YOU’VE PROBABLY SEEN the headings by now: “Weight-Loss Drugs Can Lead to Muscle Loss, Too.” “The Race Is On to Stop Ozempic Muscle Loss.” “Weight-Loss Drugs Could Cause More Harm than Good.” Frightening? Sure.
If you’re thinking about Ozempic or another GLP-1 inhibitor, the news about muscle loss might persuade you not to take that action. And if you’re currently taking a GLP-1 for weight-loss, you might question if you must stop.
We can’t inform you what to do. We can inform you what we understand about GLP-1s and muscle loss, and what you can do to reduce it. However, let’s examine some standard realities about weight loss.
What We Really Lose When We Lose Weight
ANY SUBSTANTIAL CHANGE in your body weight, in either instructions, will consist of a mix of fat and lean tissue. A steroid-free lifter will hardly ever acquire muscle without including some fat. And weight-loss inevitably consists of some decrease in lean mass. That’s real no matter how you lose it– medication, surgical treatment, or great old-fashioned diet plan and workout.
“The general rule is, for each 3 pounds of fat, it’s one pound of lean,” states Stuart Phillips, Ph.D., a teacher of workout science at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. To put it simply, you ‘d anticipate 75 percent of your weight reduction to be fat and 25 percent to be lean mass. Lean body mass, or LBM, consists of muscle, bone, organs, fluids, and whatever else that isn’t fat.
Even fat isn’t completely fat. Fat cells consist of some water, and they’re held together by a matrix of connective tissues. When you lose a great deal of fat, as lots of people make with GLP-1s, you likewise lose a few of that intracellular water and extracellular protein, both of which count as LBM. Muscle, to be sure, is the biggest element of LBM–“most likely 60 percent, or thereabouts,” Phillips states.
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Let’s run some numbers:
Image a guy who starts at 240 pounds. After 6 months on a GLP-1, he’s lost 40 of them.
If we presume 25 percent was LBM, that implies he lost 10 pounds of lean tissue, consisting of possibly 6 pounds of muscle. That’s not absolutely nothing, however the advantages of losing 30 pounds of fat would probably overshadow the drawback of losing a couple of pounds of contractile tissue.
What if the percentage of LBM loss was greater– 40 percent, state, as current research study has recommended? Now we’re speaking about 10 pounds of muscle, which might be more substantial.
Is it?
Physiology vs. Feelings
CONSIDER WHY YOU drop weight with a GLP-1: “First, it decreases stomach emptying,” Phillips states. “You feel complete faster and for longer” than you generally would. At the exact same time, “a main action in the brain reduces your hunger. You do not get food yearnings. “So you do not consume as much, since of your stomach being complete.
