right. And so I got a lot out of it. I don't necessarily think that you all will get the same benefits that I did. But I think almost everybody will get solid benefits. So, um, question came in. Do you recommend TRT for someone looking to go on this? I'm not gonna recommend TRT to anybody unless you, unless you get a blood test done and your testosterone is low. Um, what I will say is that, and you've probably heard this before, is that the testosterone of 35 or 40 year old today is what the testosterone was of a 70 or 75 year old, I think just 25 years ago. And so remember that those tests, like what is normal is what is normal for today. And so if your testosterone comes back and it's at 350 or 400, your doctor may think that that's normal. That is not normal. Especially if you're in your 30s or 40s, it should be up in that 600 range, somewhere in that ballpark. 600, 700 is fantastic. If it's 1200, 1300, you're taking too much tests. It's probably not going to be, that's not going to be natural. And so I just try to keep mine in line with what normal should be in that 600 to 700 range. If you come back and you get a blood test and it's 200, 300 low, 4 hundreds and you have a doctor that won't put you on trt, you should get a different doctor. And again, not medical advice, but I still would. Okay, so see other questions, I'll give you guys, we have a few more minutes. Any other questions to ask? And it doesn't have to be about GLP1s or hormones. Many of you. First places I would start is with creatine. A lot of you are taking creatine now and you're probably taking five grams a day. It's what we've taken for 30 years. And at five grams a day of creatine, you're really going to get all the benefits from a muscular standpoint, from a creatine, helping your muscles to store more creatine as well as electrolytes, glycogen and water. And so it essentially helps saturate your muscles. It doesn't cause bloat, it's not subcutaneous water. People that say that are just, they don't know what they're talking about. But what is incredible is over 5 grams you still get the muscle saturation, but with the over 5 grams you get into the 10 grams and 15 grams plus per day, you start to really see tremendous improvement in brain activity in Focus in mental clarity in all of those sorts of things. And so without having to hammer caffeine or nicotine or modafinil or something, that's going to cause really jittery sort of feelings. The creatine just, it just makes you sharp. It also has been shown that at least for a day or two, if you're extremely deprived of sleep, those of you moms and dads who have newborns at home or babies at home and you don't get good sleep, you get four hours or less sleep by taking 15 to 20 grams of creatine the next morning, it essentially negates all of that loss of sleep. Now that doesn't last forever but for a day or two. If you've only had three, four hours of sleep last night or you just slept poorly for some reason and you take high dose creatine the next morning. Now I would say again, creatine can cause some gastric distress. I've been using the gummies. It's a lot to chew to throw 10 or 12 of those in your mouth, but I don't have, I used to have a little bit of upset stomach when I took the powder. The gummies don't cause any at all. But to take high dose creatine so long as your gastrointestinal tract can, can handle it seems to really negate the effects of lost sleep for a few days which can be a big deal if you've got something important that next day, you got a big report to do, presentation, something like that and you need to be sharp on your toes. And so there you go. There is GLP1s and peptides by me. Happy to talk about it, happy to answer questions. Again, I'm not going to help you find them, but it's not hard to find. Just make a wise decision, you know, just like anything else. Don't buy something out of the back of some guy's car or somebody that's not reputable. Certainly there are companies, again no relate have no relationship to this company but a company like hims, they're going to be the ones that, that are, they've already started offering, they're offering semaglutide and tirzepatide at a decent price. So one of the reasons I made the switch is even with my insurance and even though when I had my blood test taken, I don't know, a year ago or so I was, my HbA1c, my basically diabetes markers was right at the level of I have diabetes and now they're super super healthy. Even with that, my insurance wouldn't cover it, so Mounjaro Tirzepatide was costing me $1,200 a month out of pocket. It was crazy. That's a mortgage. And so I wouldn't, you know, I couldn't pay that forever. To put it in perspective from these labs, retatrutide cost $100 or less per month. So we're talking about one tenth the cost until it gets FDA approval. And it's also going to be $1,000 a month. Plus, with the exception of some of these bigger companies like hims, who would be able. They're not the only ones who would be able to actually offer the patented, true trademarked version of that. I don't know what the trade name of reta is going to be when it comes out, but there's a ton of interesting stuff on YouTube on X as well. You just got to be careful who you read, make sure you get it from lots of solid sources, and then understand, you know, what you're reading. If somebody comes out and says something completely different than anybody else, they're probably full of crap. And so just be careful with what you read. And so, and again, even for me, I mean, I'm just telling you it's a, you know, it's a sample size of one. And so it's worked very, very well, but it doesn't for everybody. For some people, makes them sick to their stomach. Some people don't have the same effects that I've had. And I think the big thing is you've got to make sure that you keep your nutrition habits not just in check, but I think even taking it to another level, making sure that if you're, you're a guy, you gotta be. If you're on a GLP1, you've gotta have 200 grams of protein a day. If you're a female, you should be eating 150 grams of protein a day. And I know there's different body sizes. I'm kind of painting with a broad brush there. You gotta strength train. You gotta strength train hard. You gotta do additional hypertrophy work at the end of your workout, making sure that you're doing everything you can to preserve and even build muscle while burning the fat. I've increased activity. We're walking every day, almost every day. Get 10,000 steps. Those sort of things are the things that are really going to help and then focusing on recovery. Things like good sleep, good rest, good sleep, hygiene. Scott and I have a great podcast from several years ago about sleep hygiene. I've got an eight sleep, I've got a weighted blanket, I got blackout shades, I got a cpap, all of those things to make sure that my sleep hygiene is excellent and locked in. So yeah, I settled. Question came in. Did you settle on 10 grams of creatine? Did you overshoot or read something to get to that amount? I, I just took it from 5 to 10. I may take it from 10 to 20. I would go in 5 gram increments from 10 to 15. I don't know that you're gonna notice 10 to 11 or 10 to 12. So I'd go 5 grams at a time. If you're taking 5 grams right now, I wouldn't jump to 15 or 20. I'd go to 10 first. And see how your body responds, reacts especially your, your belly. And if it doesn't tear you up and you feel great, you know, you can always try more. So creatine's gotten dirt cheap at this point. I mean it's not, it's not the cheapest supplement there is, but it's awfully cheap. And, and so if you, if you overshoot, you're just, you're just going to excrete it. So it's not that big of a deal. So. All right, minute or two left. I'll take any other questions that come in and otherwise we will wrap it up. Hopefully this gave you some at least a good testimonial for, for GLP1s and peptides. Definitely interesting. If you're somebody who likes to kind of life hack. If you're like me and Apple, Apple Watch or whatever, smartwatch, smart scales, things like that. I think peptides are really appealed to personalities like ours because it really helps you if you're doing things where you can track those metrics, strength, weight, waste, blood pressure, blood sugar, lab work, all of those sort of things. I just love adding these things in and then seeing how they affect those sort of things. Look, do we know long term effects? We don't. And so I do want to be clear about that. Not yet. It is a peptide that's a signaling mechanism. So it's not like an exogenous hormone that we don't know how it's going to, how your body's going to handle it 20 years down the road. That doesn't mean we know exactly how your body's going to handle a signaling mechanism 20 years down the road. But I know this. If you're 275, 290 pounds like I was, you know, 33% body fat, 38% body fat. And you are, you were coming up on metabolic syndrome. If you don't already have it. We know what the effect of that is in 20 years. That's diabetes. That's losing a leg. That's death. That's death. And so I'll take the risk on the peptides. Not telling you to. You gotta weigh the risk and the benefits and pull the trigger if you decide it's something for you. So there you go. There is another episode of Mondays with Matt. Happy Monday to everybody. Hope you have a great week. This week we're starting kind of a four week talk series on nutrition. So we'll get some more into some of the nutrition habits that I've picked up over the last several weeks and we'll talk next week. Until then, Nikki and Andrew, for those of you guys who listen to the to the Beast Overburden podcast, they have an excellent podcast specifically on this on GLP1's TRT peptides, et cetera. So you can go to Beast overburden episode on YouTube.com beastoverburden YouTube.com beastoverburden subscribe to that channel. Check out their episode. It's excellent. All their episodes are excellent. They're also doing nutrition over the next four weeks. I know they just interviewed Brittany Snyder, our director of nutrition. So there'll be some great information there on cleaning up your diet. Look, it's March. You got time to look awesome for summer. So there you go. Have a happy Monday. We'll see you next week. Sa. Sam.