Mark Bell's Power Project - The Truth About GLP 1s & Weight Loss | Dave Knapp

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

Dave Knapp of The Pen joins Mark Bell to break down GLP-1s, obesity, dieting, muscle loss, side effects, and the next generation of weight-loss drugs. They also discuss why medication alone won’t replace the habits required for lasting results.Special perks for our listeners below!🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK/TRT/PEPTIDES! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com and use code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off Self-Service Labs and Guided Optimization®.🧠 Methylene Blue: Better Focus, Sleep and Mood 🧠 Use Code POWER10 for 10% off!➢https://troscriptions.com?utm_source=affiliate&ut-m_medium=podcast&ut-m_campaign=MarkBel-I_podcastBest 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎➢https://emr-tek.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!➢ https://withinyoubrand.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off supplements!➢ https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save 15% off all gear and apparel!Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast➢ https://www.PowerProject.live➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerprojectFOLLOW Mark Bell➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybellFollow Nsima Inyang➢ Ropes and equipment : https://thestrongerhuman.store➢ Community & Courses: https://www.skool.com/thestrongerhuman➢ YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=e#PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

When I learned about what these medications were doing in the human body, I was like everybody's going to be on them. People just don't feel like they have the time to wait on the FDA and Big Pharma. Man, if you don't change some of who you are at the core, you're still probably going to be stuck. If your wife is taking a thimble full of insulin to maintain that blood sugar in a fasted state, but you're taking a gallon, that is not the same. We've learned that there are some very cardioprotective benefits of especially semi-glutide.

And just because you have a couple extra LBs on you, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have a bunch of terrible things going on on the inside. And just because you're lean and look great doesn't mean you're not full of plaque and maybe developing Alzheimer's and like all kinds of crap could be going on. They're not doing massive obesity trials. Guess what they're doing? They're doing trials in smoking cessation, alcohol use disorder, opioid use disorder, major depressive disorder. All right, Dave Knapp, how did you get yourself into all this and how? How did you start your YouTube channel and, you know, get into all the GLP 1, 2s and 3s? All of the GLPs.

I got into it with the type 2 diabetes diagnosis back in 2021. This was fresh off of COVID. I'm still grappling with whether that had anything to do with it. Usually folks get like a slow march to diabetes, right? So you go into doctor, your doctor's like, hey. If you keep doing whatever you're doing, you're going to end up with diabetes, right? I had none of that. I mean, I've always been overweight.

I've always struggled with obesity my entire adult life. But interestingly, it's like if I go back 20 years, almost every year I would do keto for anywhere from three to six months out of the year and I would be able to drop 20 pounds. It's just that I could never quite keep it up for forever. And so on the upswing, if I lose 20, I'd gain it. back 25 or 30. And I literally yo-yoed on this for for 20 years until I waltzed in a doctor's office and I got the type 2 diabetes diagnosis. And it was like dumbfounding to me because my A1C had always been normal and I had never been warned like, hey, this is coming. So it was actually fresh

off of a really rough bout of COVID that I got. And I thought I had long COVID. I was telling my wife, it's like, I feel like I'm going to die. I said, I don't know if I have cancer or or what the deal is, but something's wrong. And I went into the doctor. He said, well, that's something that is wrong is that you're A1 season eight. You have diabetes. And I was like, wow, it's like 36 years old at the time. And so from that point, the doctor's like, well, what do you want to do, Dave? And I said, well, I don't want to be on medicine my whole life. I'll tell you that much. And I was like pretty skeptical about the medical world. And just at that time, it was COVID.

It was just crazy time. And it's like, I don't want to be on medicine. I'll tell you that. So he goes, well, the one thing that you can do, if you want to stay. off medicine is you have to eat keto. And I was like, well, great, I'm already keenly familiar with keto. The weird thing is that it had stopped helping me lose weight about a year prior to. It was like all my old tricks that I used to go to just did not work anymore. And like, I understood the science of keto. I understood about hidden carbs. And like, so, but it just said simply stop working. And so, so I was like, well, you know, I want to be around longer for my kids. I lost my old man at 54 from a massive heart attack. He was a smoker,

but he wasn't even that overweight, no diabetes. So I'm like, I'll do whatever I have to do. And so I buckled down for a full year, did just hardcore keto, wore the CGM that went right to my doctor's computer. So he could see that my blood sugars were flatlined. I was eating no carbohydrates. And we got to the end of the year.

My A1C went from an 8 to about a 5.2, I think it was. So non-diabetic, really good A1C. But my weight had only gone. gone from 319 pounds to 312 pounds. And so, so was really able to control the diabetes. Now, the other interesting thing is that my insulin levels, even at the, the A1C that I was at, was still off the charts high, interestingly enough. And so my doctor's like, well, you know, here's the deal.

There's about four people out of the 600 that I've had in this program that just cannot lose weight on this program. And I don't know what it is, but I think you're a candidate for bariatric surgery. And I was like, rearranging my anatomy at 37 wasn't super high on my, my want to do list, but neither is dying young. And so whatever it's going to take. And so I ended up, thankfully, not having insurance coverage for bariatric surgery. But my doctor says, well, you know, since you're diabetic, there's this new class of medications that's accomplishing hormones. Monally, what bariatric surgery does. Most people think that bariatric surgery only works because you're just cutting your stomach down.

You're eating less. You're absorbing less nutrients. And that is certainly part of the equation. But the other part is there's this rebalancing of all these hormones that are dysregulated. And one of those hormones have, are, they belong to a family called nutrient-stimulated hormones of which GLP1 is one. And so he introduced me that day to a drug called Majaro. and I took it home, took home the prescription, and I thought, you know, I'm not going to take something that I don't know anything about. So I went online to learn everything I could about this.

And all I could find was, you know, there's a lot of like women that were on YouTube like, hey, I lost 100 pounds on those epic and, you know, like that kind of content, which, you know, I was like, good for you. You know, that's really great. It was exciting for me at the time, but I was like, how? How does it work? And I could find nobody talking about how these medications worked, what they were, where they came from. And I was like, that's what I want to. know before I inject something into my body. And so really, I just started reading clinical trials. I started following the companies that make them. And I started to just share the information that I was learning for myself until ultimately it morphed into this platform that we now today

call on the pen. These, uh, there's some people out there, you know, speaking outwardly against some of these things for various reasons. Some of sometimes it's moral. Sometimes there's, uh, that doctor, I want to say his name is like artists or something like that. and he claims, you know, it's got stuff from a lizard in there. That is indeed, I think, how they did discover GLP1, but GLP1 is something that's in our bodies anyway. Like, what are some of your commentary on that? Have you heard this guy kind of saying, like,

you're injecting yourself with, like, lizard venom type stuff? Turn yourself into a lizard person. Yeah, so there is some truth to everything that you hear, right? but if it's online, chances are it's a bit of a telephone game. So the Incretin effect is, so all these drugs that you're hearing about that are causing massive weight loss, right, are drugs that belong to a class of medications called incritons. And incritons are a class of hormones that were discovered in actually the 70s as they were

studying, you know, what was responsible for insulin secretions. and controlling glucose in the body. And so the Incretin effect was discovered in the 70s, but it was later on that they discovered that Helo monster venom, and this is a lizard that is, I believe, primarily in the Arizona desert, had a peptide in the venom that caused people who were bitten by the lizard to have low blood sugar. And so what they ended up finding was, was that this peptide that later became known as Exenden 4 mimicked that GLP1 hormone in your body that caused

this what's called an incritin effect. And so they thought, well, we ought to be able to make this last longer in the body so we could give it to diabetics. And ultimately what happened was the first drug in this class of medications. The first GLP1 drug was created. It was called Exenotide. that was the peptide once it was, you know, ultimately manufactured by pharma, and the drug was called Bayetta. And so a lot of times, Mark, when you hear people talking about these medications, they're like,

we never know what's going to happen with these drugs in 20 years. Actually, we know exactly what's going to happen in 20 years because we've had these drugs for 20 years. It's just that they haven't been effective. And it's been like a slow evolution of pharma of developing peptides, chains of amino acids that mimic these hormones in your body that simply lasts longer. So exenotide, the reason you don't know much about it is because you had to take it twice a day. And it just wasn't that powerful because it didn't last that long in your body. But fast forward a couple generations of medicines and you get to semaglutide. And all of a sudden, semaglutide can last seven days in at least a seven day half life.

Last about 21 days in the body, but a seven day half life. And so you only have to take it once a week. And so it's become this slow evolution of getting these peptides that your body would otherwise break down very fast. and as well as you're endogenous, and we can get into this year. Indogenous versions of these hormones are broken down very fast and faster in people with obesity and diabetes.

But it's been a slow evolution to more powerful, longer acting versions of these medications that did ultimately come from the discovery of the drugs came from a peptide in lizard venom. I know, you know, it's more readily talked about nowadays

and people can go to doctors, they can go to hormone, you know, replacement therapy. But like somebody listening to this, it's like, oh, man, I find this guy interesting. I'm going to follow along on some of his YouTube stuff. But I would like to just, you know, learn how to get this kind of medication. I really want to jumpstart my weight loss. I want to make some big changes.

Where, in your opinion, where should people start? That's a really good question because I think it's so individual. There are people who are taking these medications to lose 20 pounds, and there's people who are taking these medications because it's the absolute last resort to not end up in the grave in two years, right? And everything in between. And I think the answer to that, Mark, is just depends on who you are and what your situation is. I think that those conversations are always best to start with a medical professional. But we're still living, unfortunately, in a world where there is a good portion of the medical community. that's still either skeptical or adversarial or just uninformed about what these medications are.

Now, what I will say is the primary mechanism by which these drugs work is that, again, they're mimicking natural nutrient-stimulated hormones in your body, but they're lasting orders of magnitude longer than your endogenous versions ever would. And so what ultimately happens is this incritin effect, which signals satiety to different areas of your brain, these peptides are penetrating much deeper and for much longer into the brain. And so what you're doing is you're turning off oftentimes that hunger signal. Now, it's going to be different from person to person because you have some people like

myself, I was up to the highest dose of Zepbound and still it never turned my hunger off, where you'll have some people who microdose the stuff and they can't eat or drink. And so there's a real wide spectrum of how you're going to respond. My hypothesis is it has to do with your baseline metabolic health. But anyways, so the answer to the question of where should I start, I think it really depends on what your goals are. But I think those conversations are always helpful when they start with the, I always say that you're an expert in your body and a medical doctor is an expert in medicine. And so why not start the conversation there? I think from there, there are a number of different avenues you could go to get your hands on the actual peptides.

I'm sponsored by Merrick Health, so I always drop them whenever I can. So that's a great place that people can start because it might be, and every person can judge this for themselves, but it might be wise to get some blood work done and talk to somebody that knows they're talking about because there's a lot of different tides out there. This is semaglutide and caglittide and redatutide and all these different things. Yeah, right? And you want to, it's good if you can learn about a bunch of different ones because what may happen is, first of all, you may order something and it might be fake.

Even worse, you may order something, it might be something else. Like, that's not good because then you're taking something that you don't even really know what the hell it's going to be doing. but you could be taking something that could be higher-dosed or it could be just not really right for you. And if you talk with a professional, talk with somebody that has done this before, I'd even go as far as to say you could talk to some various coaches out there. There's diet coaches and people that they've learned a lot about this,

and that is a dicier place to be when people aren't, when their ass isn't on the line, they're FDA-approved and all that kind of thing. But do your best to do your due diligence. do your best to do your research, but understand that if you're starting from ground zero, not understanding hardly any of this, your best bet is to get your blood work done and then see if there's room for you to add this into your lifestyle. Sometimes, some people that I know, they've tried to have some of these TRT clinics provide them with testosterone and with

some of these GLP-1s, and they kind of like struck out and they're super, disappointed, but I'm like, well, you still lost 15 pounds and your blood works way better than it was you know, six months ago. So you shouldn't, you shouldn't be sad about it. But other friends, though, too, I've had them try to get from just kind of regular doctors that they go to. I've had them try to get drugs that they felt were going to be in their best interest that were going to really help them. And they weren't able to get it. And they weren't able to get it through insurance and stuff like that, which is really frustrating because you're, like a lot of these people are just trying to make improvements. It's kind of hard. Like, you take something like testosterone or you take

something like one of these DLP ones. Man, does that give you a lot of momentum? It might just give you a little nudge just to lose like five pounds, six pounds. But that's when someone at the grocery store might say, hey, you're doing something different? What's going on? I mean, you stick into your diet? What do you got going on? Man, does that make somebody feel amazing sometimes? Absolutely. I think that your point is an excellent one. I think that the biggest frustration, I think people, when you or I say something like, start the conversation with the doctor or an expert, the whole bottom line becomes, will I be able to get access to it or not?

And so for many in your community, if you've been in the fitness community for a long, long time, you've never struggled with the actual underlying metabolic disease of obesity, or type 2 diabetes, you're probably not going to fit the qualifications ever in the near term to get these medications. One of the things I said back when I started my channel, though, and I've learned just an exorbitant amount of information in the last four years since I started this. But when I first started and I started to see that there was a future in doing this full-time because this is my full-time gig, my podcast, my substack, my everything, I thought,

when I learned about what these medications were doing in the human body and what the environment is doing to our natural production of this stuff, I was like, everybody's going to be on them. And I stand by that statement. Now, it's a bit hyperbolic, right? Not everyone is going to be on them. But my point in saying that is it's not just for the morbidly obese or the severely metabolic, metabolically ill. we've learned that there are probably some very cardio protective benefits of especially

semi-glutide irrespective of the dose that you're on or the weight that you're losing because there's actually, so they did a really interesting rodent study that we've seen some of the largest GLP1 trials like I won't say confirm but echo right. And so we're sort of seeing evidence pile up. In this rodent study, they took that exenitide, first glp1 that I told you about, just a straight glp1 receptor agonist. It was just a less potent version of semi-glutide. And they took that and they basically induced heart attacks in these rodents, right? And they gave half of the rodents a GLP1 blocker and they gave half of them a

gLP1 receptor agonist. And essentially what happened in this study, I'm sort of paraphrasing here, kind of going off the thought of my head, but essentially in the group of rodents that were given the GLP1 receptor agonist, the parasites, these cells on their hearts opened back up and allowed blood flow to the areas of the heart that were damaged during the myocardial infarction during the induced heart attack. And so they received blood flow, and so they didn't lose that part of their heart. That's always the biggest thing. When you have a heart attack, part of your heart can die and you lose that function of the heart. And so in the group that that had the GLP1 blocked, it closed off and ultimately that part of the heart just remained damaged.

And so it's likely that there are our cardioprotective benefits, especially for people with a family history of heart attack and things like that. And that's just one small thing. We're looking at the next generation of if you've heard of Manjaro and Zeppound or Zepetotide, the next generation that Eli Lilly is working on of that same pathway, GLP1, GIPI. they're not doing massive obesity trials. Guess what they're doing? They're doing trials in smoking cessation, alcohol use disorder, opioid use disorder, major depressive disorder. And so ultimately what they're seeing is that there are benefits of these molecules lasting longer in your body that extend well beyond weight loss, which is sort of how the world classifies these medications. And so I think that we'll

see a day where many people will be on, we're already seeing many people, but most people will be on some form of these incritin or nutrient-stimulated hormone drugs for one reason or another. And I believe it's because our natural production of these have been under assault by the environment, obviously genetics for some people, but the environment for others. things we put into our body. We could get into the science behind all that. But I believe that access is the paramount issue. And so if you go to your doctor and you're like, okay, I did that.

I still can't get access. There are obviously some other avenues that you can explore where access does exist. But those get progressively harder to separate what's a good resource from what's maybe a less savory resource. Yeah, and I would say that I've heard through the grapevine that you could potentially get all this stuff online and more. You can find it. You can even find stuff that's third-party tested or you can third-party test stuff yourself. I've actually done this with certain compounds, and they've turned out to have what they say they have at 99% purity. So, again, this is all speculative stuff.

But, you know, again, you got to have to do your due diligence because you don't want to get hurt and you don't want to get messed up with anything. And anybody that's going to try any of these things, even when you do get it from a doctor, even when you are starting out, like always start, always start with the lowest dosage that you possibly can because you have no idea what your reaction to your body can be. Think about it a little bit like a mushroom trip or something, you know?

Someone's like, hey, man, this is going to be fun. Like, let's, you know, let's do this. Well, if you shove a whole giant thing of mushrooms in your mouth, there ain't no turning back from that. So kind of think about that once you have injected something in your body, especially these GLP-1s, they're now hanging around for a week or two weeks. So whatever stomach discomfort or wherever these things are that you might have, if you're self-administering this and you have bypassed,

some of the stuff that we suggested with, you know, seeing a professional, um, please, please, please at the very least start off with a very, very low, uh, minute dosage because once you put something in, you can't take it back out. And the other thing I'll say, so, so like there's, we're kind of beating around the bush here a little bit because there's, there's basically three avenues by which you can explore access. You can go to your doctor, uh, your, your, your normal PCP and they're going to, they're going to prescribe you the FDA track through your insurance made in an Eli-Lillier-Novo Nordisk factory type of solution,

$1,000 list price, and it goes down from there depending on your insurance coverage and manufacture savings. The second lane would be compounded, so that's still going through a primary care or a telehealth often clinic that's going to prescribe you a personalized version of this. It's going to come from a compound pharmacy. It's usually going to be all cash pay. There's no insurance involved. but it comes from a regulated pharmacy and the prescription is personalized to your individual needs based upon dosing or things you may need to add it to to to to tolerate the medicine etc then there's this third lane which we're kind of what we're dancing around which is this r uo market now the thing about the r uo market was this is the the one that happens outside of any regulation at all and i think as you pointed out mark was was perfectly kind of stated there's no good way to know exactly

what you're getting without independently testing because there's zero accountability in this market. And so you're really relying at that point on the good faith of the people who are selling it to you, right, which is, I don't know, I don't trust people enough to do that blindly, right? But I think the interesting thing there is there have been some independent folks out there who have looked at this market. And the number one thing that they find over and over is not that these things are continually and often laced with things that are going to immediately make you sick or endotoxins or impurities. Oftentimes, the majority of them test pretty well for that, but by and large, the biggest knock against it is the amount that it says on that vial that you're

getting is often off by a lot. And when you're talking about, you know, a vial that purports to contain 40 milligrams in it and it contains 55 milligrams. When you're talking about drugs that your body could be very sensitive to, it just underscores that oftentimes you could be taking more than you even realize that you're taking because, again, there's nobody policing that and there's nobody independently verifying unless you've done that work yourself to make sure that what's on the vial in terms of dosage is actually what's on there. So low and slow, whether you're on the branded medication or the other, you know, the other avenues is always the best route because also, you know, especially I'm thinking,

I come from the kind of community as it's all people living with obesity and diabetes. It's very rarely anybody outside of that scope that's taking these medications. But, you know, when you achieve your results with said molecule, the more it took you to get to that goal, the more likely it is you will need that to maintain the goal because your body becomes used to that pathway being redlined by the drug. And so all of a sudden you take that away and then your appetite comes roaring back, your metabolic dysfunction comes rolling back. So the less drug you need to reach your goals, the more likely it is that you will need less or little or none to maintain it. Let's talk a little bit about because I think one of the more compelling things that comes from you and what makes you

unique is your own story and struggling with obesity you said since you were an adult so you were thinner yeah I mean I was a really active kid I mean as your typical like right I played a lot of sports as a younger kid as I got a little bit older I was a kind of kid who always had a job you know when I was 11, I had a paper route. As soon as I was old enough, I applied at an Arby's restaurant and was able to get a job there at 14. And so from the ages of 14 to 27, I worked in restaurants. And so I had constant exposure to the, you know, worst kind of food that you can fuel your body with. And I did. I just, I mean, I did. That's the reality. I always noticed from a young age that I had higher appetite than my siblings did that I had.

I was just satiated less easily than they were. It's kind of interesting because if you line my siblings and myself up, all of my siblings are dark brown eyes, dark hair, and I was this little blonde-haired blue-eyed kid who expressed all of my mom's side's genetics. And virtually all of that side of the family deals with obesity and diabetes. and my dad's side to a much lesser extent, right? It's just a interesting little note. But I was so, so you have maybe perhaps some genetic things at play, definitely some genetic things at play.

And then you have like this environment where I grew up and worked and ate trash for the first 15 years of my, you know, formative years of my adult life. And so I ended up, you know, about. high school. I think at my senior year, I was weighing at the start of my senior year, I was like 220 on a 510 frame. And I knew I had to do something. And that's like when I kind of learned like, hey, carbs are the enemy. So you don't want to, you don't want to eat carbohydrates. And so I went to the Atkins diet route. So I'm stacking hamburger patties like their pancakes and, you know,

basically eating peanuts every now and again if I needed a snack in between a meal. And I did that. And I always say the problem with it was that it worked. It worked really well. Within a few months, I had gone down from 220 to, I think, 170. And so I was just really, really thin. But then the second I introduced carbs back, it was like, pooh. And so I literally chased that success for 20 years.

And that's why I kind of led, I went, you know, on and off this keto roller coaster for 20 years until I ended up with diabetes. And so, yeah, I got on the medicine, you know, once I was diagnosed about a year after I was diagnosed, but it was this really, you know, tricky roller coaster with the ketogenic diet that that I wrestled with for 20 years. One thing that's very interesting about a ketogenic diet for some people, especially maybe those that aren't lifting and maybe doing some other things, it can, actually like, uh, like it can avoid insulin resistance rather than like train it, you know,

I think a little bit of carbohydrate here and there, I think kind of trains it. The other thing that happens, uh, sometimes on a keto diet, what happens, I think probably more often than not is binging and having a day where you just like murder a bunch of like junky food. And then you talked about like when I went back to carbs, you know, I gained a lot of weight. A lot of times those carbs are accompanied by fat too. like you got used to eating, you got used to eating a diet that was probably pretty high in fat and decent amounts of protein.

And then when you switch and you have these cravings for like pizza and cheeseburgers with the bun and fries and things like that, you are bringing carbs back in, but you're not thinking about the fat calories. And I think that might be something that people really need to watch and pay attention to. The other thing to be conscious of is like you could be potentially, making your reaction to insulin, you could be kind of messing with your insulin sensitivity. Again, I don't know how much data there is on that, but like you could be messing with their insulin sensitivity if you're just completely and totally avoiding carbs for really

long periods of time. So when you do go back to eating carbohydrate, even if the carbohydrates are clean, you're trying to do like a bodybuilding diet, you could potentially have some issues with that. You could even register maybe as like being pre-diabetic or diabetes. which happened in your case. Yeah, and like I said, the kind of crazy thing for me after that full year of like full throttle white knuckle keto, it was probably the only time in life that I ever was able to do like a full year of it.

But when I got to the end of it, my insulin levels were still off the charts. They still like, you know, you have zero to whatever it was like 30 or whatever it was on the insulin charts. And mine weren't even registering on the charts. They were so high after a year of doing. you know, the right thing. And so, um, yeah, I mean, the, the underlying metabolic dysfunction is something that I have not ever been able to sort of like really get to the, get to the bottom of. Um, I, it's been a while since I had my fasting insulin checked, but I think that's an important

thing to, to be cognitive of. If you have been warned that you're, you're kind of on that slow march to diabetes. Once your A1C is high, the wheels are completely off metabolically by that point. I mean, why there isn't more testing that's done early on for fasting insulin levels? And it might be like, well, why would you check fasting insulin levels? Well, insulin is what keeps your blood sugar low. And if you at a baseline with no carbohydrates in your system, no nutrients, you know, in a fasted state are requiring a bunch of insulin to keep your your blood sugar low, then the wheels are starting to fall off already. I always kind of use this crude analogy. It's like you and your wife may go to the doctor and you may both leave

with a 5.3A1c, but it doesn't mean you're in the same metabolic state. If your wife is taking, I always use a crude analogy of it, like a thimble full of insulin to maintain that blood sugar in a fasted state, but you're taking a gallon, that is not the same. And eventually your pancreas just starts to wear out. And once it does, and it can't keep up, then you're seeing these issues with high A1Cs and extended long, high blood sugars. And so they're not all created equal. I think more is going to be known and more is going to be shared, I think, especially in the next two or three years, about how.

So weight loss, we've talked a lot about weight loss on this show. We've had Stan Effering come on this show a bunch. And Stan has mentioned how, you know, all cause mortality. You know, like all these things improve, a lot of markers of your health improve. when there is weight loss, but it doesn't always work out that way. People now are losing weight, and I know a lot of people,

they struggle to kind of get their blood work in check when they're seemingly doing a lot of things right. It's very difficult to figure out, and just because you have a couple extra LBs on you, doesn't necessarily mean that you have a bunch of terrible things going on on the inside. And just because you're lean and look great, It doesn't mean you're not full of plaque and maybe developing Alzheimer's and like all kinds of crap could be going on that you don't know of. And so, you know, getting some testing done, getting some blood work done, I think they're just the very beginning signs that you can maybe try to avoid some of these nasty situations in the first place.

You mentioned earlier that you weighed around 319 or so. What's your current body weight at? because it seems like over the last, even the last couple of months, it seems like you've lost more weight. Yeah. So, uh, so, uh, so I'm going to give like my whole journey for just for context of starting with. So I was at 319 when I was diagnosed with diabetes, I got down to 312 after a year of white knuckling keto. And the one that I introduced Manjaro, uh, by about the fourth month on that into early 2023. I had dropped, uh, down into the low two 80s.

And so I was able. to cut, you know, 35 pounds off, like really easy with the medicine. In fact, I was like, I'm done with this, you know, after 20 years, it's like, I'm just done with this roller coaster of the keto diet. It's clearly not it for me. And so I just like, I'm going to let the medicine do. I was so fatigued of dieting, just so fatigued of 20. I mean, most people think of like, I think this is the biggest misnomer about people that

struggle with obesity is that, you know, everybody, they're just not trying. They're not trying. I literally go every 20 year, you know, every one of the. those 20 years of my formative adult years, I was dieting. It's just that I couldn't get the whole picture down every year. It'd be a six-month sprint or whatever with just incredible restriction, which tends to have a pendulum effect to it, right? When you're just restricting, restricting, restricting, restricting, restricting, and eventually you tell somebody they can't do something for so long, they're going to do it. And so it was an upswing that always got me. But anyways, when I started

Majaro, I was at that 312 and I got down to the low 280s, but I had maxed. out up to the top dose of Majaro very fast. Like, long story short, all the middle doses were like impossible to find when they first launched this thing because they were basically giving it away to anybody diabetic, non-diabetic, whatever. There was a $25 savings card that came with the box and it just meant that you were entitled to the drug for $25 a month regardless of what your diagnosis code was as long as you had insurance.

And so that eventually went away. But while it was there was when we were titrating up and because I handled the drug really well, I didn't have a lot of side effects. They just kept ramping me up all the way to the top, but it maxed out right away. So I plateaued at about 280. And then for the next three years, which takes me to the fall of last year, I was just yo-yoing kind of like I'd go all the way up to maybe $2.95 and I'd come down to maybe $2.80 again and just yo-yoed in there.

And again, during this time, admittedly, I was not like buckling down on behaviors, but it got to towards the middle end of last year and I was starting to like mess with taking the shots a little bit closer to each other to see if I get more of effect from the drug and you know the the effect was ultimately I did get down into the 260s from a weight loss perspective but I ended up with severe anhedonia now so for those of you don't know what that is and hedonia is kind of like depression but not really And hedonia is more of the loss of pleasure. And so if you're like, well, why would this medication cause that? Well, they actually, in the scientific community, if you refer to these medications as antihedonic medications, because essentially what they're doing is they're working in that part of your brain that gets pleasure and reward from eating.

That's why people always talk about this food noise. I don't think of it. You know, I thought about food constantly every minute of every day. I'd be eating a meal. I'd be thinking about the next meal. And then this medication just turned it off. that's because it's really turning off the pleasure that you get from doing it. And so you kind of become indifferent.

And for some people, they'll describe it as like eating becomes optional instead of, you know, like this primal drive, right? And so at rarely high doses, it's turned on anhedonia for me. And so I ended up going off taking a sabbatical in the spring of this year, which it was a great experience and a terrible experience all at the same time. So again, at my lowest, I was about 268. And I go off the medication. And now I knew that my diabetes was going to come roaring back. I knew my appetite was going to come roaring back. I'd been suppressing this stuff with medicine for three years.

But the reality is, like, you might be like, well, why weren't you doing a lot during this time? I didn't realize how much the antidone was affecting me. But when you're taking a drug for three years at high doses, it becomes your new. But how you feel is normal, right? It's almost like you have to remove the drug to go, okay, this is what normal actually feels like. So anyways, I go off the medication and I go off it and I told my buddy Ike, who is a now he's a retired NFL football player. But he's a lineman and he's like he was trying to get back on his squad. And so he was working out every day.

And so he's like, just come with me and we'll work out. So the time I go off a GLP1, I commit to the gym four days a week. I'm doing this circuit with him for about two hours each of these four days. I'm eating carnivore the whole time because that's ultimately, I know that if I'm going to restrict calories, carnivore is going to keep me the fullest. And I also knew that my blood glucose was going to go nuts because I'm diabetic. And so I wanted to control this time, this is where it gets a little bit kind of hard to follow. But at the time that I go off to YLP 1, I also am getting my testosterone checked because I had been so many people like,

hey, have you ever had this check? My testosterone is sub 200. So I get on, I get on TRT right away at this time, too. So I get on TRT. I drop the GLP one over the course of the next 40 days because I actually happened to coincide with the period of Lent. So I was like, I'm just going to do the 40 days of Lent, a washout period. That'll be a month to get the drugs out of my system in a month or another, you know, like half a month to sort of feel what normal feels like. During this time, So I started the break. I tapered off. I did a month of the Wigobi pill after doing high dose of Majaro.

And so during this month, I actually gained a little bit because this is much less powerful. And then when I went off, I believe my weight was somewhere in the ballpark of like 280, 285. I ended up going all the way during this 20-day sabbatical to 299. My weight went up about a half a pound a day. while I was in the gym four days a week, while I was eating carnivore. And it wasn't just like, it wasn't just like that I was putting on 20 pounds of muscle in that time. My face was puffier.

I felt horrible. And my blood sugars were going, like I was waking up to blood sugars over 200. And again, I'm doing all the things you're supposed to do. So it was like kind of a terrifying experience, but it was also a reminder like, hey, there's a lot of underlying. metabolic dysfunction here that these drugs are are treating. And so the interesting thing now is that when I came back on it, I was like, I do not ever want to go back to those highest doses because I just don't want to feel like that. But I started, I discovered this program through now our podcast sponsor where they've developed basically a program where you, you work to maintain your serum

levels of the drugs instead of, you know, just taking a weekly shot. You're basically taking a shot every couple of days to maintain the same consistent blood serum levels where you feel good on the drug. And so now, as we sit here today, you love, by the way, how all of my answers to your very simple questions are like 20, 20 minute responses. This is why I have a podcast. I, I, I, obesity is very complicated. It is. It's not as simple. Thank you for saying that. We get into those conversations of like, is obesity a choice? And it's like, ah, it's like once someone has it it's like i don't even know if it's worth discussing or bringing up whether it's a choice or not you know and there's a lot of little kids that end up being you know

very heavy at the age of like 11 and stuff like that but really the thing is it's just whatever the case is people fall into this and then man is it so hard to get yourself out of it yeah i i really appreciate you saying that um i think given your position and what you do and how you've made a name and a living for yourself, I think that speaks a lot to your character and your open-mindedness. Because what's that? You say, I love, I love fat people too.

I love all people. I appreciate you saying that because it is extremely nuanced and it is not, it is far more complicated than anyone wants to admit. I think there are multiple reasons for that that we don't need to litigate here, but, you know, I end up getting to this program where now I'm on a third of the dose that I was at previously and I'm down to like 268 today. So I'm at my lowest weight in 10 years.

But I'm also, you know, I have the mental like fortitude and I'm not so suppressed from a drive standpoint by the drug that I can get out there. I can get in the gym and I can I can care at a level. that at a high enough level, it's like these drugs can become counterproductive because they do impact drive. And there's a whole other generation of these drugs that are working on some of those more primal, instinctive drives that we have to eat.

There's other pathways that regulate this too. And I think that's the thing we as a society need to watch for. Like, there's a lot of people like, you're going to get cancer. You're going to get whatever. I think honest, as somebody who's following,

this thing closer than anyone for the last four years now there's so many people getting into this and following this but i've been on this since day one and the one honest conversation i think we need to have as a society is not about will it increase cancer is it going to make you go blind is going to all this thing is fud but one thing that we need to be very careful about is what it's doing to our drive because these are antihedonic medications it's not my word it's the name of the people who came up with these things. And they're, they're impacting drive, they're impacting motivation. And while they are fixing for a lot of people, what's, what's biologically disregulated, there is no free lunch, so to speak. And we do need to be paying attention to that. And as an

individual, when you get on these drugs too, you need to be aware that you are turning off potentially more than just your drive to eat and look no further than the next generation of studies for these medications, alcohol use disorder, opioid use disorder, smoking cessation. It's because people don't enjoy taking their opioid anymore. That's how powerful these drugs are. It's because, you know, the most powerful narcotic drug that enslaves a generation, it's at the same time equal parts hopeful and equal parts like kind of scary to think what the societal implications of that just unhinged and unchained would be. So that's why it's so important to consult people who know what they're talking about about these medications about here you know you

don't want to like go and stockpile a bunch of drugs on top of each other however you know when I think about the gLP ones and a potential negative side effects that I've heard which are usually you know loss of muscle mass which seems like a fairly easy cure for people that enjoy some lifting weights or some resistance, go into a gym, you know, and get some resistance training a couple times a week. And you should partially be covered there. Maybe eat a little bit more protein, because that's going to help with protein muscle synthesis as well. But right away, I just think testosterone, you know, and then even with what you're saying of like, you know, these things kind of dragging you down and maybe losing some drive. I remember years and years ago, somebody made a comment on what

of my YouTube videos when I was getting into running. And I was talking about like running and lifting and walking and I'm doing this stuff on the beach and all these things. And the guy writes, you only love doing all this stuff because you're on steroids. And I thought to myself, at first I was like a little offended, but then I was like, he's got a good point. Steroids are magnificent for drive. Testosterone is magnificent for making you want to go to the gym.

and things like that. For you personally, when you noticed that your testosterone was 200 and then you started taking this testosterone, was that a really helpful thing to go enjoy, to go and join your NFL buddy in the gym with those hard circuits you were doing? I think for me, whatever the testosterone was doing was probably eclipsed by just the enjoyment that I was having just hanging out with my buddy. Because I had spent the last three years of my life building this and like really paying very little attention to, I'm a father of four kids and they're young.

And so like there's not much bandwidth outside of building something from the ground up and raising four kids. So for me, I just was enjoying hanging out with a buddy. But, you know, here's what I'll say about the testosterone. the testosterone because I guess I'm kind of like a super responder in the sense that I took, I'm taking, I can't even remember the doses, but it's just kind of the standard dose that they start everyone on injectable testosterone. And I think it's like 140 maybe 140 milligrams a week and I split it up.

I take 10 units every day instead of sort of slamming it all at once. And it's been really good for me. But I think the one thing that I noticed, so I said that back in the fall, I got down to my lowest weight, you know, I was cranking up the GLP1. Well, what's interesting to me today, and I've also been taking other peptides test of Morellin to kind of help with the lean mass and help with the visceral fat and reduction and et cetera. But my body shape is so much different at 268 pounds today than it was even in the fall of 2025. So my composition has been just completely changing. And so what I'm excited for is like is just again, I think this is the long term meta conversation again,

I realize this isn't your audience generally, but bringing it back to the world of like obesity and treating the obesity epidemic. Like having all these these molecules that are super potent and can get people down and get their weight down for the first time, that's great. But we don't want a whole bunch of, you know, another generation of sarcopenic skinny people.

We don't want to trade one problem for another, right? And so I think that's where the future generation of these medications is exciting to me because it's equally as important to get, not only to get the weight down, but to preserve that muscle mass along the way. That's why, like, one of my big concerns was I love that Medicare is now covering the prescription drugs for patients with obesity on Medicare, but also it's like if they're not getting good information and they're not getting good nutrition coaching if they're not if they're not aware that that you know with rapid weight loss can come rapid uh lean mass loss as well if you're not

intentional that's worrisome uh because these these are so potent for so many people uh especially non diabetic people you can kind of compare the clinical trials of all these non diabetics lose way more weight on these medications and diabetics um they're very potent and so preserving that muscle mass along the way. That's why I get excited about these new generations that are coming because they're kind of combining those, you know, like the IGF1 pathway along with the sort of more appetite restricting incritin hormone pathways. You know, everybody knows I love certified Piedmontese beef, but I also love good life proteins because that brand and that company and that website is where you can get like a crazy variety of meat. Do you like a lot of different kinds of meat other than just

red meat? Dude, well, of course. Before we even get to that, I do need to mention Good Life's sausages. Are they sausages? They're not just hotlings. They have like chorizo baked turkey sausage. They have different types of bacon. I'm talking a lot about red meat right now, but like their assortment of meats over there is scrum chish.

The Bratworth has like cheese in it. Yeah. Yeah, that one's amazing. Oh, my God. But they also have like, they have chicken. They have scallops. They have literally anything that, any type of protein you dig, they have it there and it's high quality protein.

Lamb. Yeah. I get shrimp, scallops, all kinds of different fish, salmon, cod. I mean, you name it. They have it. Absolutely amazing. It makes it convenient to be able to get everything all in one stop. And then also, Good Life Proteins has certified Piedmontese beef.

So all the same cuts and all the same things that you would enjoy from Piedmontese. You're getting now over at Good Life Proteins and they have a code. And code power at Good Life Proteins is going to get you 20% off your entire order. Yeah, and right now, Red of True Tide is still not FDA approved yet, right? They're going the route of biologics designation to try to cut down compounding and to try to preserve their market share for as long as they can. they've announced even recently that they're filing in the first quarter of 2027 so it's it's not likely we'll have it any time even by this time next year i think we'll still be a couple of months off from having the the branded version i want to say that um i don't think that any of these glp1 type of drug you know quote unquote making people lose muscle mass my belief and you can correct me if i'm wrong my belief is that it's they're eating less overall food. Is that correct? I mean, essentially what you have for many people who take these medications, for whom these

medications are extremely powerful from a weight loss perspective, is it's creating an anorexic effect. And anytime you create anorexic effect, you have to be very intentional about getting an adequate amount of protein in. There's nothing that has been ever shown that these drugs themselves are eating away or deteriorating muscle. It's just simply not happening. What is happening, however, is extreme restriction, couple that with a sedentary lifestyle and a lack of proper nutrients. And all of those things are sort of a recipe, whether you're on a medication or you're just, you know, white knuckling through a fast, you know, this is the risk that you run. And so, yeah, there's no studies that have ever shown that these are particularly

muscle wasting drugs. It's just, it's just the fact that folks lose so much weight so rapidly. And it's not even muscle. It's lean mass. So, you know, you've got organs, you know, you've got connective tissue, got all sorts of things. And the reality is that when you, when you look at the data from the clinical trials and you see a 350-pound person go to 250 pounds or to 225 pounds, you simply don't need as much muscle on your frame because you're not carrying around the weight that you were prior to. So, you know, it's just one of those things that I believe is overblown, but worthy of monitoring and certainly worthy enough of monitoring that you've got these drug companies that make

these drugs looking at, you know, combined treatments in the future that do look at some those muscle growth pathways. I try to be as open as possible with people about, you know, what I do and what I use. And I think it's really important. And I think that sometimes, interestingly enough, you know, I've been somebody who's been talking about performance-hancing drugs forever. But then you start talking about like something like Red a Trutide. And then people are like, wait a second, you know, you're cheating to get like leaner.

And it's like, well, no, I actually just, I think it's just another thing. that I can add into the mix. So I've been utilizing Red of Trutide on and off for a little while. And I didn't have much success with it. I didn't really like it. It was causing a lot of, it was giving me a lot of bloating, a lot of gas, and just kind of bugging me a bunch.

And so I stopped taking it the first time I took it. Then I tried to take it again. And the second time I tried to take it, I all of a sudden was getting kind of hit with some anxiety, which is really weird and really rare for me. That doesn't normally happen. I'm not somebody that usually experiences that. So that was kind of weird.

So I'm like, maybe it's the retitutide. Let me cut it out. So I cut it out. The anxiety went away. And I was like, okay, I was like, I'm going to give it one more try. So I actually tried something different, which is called omega-littide, which I don't know if you've ever heard of that, but that's retitutide. And I believe it's pronounced caglotide.

It's those two things in combination. and that's sold by a guy named Chase Irons. What are your thoughts on, because it seems like that's a popular thing to do now, is to stack these GLP ones. And have you tried that? And what are things that you're hearing and what's the research show? Yeah, it's a great question. So combining these pathways is the future of the next generation.

I think a lot of people's knock on Reda True Tide is similar to. years because you have that sort of that ramping up of the cardiometabolic state you've got basically a cardiac stimulant in glucagon it's the first first drug in human history to be a long-acting glucagon agonist and so there's just a lot of there's a lot of unknowns we've got clinical trial data it's probably the most powerful metabolic modulating drug to ever reach the masses it will be once once it's approved it already is in the gray market I think the future is combining these. I mean, we're basically seeing there was a story that I did that went viral back a few months ago about a quintuptopal agonist.

It's essentially what you've just outlined. It's, it's GLP-1, GIP glucagon, which is retitutide plus amylin and calciton, which is, which is what cagrillantide is. And so you've got five different pathways with one molecule. And so I think what the gray market folks are doing is, just mimicking, or perhaps there's some boat going the other way to, you know, what the pharmaceutical companies are doing is mimicking what they're seeing people doing in the gray market. But yeah, this is sort of the future of these pathways. The nice thing about that is you can go at a lower dose with maybe something like a Reda-Trutide, which for some people

is just going to be, especially I think, I think this is an anecdotal hypothesis of mine based upon what people say because we have many tens of thousands of people in my community that are on research grade red of true tide because people just don't feel like they have the time to wait on the FDA and big pharma and then once it's approved to just be on a wing and a prayer that your insurance is going to cover it so they've gone to the gray market um and i think what a lot of those people found especially if those people were agnostic to glp ones that's when the heart rate was like crazy because all gLP ones have been shown to increase heart rate but the glucagon component adds another layer to that and so folks who have never been on any of them i think those that that's who

really gets hit the hardest with that kind of you it manifested as anxiety for you but what adding something like an amylin pathway does is it allows you to hit another target in the brain that that brings down hunger without ramping up your nervous system at the same time. And so that's the future. I mean, right now I'm stacking multiple peptides. I'm stacking. So I've got the six milligrams taken two or three times a week of terseptide. But I'm also hitting Tessimorellin, Ippamorellin, which is helping to reduce visceral

fat for me in a pretty meaningful way. I think that's been a big contributor to the changing of the body shape. we've got obviously running the testosterone. I'm also, I just got done running around of SS31 in preparation for taking MOTC. So I'll be starting MOTC here in the next couple of days. And so I'm stacking multiple kind of different pathways to improve upon my metabolic situation. And I'm certainly excited for the next generation of anti-opacency medicines to come out too. Yeah, and I think, you know, the body building.

You know, I've been doing this kind of thing for years, you know, running these steroid cycles, right? And the idea was you get, you know, you get a lot from, say, like a testosterone, like as like a power lifter, let's just hypothetically say. A power lifter, you know, testosterone before you start having a lot of negative side effects. So then somebody might bring in something like Deca. They would bring in Deca Deroblin with the testosterone, take a couple hundred milligrams of each as you're getting. getting ready for a competition. And then they might bring in like a third drug. They might bring in like we used to say,

I did professional wrestling for a few years. And we used to say that if you weren't on three things at one time, that you were natural. But you'd be on testosterone, Deca. And then as the competition got closer, you would use like an antedrol or a diana ball. And some of the reasons for this was, hey, look, man, you can't run these oral steroids forever.

You can just run them for a short period of time. You're going to get some of the strength benefits. and you're going to work your way around some of the negative side effects. Obviously, you're still rolling a dice. You're still going to get some negative side effects. Who knows what you might be doing, you know, from a more permanent standpoint. But that is a way and was a way. And people now talk about like kind of blast and crews, like where you just,

you're just taking like, you know, 200 milligrams of testosterone for a few weeks. Very commonplace for bodybuilders, powerlifters to do that. And then as a competition comes closer, they'll get back on the stuff that they need, either for the stage and bodybuilding or for the platform in powerlifting. And so when doing this with these GLP-1s, what I've noticed is with Reda-Truthide, I was trying to get myself to like that around that 4-millimeter mark. And it was just too much. I just couldn't personally do it.

I know other people who have taken away more, but I think there's going to be huge individual variants. And once I switch to that omegaotide, which has this other compound in it, I only take one milligram of that. And it seems to be extremely powerful. So I haven't messed around with even thinking about or needing to increase the dosage of that. And that's been very comfortable. What I also want to share with people, though, is it's not like I took that and lost 20 pounds. It's like I've been using that for probably two. or three, maybe three months, maybe three months and I've lost like six pounds,

which is a good amount of weight, you know, on somebody, like I'm fairly lean as it is. So it's not, not easy. That's not just going to come off as it did when I was 330 pounds. But these things, they're not always going to just like, you're not going to, you're not going to necessarily have the same results as some of these people that you might see on YouTube who are like, I lost 100 pounds. it might take you a while and I want people also to understand

that almost everybody I know let me try to make sure that's yeah every one that I know that has lost weight utilizing these drugs I don't know one person I know a bunch of people that are on them I don't know one person that isn't on a specific diet

so there's no you know people talk about diets and they talk about coming on you know they talk about going off a diet and there's never an op there's never like a time in your life where taking a break from good habits is going to be a great idea you still need like good habits it's still good habits and you you need to stay tethered to them in some way so if you're somebody who's going to use this stuff it's like man if you don't change some of who you are at the core you're still probably

going to be stuck. You'll have to either enjoy the gym or enjoy some walking or enjoy some lifting and you'll definitely have to figure out something to do in your kitchen that's a little different than what you've been doing in the past. Otherwise, this weight loss and weight gain thing is just going to, I think, continue on. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think it's a, it's an entirely different conversation for somebody who's got 20 pounds to lose. and for somebody who has 200 pounds to lose or somebody who has 500 pounds to lose, but there are some underlying truths that remain the same, is that your personal decision-making along the way matters, right?

I think where it becomes more difficult is when you have biological dysregulation that these drugs are actually fixing, where it becomes a more nuanced discussion. If somebody is severely metabolic, metabolically unwell, they have type 2 diabetes, for example, then you have a surplus of something in your system called DPP4. It's an enzyme made by your fat tissue, excess adiposity, and even an off-kilter gut microbiome, which they've done study after study that shows people with obesity and diabetes have vastly dysregulated gut microbiomes. and one of the byproducts of the bacteria that is run amok is called DPP4.

DPP4 destroys your natural production of these hormones, the signal satiety, your incretin hormones, your GLP1, your GIP, and even the natural production itself can be dysregulated by your gut health. That's where it gets a little bit more complicated and where somebody might come in and they might need a stack of three different pathways where somebody else just needs a very, low dose of some combination of something else. I think it, the conversation becomes more nuanced, as you said early in the podcast, when you become diabetic or when you become obese, regardless of how you got there, at a certain point that conversation shifts is how do we get somebody out of that state. And it doesn't really matter how they got there or why you think they got there. It matters how you get them out of it. And it becomes a much more nuanced conversation for that person, especially somebody like me who for 20 years yo-yoed and just couldn't.

I don't know very many people who are able to keep a ketogenic diet 100% of the time. There are people that can do it. I don't know how they do it because they have something that I don't seem to have been able to tap into. But the medication hopefully is going to make that easier for that person to maintain those. What's that? What's your diet like now? So right before I got on here, I had a made a pound of 93% ground beef, cooked that with just some salt and pepper,

and then I had it over a small bowl of brown rice and quinoa. That's a pretty standard lunch for me when I'm home. I do have some carbohydrates. I need, especially when I'm on a GLP 1, because a little dose of the GLP 1 goes a long way for my diabetes. and so what I find is if I eat just carnivore on a on a gLP my sugars dip too low almost and then I feel terrible for a whole other reason so I would say generally my diet is is pretty whole foods based pretty protein dense I'm probably eating usually somewhere in the ballpark of 200 to 250 grams of

protein a day. And then there's, I find when I'm eating that much protein and I'm getting it from, you know, I'm not getting it from a protein shake. I'm not getting it. I'm getting it from eggs and I'm getting it from beef and what have you. My hunger around that just doesn't, right, there's not really need for much more eating. So that's pretty typical for me, just protein dense meals. And it helps to keep my satiety where I need it to be without having to go overboard with the medications, and it also helps to keep my blood sugars in a reasonable range. Kind of like two to three meals a day, maybe some snack, type of deal. Yeah, I'd say one to two meals a day is probably more accurate.

It's typically I'll either eat breakfast or I'll eat dinner. I'll always eat lunch, but I'll either eat breakfast or dinner. So usually it's, usually it's I eat breakfast, I eat lunch, and I really don't eat much in the evenings. it seems like you're on a good a good path i think you know i've done carnivore i've done many different styles of diet i have not found when it comes to carnivore in particular i never found that being more carnivore had more benefit so like you know i had i had vegetables and i had other things in there and maybe i'd have potatoes like once a week or something you know i'd have something

that's slightly off plan um and i didn't find that like i noticed and i noticed and any further like weight loss or any further benefits from like being like hardcore, you know, carnivore. I did 100 days of it before just as like an experiment. And I liked it. It was, it was fine. I like meat, so it fit me pretty well. But it also made me a little crazy too.

I just didn't, you know, it, just eating the same kind of stuff over and over again. Just got to be monotonous. Even though there is like you can have variety within it, I just never found. And I would say the same thing is true with keto. Like my friend John Anderson has been very low carb for over a decade, and I've been on and off ketogenic style diets for a really long time. I never really found any extra benefit to like being any further down the keto path. I do understand that sometimes when people are producing more ketones,

they might feel more focused. I've done fasting. I've done a lot of different things. And what I would say is like, I think, sometimes people get they get so strict with something and I think the strictness is okay but when the strict turns into like restrict then I think you need to be a little cautious because more than likely more than likely your brain or your body or your mindset is going to want payback for that because it's kind of thinking like we're being punished you know much like you

might think somebody might think push-ups or punishment because their dad made them do it or their gym teacher or their coach or whatever made them, made them do pushups. Like, no, pushups are awesome. You know, pushups are great. They're really valuable. When you kind of look at certain things as a punishment, it can, it can kind of register in your brain of like, I need to even the score out. And so you're like, punish, punish, punish for five days.

And you make it to Friday. And then Saturday, Sunday, and maybe even into Monday, you just totally wrecked your diet. And you can. You know, you can overcome. them the great stuff that you did for five days. If you're somebody that has been big, like my whole family has had issues with obesity for years and years.

And everybody has to work out and everybody has to be pretty diligent. And when I hear sometimes people are like, oh, man, if you fast, you know, just one day, you can't mess it up. I'm like, I can. I'm like, I shall, I'll show you that I can. Yeah, in a day or day and a half, I could easily. you know, mess up a week's worth of work or even two weeks worth of work. Insight.

It's really good perspective. And I think you sort of encapsulated what it's like to live with obesity because I think what we, people like me, I can only speak for myself, I guess. But what I've done my whole life has been restrict, restrict, restrict, restrict. And it almost was a punishment. Like I deserved to, I deserved that restriction. because, you know, I, nobody gets to the point that I'm at without, you know, overindulging somewhere. And so I deserve that restriction.

But again, it does, it does do something in your brain, which is, you know, next level. It adds nuance and complication to this whole discussion, which is kind of like brings it back to what we were saying, you know, when we started the podcast is that people want this to be simple. And they want it to be, you know, hey, calories in calories out, eat less, move more. but people are more than just machines or robots. There's a spiritual and mental element to everything that makes it more complicated. And hormones are part of that discussion too. And I think we're just starting to scratch the surface on how much hormones play a role in weight management and dysregulation of said hormones plays a role in said weight management.

And that's why I'm eager for this science to continue to evolve because the more the science evolves, the more people understand that this isn't just people choosing this lifestyle for themselves. It's not just people choosing to be overweight. Most of us have battled for a very, very long time for anything but the body that we're in. And with that comes a certain degree of punishment because we've been made to feel or we've caused ourselves to feel like moral, failures along the way when really there's there's just a lot more nuance to the conversation than the world wants to give it. So I appreciate your perspective and you're saying that. Can I, I don't know how much longer you want to go here, but can I talk about one molecule

that I'm most excited about on the horizon in obesity therapy? I do, I do want you to talk about the future a little bit, but I want to just attack this a little bit more about kind of like binging and stuff. Is that a thing for you? Do you end up binging? It's a good question. I guess it depends on how you define it. So I have a tendency, if you're defining it this way, I do have a tendency if I'm going restrict, restrict, restrict, restrict, restrict, restrict, to eat a little bit unhinged. I don't know what you would classify binging as, but I have a healthy appetite.

even with GLP-1s, I always have had a healthy appetite. I can put down some food in one sitting. That's why even like when I'm dieting or minding a specific diet, like I tend to gravitate back to something like a carnivore diet or a ketogenic diet because when I eat protein and I eat fat, I feel satiated. And I don't have to eat 30 pounds of meat to feel full. I can eat a pound of ground beef. And I can feel full for most, if not all of the diet.

day, especially on a GLP1. Like that, I don't know that I'll eat again today because I usually don't mix the rice and the quinoa, but that's slower digesting. I get some fiber in there. You know, so I think, like, if I were to rewind the last 20 years of my life, there were definitely periods of time where I might be on a strict ketogenic diet for, let's say, three months. And then, you know, the day I go off, I will, and I think part of this is the minimum.

mentality of just how keto works. Like you don't, you don't refeed the carbohydrates and then the next day you're right back into ketosis getting after the weight loss progress. It takes a few days to wash the carbohydrates out of your system. And so I would eat, you know, like a big, you know, probably 1,500 calorie fast food drive-through meal after that. I mean, if that's what you would count as binge eating, I mean, it's, it just depends on how you,

or like fast or, I'm sorry, a cheat, like cheat on your diet type thing. There's the reason why I bring it up is like, I think that there's two things. One is I think people should try their best to find a diet that isn't necessarily, that doesn't necessarily feel like this like tightly knit, restricted diet.

But it's, it's, um, it also prevents them from binging. So there's like enough stuff in there to where it prevents them from binging. And each person has to kind of calibrate and figure out what are their signals for binging? Because as you do want some variety, you don't want so much variety that it triggers you to go in a very particular direction. But something I've learned for myself is that, you know, like if I'm ravenously hungry, say I eat something and I'm still like, oh my God, still have all these cravings, right? Well, I have various things I can go to that are sweet that still taste awesome, things

like keto bricks or things like protein shakes or things like, you know, I can make something with cottage cheese or yogurt. I realize it's not the same thing. You know, some of the big boys come at me and they're like, yo, it's not the same thing. I'm like, I know it's not the same thing, but it's still a version, you know, a deconstructed pizza that's like, you know, pepperoni and ground beef. and maybe I get the 85-15 ground beef rather than the 93-7, you know, these kind of small, these like small changes where you make this little tiny change

just to avoid the potential of a binge later on. The other thing I'll add too is that when it comes to cheating, if cheating is part of the plan, like almost picture that you wrote your diet down, you know, Monday through Monday through Sunday, I'm going to eat. you know, this way. And then Sunday, during the football game, I'm going to enjoy some wings. I'm going to enjoy, you know, A, B, and C, maybe some pizza, whatever it is, right? Well, now that's a different perspective because that's part of your plan.

Part of your plan is to go off plan for like a set period of time. And even if you were to go like slightly, you know, beyond that set period of time or you had two cheat meals or you had a cheat meal and some ice cream afterwards, words or something like that, I would just think it wouldn't be that big of a deal. And then also, I think from a psychological standpoint, you know, maybe even change the word cheat, but like whatever you have to do, I think from a psychological standpoint, it changes, you feeling like you blew it, you feeling like a loser, you feeling like you messed up again. It's kind of like almost giving yourself carte blanche to do that on that particular day. Yeah, I think there's a lot of people that,

there's a lot of people that do that i think as as somebody who struggled with obesity and one of the things i hear from my community every day is that most of us um who who've lived this journey have have at some point along the line uh prescribed a moral value to food um and i think that because we've done that because we know what foods are and are not supportive of our goals that when you deviate from that, you're making an immoral decision, which can often cause a whole host of, you know,

cascading psychological, you know, thoughts, ideas, and behaviors. So it becomes very complicated. So I think that for a lot of people, they have found some freedom.

I think that the reality is that GLP ones have given a lot of people that live with obesity, exactly what you're saying, the ability to, to enjoy the food, that they enjoy in moderation and just know that it's not going to derail all of the progress that they made to do it and then just go back and tomorrow you're just kind of back on plan and I think it's it's much harder to do that when you're when you're not on a GLP one for most

of these people like I'm such a rare I'm such a rare case I've talked to so many so many people like I've talked to people in the highest. You know, I've talked to some of the most world-renowned endocrinologist. I've talked to some of those world-renowned people in the fitness world and the keto world and, and you name it. And I think, like, it's one conversation when I'm talking about people living with obesity, but when I'm talking about me specifically, I feel like a bit of a unicorn because I feel like here's, you know, if we're just like, like, honing in on my own topic. Here, here's my story in a nutshell, right? I know that if I want to reach all my weight loss goals, I know how to do it. I have to cut my calories to 1,500 calories or less a day. If I eat less than 1,500 calories, the scale will go down. And I've proven that

time and time again. I know when I cut my calories. The problem is I can't function physically on 1,500 calories. I have headaches. I feel sick. I feel I'm worthless when I cut my calories that low. When I went on the sabbatical from GLP ones, I knew like I knew like I'm taken away the one thing that's treating all this. I'm going to have the card stacked against me. I'm just trying not to gain all the weight back that I lost. And I put, I think for for the most of that time, I think I put almost everything I ate every day into chat GPT. And I was like, that was my log for, for that time. Like, and every day, you know, would calculate up my macros.

And I was eating anywhere between 1,800 and 2,200 calories, give or take a day. Sometimes on like an intense training day, I might have gone up to 2,400 calories. No booze, no sugar. and I still gained 20 pounds in 40 days. Tell me how that works into the equation that, you know, I do believe that it's calories and calories out. I do, I do believe that what those calories are and the TDEA calculator,

there's no possible way that it's applicable to every single person universally because I know that I've got to cut to 1,500 or less to lose. I'd actually say that I don't believe it. I don't believe it's true. I don't believe calories in calories out. And I know that people are like, you're dumb. Like it's stupid. I've been considered dumb my whole life, so I'm comfortable with it.

You're comfortable there. That's good. Maybe I should get more comfortable there. Yeah, just be comfortable hanging out there because I think these other people are wrong. I just think they are. I think that, you know, when I was a kid, I don't know if the arcades would still work the same or if they still even have them, but, you know, you put a dollar. in a machine and the machine gives you four quarters, right?

I think that for every person that you stick a dollar into, dollar representing calories, a different amount comes out. You know, I think the representation of a calorie for a person is so different. It might represent this thing when you light it on fire and it might, you know, burn at this particular rate and it might cause this amount of heat.

And I'm not in disagreement with that. And I'm not in disagreement that a, I'm not in disagreement that a calorie is a calorie because we made up a calorie. We made up what it is. And we made up a definition for it. So there are, in terms of language, we do have to agree on words. Yes, a calorie is a calorie because we made that up. Just like a mile is a mile. I agree with you.

Yes, it is a mile. But it's going to feel differently and react differently in everyone's body. whether it's a carbohydrate, whether it's fat. I mean, you know what we know about diabetes? We don't know shit about diabetes. There's we don't know, we don't know dick about it. There's five different, there's at least five different types of diabetes. And then within those types of diabetes, there are multiple situations.

People like yourself, I have a friend that has Mottie diabetes, which no one's probably have ever heard of before there's uh there's all kinds of stuff there's there's adults that have like a like adult onset diabetes where they get type one diabetes and they had there's people that flip-flop with diagnosis of diabetes that sometimes they they think they have type one and they have type two and sometimes they think they have type two and they type one so there's so much for us to still discover but i think the idea of calories in calories out is um It's a decent, like, overall thing of like, hey, you know, you shouldn't eat 5,000 calories every day. Like, that's a great way for almost everybody to gain weight.

But at the same time, I think that calories are going to vary quite a bit from one person to another. And what about, you know, the food labels are they can be 15% off, I think. And then what about, like, say, like fruits, like you ever eat a blueberry? It has absolutely no flavor to it. Well, that's because that blueberry has hardly any sugar in it. Eat the next one and it's super sour or super strong. Well, that next one has more sugar in it. So you could eat a couple blueberries that has virtually no carbohydrates

because it's predominantly, you know, whenever it was picked or whatever. So you can just get into the weeds on this stuff and it can be absolutely mind-numbing. But the truth is, is everyone's body is going to react to stuff differently. I mean, what about have you heard this before? for if you have a one night of bad sleep, your glucose can register as you being pre-diabetic. So, you know, the way that this machine works is you're not always going to get those four-quarters spitting back out every time you put a dollar in.

Yeah, it's not, it's not as clean as people want to make it. And I say all the time on my channel, I was like, I long for the day. where I could come online and not feel just completely gaslit about my lived experience. Because, you know, like when you're putting yourself out there, part of the program is people are just going to rip you up. I mean, that's just part of the program. If you're going to be online and you're going to make content, especially if you're going to make content around obesity and diabetes and the medicines that are fixing it for millions of people and then it very clearly hasn't fixed you. You're just, it's part of what you sign up for.

That said, I long for a day where science is, understands this better. And so I don't have to feel so like, there's a lot of people just look at me cross-eyed and go, you're not doing something right. You're eating more calories than you think you are. You're, are you doing this? Are you doing that? I'm like, buddy, I've been doing this for 25 years. And it's not that I lack the intelligence to do something that's very simple in your head.

head. It's more complicated and nuanced than that. And I think that because obesity's only been recognized as a disease for a very short period of time, the science just simply has not caught up. But it is catching up. And we're learning more about the hundreds of hormones that are involved in appetite and satiety and signaling hunger and the way that our body processes fat. I mean, one of the things that we've learned even in the last year is that your muscle you're the cells within your fat cells remember they literally are programmed to remember what weight you were at what uh remember how fat how big and how dense they were and their goal is to get back to that point um and essentially um you know as time goes on we're just going to unpack that more and more and we're going to understand that that

that again, I think, I think the way that you've said some of this stuff is, is maybe even, it's more succinct than maybe I put this together in my head. But when you, when we started off and you said, it's not even really worth litigating how people got there or whether it's a disease or not. Once somebody's there. Yeah, exactly. Once somebody's there, how do you fix it? it becomes the question and and it's it's complicated one thing i wanted to add to you mentioning that

science they found where that fat cell you know remembers how big it was right um this is something that was pointed out on my show by joel green uh some years ago it was more like a hunch from him but what he said the way he described it was he felt that fat cells had spider webs connected to it so So picture the fat cell shrinks, right? And it's got these webs, these spider webs on it, right? And it tightened up, right? And then now you go, you know, quote unquote, off your diet, which no one should ever go off their diet to nothing. Go off your diet to another style of some sort of thing that's not going to make you bounce back too much.

But it has all this almost like power in it. It's like now it's got strength in it. And as soon as you go back to doing your old habits, it might come back and then even. and then some. So let's maybe end this here with getting to what's on the horizon. What are some of the new drugs that might be coming? I know you broke the news on that 007 one. That sounded pretty fascinating.

Yeah, the 007 ones was interesting because it's sort of like I get kind of bored talking about the incritin or nutrient stimulated hormone pathways because there's just like there's somebody new popping up every day that's doing some combination of GLP1 and GIP or glucagon or amylin, you know, the nutrient-stimulated ones. But WVE-O-O-7 was kind of interesting because it's working on a totally different pathway. And this one's called the I-N-H-B-E pathway or gene that works on something called Active in E, which is something that appears to influence how your body stores fat and then how how it uses that energy.

And so unlike GLP-1s, it's not primarily just suppressing your appetite. It's reducing the way that your body stores fat, particularly visceral fat, right, which is the kind of fat that puts you in an early grave. But it's able to do this in early studies while preserving muscle mass along the way. And so that's something that's unique because obviously GLP-1s have not been immune to you know, that rapid weight loss and the lean mass loss that comes along with that. So something that instead of making you less hungry, like a GLP1, could potentially change how your body actually handles fat.

Wasn't even like a little muscle gain, I think, in that one study with the 007? Yeah, it could have been. I believe that that early study, I think it was rodents, right? I'm trying to remember back whether this was a human study or even a rodent. study but um you know what what for me the the exciting thing is is looking at different pathways right because i think ultimately for a lot of people there will glp1 gip that's you know the two active ones interseptide i think those will remain sort of a backbone of kind of the spine of the obesity care like it'll always be part of it um but what else can be explored along the way to either

increase weight management or or improve body composition along with the reduction of weight. Awesome. Any other cool drugs on their way? Yeah, the one that I'm really bullish on right now is, so you talked about combining, what do you call omega-tide, omega-littide? Okay. First of all, I love the R-U-O's way of marketing and labeling things creatively. Okay, so that one adds to Reda True Tide, Cagrillin Tide, I think is what you said, right? So Cagrillentide is, will be the first FDA approved in early 2027, will be the first FDA approved amylin, long-acting amylin agonist.

And amylin's been a weird target. So amylin is a hormone that's co-secreted in your pancreas alongside insulin. So if you have insulin dysregulation, chances are you probably got some amylin dysregulation too. And amylin's interesting because when they create a peptide that mimics. So when you, obviously you know all this, but for those who are listening, they may not know, when you're talking about creating these peptides, your body has receptors and the peptide comes along. And the receptor is like a key and the peptide is like a, or sorry, the receptors like a lock. And the peptide comes along like a key.

they bind together and then all of a sudden, you know, you've got this signaling that starts to happen in your body. And as long as those two are sort of connected, then that signaling remains intact. Now, when you create a peptide that mimics amylin, there's another receptor in your body. There's actually three amylin receptors, but there's also another family of receptors called calcitonin receptors, which are very similar to the lock of the amylin receptor. binds to the calcitonin receptors. Now the makers of cagrillantide, which is Novo Nordus, they're the ones that are out there saying, you know, we think that actually hitting that calcitonin target is a benefit that it adds weight loss. Well, Eli Lilly, who's got a pretty

big track record on their hypothesis about these different targets, GIP being one of them, some companies are trying to block GIP. They're trying to bind to it. They've been pretty good track record, right? They go, well, actually we think when you hit those calcitonin receptors, the only thing you're doing is really increasing side effects. So they made what's called a selective amylin receptor agonist, and it's called elorilentide. And what they've done, instead of combining automatically into the same molecule, or not the same molecule, but into the same drug, amyloor, plus semaglutide. That's what cagrillantide will be. It'll be cagrissima. So you won't just get cagrillantide. You're going to get it in a combination with semaglutide cagrissima. That will be the name of this drug when it comes out.

Instead of going that route, Lily also goes, we're going to study alloralintide by itself and then adding it on to any GLP1 therapy for those who maybe need a boost. and so allura lintide in a 48 week study by itself again this is the selective amylen agonist so it doesn't bind to that causal tonic receptor like a grilentide and it only binds to one specific amylin target um it achieved 20% weight loss by itself in 48 weeks now to compare that to terseptide Dersepotide in 72 weeks hit about 22% weight loss, Red at Trutide around 28% weight loss. If you've heard different numbers, it's because the pharmaceutical companies

have a funny way of jimmying with these numbers, with efficacy estimates and et cetera. But roughly, that's kind of where we're at, right? So Alar Linthide by itself hits 20% in 48 weeks. We don't have a phase three by itself, like 72 week, but it didn't show a plateau even at 48 weeks. So there's room to run. And the cool thing about it is this clinical trial that they're running now in phase three

with a laurelintide combines it with other assets like terseptide. And so it's really for those who are like, I'm at 15 milligrams and I've maxed out, when are higher doses of churzepid coming? Like I say, don't hold out hope for higher doses of chersepitide because you're already redlining the gLP one and gip pathway, specifically the gip pathway. you're like really pushing that that pathway. Allurelintide adding that to it is, is I think a much more hopeful option.

And of course, there's a lot of people who are even maybe on Turseptide who are going to gray market route or even some compounding pharmacies that are now making cagrillantide because it's a fairly easy molecule to make because it's not selective. So they're not doing anything like super novel

to the peptide to make it bind. Allurellentide's totally different. So when you see research grade versions, of this ones know that if they're wildly expensive, A, it's because people are really excited about it, but B, it's harder to make because Lily had to basically create this loop in the peptide chain that kept it from binding to the calcitonin receptors. And so I don't know much about, you know, engineering peptides and what that process works, how that works. But I do know that that loop that they added to the molecule makes it uniquely challenging to do.

so that it doesn't hit those other targets, which is what makes Allura Lintide unique. But people are already combining Kogrelintide as you are to a lot of success because that Amlin pathway is really effective at turning off hunger. So I mean, Alora Lentide, because it's in phase three, because it offers a lot of hope to people who've already redlined the current therapies while exploring a completely different pathway, that's the one I'm like most excited about because by 2029, early 2029, we'll probably have that which sounds like a, you know, forever away. But it was just felt like yesterday that we were talking about this drug red of

too tight and nobody else on the internet was talking about it. And now the whole world is on it, it seems like. Amazing having you on the show today. People listening, you know, make sure you follow along on the pen is his YouTube channel podcast as well. Where else can people find you? So the best way to find our whole ecosystem is just to go to OTP for on the pen OTPLinks.com.

And from there is a gateway to all the resources, but all of the social channels that we have out there, that you can get connected with whatever channel you're on. We're probably most active on YouTube, but we have a TikTok and Instagram and the whole deal. Just a dad of four who just decided to say, I'm just going to do my own research. And here you are with your own show and becoming very popular.

and you ended up on the Today Show. What was that like? Surreal. I mean, so I'll share a cool little anecdote from my life. I was selling traffic signals for 10 years. I had started a small marketing company. This was right after my dad passed away suddenly. The last conversation I ever had with him was like, hey, let's build something together. Let's do this thing. And three days later, he was gone. The last thing that he ever said to me was, don't forget this conversation, boy. And I was like, I won't. And the whole conversation was about, let's start this thing together.

And so I took a lot of time to grieve. Grieved pretty hard, obviously. That was a big loss for me, as it would be for anyone. But I felt very clearly at the time that God was telling me, you don't need your dad to start this. I've given you everything you need to do. You're growing up in a time in human history where you have access to every piece of information in the world you want. Just do it. So I started a marketing company.

That led me to a 10-year career of selling portable stoplights. And towards the end of that career, I was just having a lot of internal conflict about what my next move for my career was because I had gone so far away from this marketing thing that I had started. And I got a type 2 diabetes diagnosis. And suddenly I felt like I was like maybe had like a glimmer of like, hey, I think I could maybe talk about this stuff. And so I started talking about this. And I called my mom one day and I was really conflicted about leaving my job because it was like, I didn't go to college. I was making really good money because it was really good at the job that I was doing.

And I remember, like, I don't do this often as an adult, but I called my mom one day. And I was just like a mess emotionally. I was like, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. If I leave my job, how am I supposed to provide it for my kids? Anyways, she prayed a prayer with me that day. And she said, God, we don't know what you have for Dave. We would just ask, we just know that it's good and we asked that you would just bring it forth in his life. One year later, almost to the day that that, my mom and I had prayed that prayer together,

I had started this during that year. And I was featured in Fortune magazine alongside a big write-up that they did for Eli Lilly. So from there, we got on Yahoo Finance. We got on, you know, Bloomberg articles. Like, you name it. Like, there's very few that cover GLP ones that haven't mentioned us at some.