Before the Shot, Remember the Fast

There is an interesting moment happening in American health.

For most of my thirty years coaching people, weight loss has been sold through some variation of the same promise: eat this instead of that, count these calories, eliminate this food group, buy this supplement, follow this program. The details changed, the villains changed, and every few years the cover of the diet book changed, but the basic proposition remained remarkably consistent.

Then came the injection.

Suddenly, millions of people discovered they could dramatically reduce their appetite without having to negotiate with it. Food became less interesting. Portions became smaller. The incessant chatter some people describe as “food noise” quieted. Weight began disappearing, sometimes at a rate people had never been able to achieve through dieting.

After decades of working with people who have struggled with obesity, I understand the appeal. I have spent my professional life sitting across from real human beings, not metabolic equations. I know what it looks like when someone fights the same twenty, fifty, or one hundred pounds for years. I know the embarrassment hidden behind a joke before stepping on a scale and the quiet shame that sometimes keeps someone away from a swimming pool, family photograph, or doctor’s appointment.

So my objection to the GLP-1 revolution does not come from a lack of empathy.

It comes from thirty years of it.

I am fascinated by physiology, but I am equally fascinated by human behavior. Eventually you discover that health does not happen in a laboratory. It happens on Monday morning when the alarm rings. It happens at the restaurant when everyone else orders dessert. It happens when you are tired, stressed, traveling, lonely, celebrating, grieving, bored, or standing in your kitchen at 9:30 at night.

Human beings do not merely have metabolisms. We have habits.

That is why I believe the most important question surrounding today’s pharmaceutical weight-loss revolution is not whether these drugs can make people lighter.

They clearly can.

The more important question is: What kind of health are we actually trying to build?

The Biology Was Already There

There is an irony hiding in the name GLP-1.

Glucagon-like peptide-1 is not a pharmaceutical invention. It is part of normal human physiology.

Our intestinal system naturally releases GLP-1 in response to food. It participates in an intricate conversation among the gut, pancreas, brain, and other tissues, influencing insulin secretion, glucagon signaling, appetite, satiety, and food intake.

Modern GLP-1 medications work because scientists learned how to amplify or imitate biological signaling systems the human body already possesses.

That is remarkable pharmacology.

It should also produce a little humility.

The pharmaceutical industry did not invent satiety; it learned how to manipulate a system of satiety that was already there. And for all the complexity of receptors, hormones, and signaling pathways, much of the resulting weight loss ultimately comes down to something simple:

People eat less.

That is precisely where my concern begins.

Reducing appetite is not the same thing as teaching someone how to eat. Reducing energy intake is not the same thing as developing metabolic health, and losing weight is certainly not the same thing as building a strong human being.

I have never been interested in merely making people smaller.

The Scale Tells an Incomplete Story

The bathroom scale is one of the most persuasive liars in health and fitness.

Not because the number is false. The number is perfectly accurate.

The problem is everything it refuses to tell you.

A scale cannot distinguish a pound of fat from a pound of skeletal muscle. It cannot tell you whether your legs are stronger, whether you can get off the floor without using your hands, whether your balance is improving, whether you can carry your suitcase through an airport at seventy-five, or whether you are slowly becoming a lighter but more fragile version of yourself.

We have somehow reduced the extraordinarily complex concept of health to a single number produced by gravity.

That becomes especially important during rapid pharmaceutical weight loss.

Large trials of medications such as tirzepatide have shown tremendous reductions in body weight, much of it body fat. But meaningful losses of lean tissue occur as well. Lean mass is not synonymous with skeletal muscle, so we should not pretend every pound of lean mass measured by a scan is contractile muscle disappearing. But neither should we dismiss the issue.

Researchers and clinicians are increasingly emphasizing adequate protein intake and progressive resistance training during GLP-1-assisted weight loss precisely because muscle preservation matters.
And here is where physiology collides with human behavior.

Preserving muscle requires someone to consume enough high-quality protein despite a suppressed appetite, progressively load skeletal muscle, and train consistently enough to give the body a reason to preserve that tissue.

Could someone do all of this while taking a GLP-1 medication?

Of course.

But after three decades of coaching, I am interested in more than what is biologically possible.

I am interested in what human beings predictably do.

The person who has spent twenty years avoiding resistance training does not automatically become a disciplined strength trainee because a physician writes a prescription. The person who has never prioritized protein does not suddenly begin thinking about muscle protein synthesis because an injection made lunch less appealing.

A medication can alter a signal.

It cannot create a habit.

Muscle Is Not Decoration

I wish we would stop talking about muscle as though it were an accessory.

Muscle is usually discussed in the language of abs, arms, swimsuits, and vanity. Somewhere along the way, building muscle became associated with bodybuilders instead of human beings.

That is a profound misunderstanding of physiology.

Muscle allows us to produce force, absorb force, climb stairs, carry groceries, maintain balance, protect joints, regulate glucose more effectively, rise from a chair, play with grandchildren, and remain capable as we age.
Muscle is part of the architecture underneath longevity.

And muscle requires a reason to remain.

That reason is load.

I often tell my clients that the body is constantly listening.

Place bone under mechanical stress and it receives information. Challenge the cardiovascular system and it receives information. Expose muscle to meaningful resistance and it receives information.

The body adapts to the demands we repeatedly place upon it.

That is why resistance training occupies such an important role in the Fast.Eat.Live. philosophy. We are not simply trying to create an energy deficit. We want to preserve and build useful tissue.
We fast.

Then we return to nourishment.

We eat protein.

We train.

We recover.

The phases matter because the signals matter.

The Other Fuel Tank

There is another piece of physiology I believe our culture has almost completely forgotten.

Stored body fat is energy.

That sentence seems absurdly obvious, yet much of modern eating behavior suggests we no longer understand it.

A person can be carrying tens of thousands of calories of stored energy and still feel alarmed when breakfast is delayed by two hours.

We have normalized an eating environment our ancestors could scarcely have imagined: food available every waking hour, snacks carried everywhere, drive-through restaurants glowing at midnight, calorie-containing beverages between meals, office food, entertainment food, convenience food, and an entire economy designed to make stopping consumption surprisingly difficult.

Then we wonder why the body continues storing energy it is rarely given permission to retrieve.

Human metabolism was not built with one fuel source.

As fasting progresses, insulin falls, liver glycogen becomes less dominant, stored triglycerides are broken apart, fatty acids become available, and the liver begins converting increasing amounts of those fatty acids into ketone bodies.

The body changes fuel sources.

Researchers sometimes describe this as the metabolic switch.

Imagine owning a hybrid automobile with two energy systems and spending your entire life believing only one of them worked.

That is how many modern people live metabolically.

We have become extraordinarily practiced at consuming energy and surprisingly unfamiliar with accessing the energy already stored on our bodies.

Hunger arrives and immediately produces a behavioral response: I need to eat.

But hunger is not always evidence of an energy emergency.

Sometimes it is simply a signal.

And one of the most empowering things a person can discover is that a signal does not have to become a command.

What Fasting Teaches

This is where fasting becomes more interesting to me than simple calorie reduction.
The person fasting still experiences hunger.

That matters.

The stomach growls. A familiar eating hour arrives. Someone walks into a restaurant. A coworker opens something that smells wonderful. The internal suggestion appears: You could eat.

And the person practicing an intentional fast answers: Yes, I could. But I have chosen not to yet.

There is tremendous psychological value in that exchange.

Not because hunger is virtuous and certainly not because misery earns metabolic points.

It matters because human beings become stronger when they discover that discomfort does not possess authority over them.

At first, many people treat hunger as though a fire alarm has gone off. Then they begin recognizing its rhythm. Hunger rises. Hunger falls. They drink some water. They take a walk. They return to work and discover they are still mentally capable, physically functional, and very much alive.

Something changes.

They no longer fear the sensation.

That is very different from pharmacologically reducing the sensation.

The distinction is subtle, but from the perspective of human behavior it is enormous.

Fasting gives someone an opportunity to experience appetite without automatically obeying it. It creates a small laboratory of self-regulation.

And that skill travels.

The person who discovers they can be hungry without becoming miserable may begin noticing the same pattern elsewhere. Fatigue does not always have to cancel a workout. Irritation does not have to spill onto the family. Wanting another drink does not require having one, and the urge to pick up a phone can be noticed without being obeyed.

The skill being practiced is larger than fasting:

Discomfort can be experienced without immediately reaching for relief.

This is not diet culture.

This is human formation.

Fasting Is Not Starvation

Enthusiasm, however, can become its own kind of stupidity.

If fasting is good, longer fasting must be better. If ketosis is interesting, more ketosis must be superior.

Human beings have a remarkable ability to take a useful principle and drive it into a ditch.

Fast.Eat.Live. was never built around starvation.

Any meaningful period of energy restriction requires us to think intelligently about muscle. Longer periods of fasting can increase protein breakdown and reduce lean tissue, which is one reason I believe fasting should exist inside a rhythm rather than becoming an endurance contest.

We fast, but then we deliberately return to nourishment. Protein matters when we eat. Resistance matters when we train. Sleep matters while the body repairs what training has asked it to build.

There is a time to withdraw food and allow stored energy to become useful. There is a time to provide amino acids, minerals, vitamins, fatty acids, and energy. There is a time to place tissue under load and ask it to adapt.

And there is a time to recover.

You Cannot Inject Discipline

One of the most revealing things about pharmaceutical weight loss is what happens when the medication is removed.

Follow-up studies of both semaglutide and tirzepatide have demonstrated substantial weight regain for many participants after treatment is stopped.

The conventional medical explanation is that obesity is a chronic disease and therefore chronic pharmaceutical treatment may be required.

I understand the logic.

But as a coach, I hear another question underneath it:

What did the person learn to do?

If the principal mechanism producing the outcome remains pharmacological appetite suppression, then removing the pharmacology predictably changes the environment that produced the outcome.

That does not mean someone using a GLP-1 medication is lazy, weak, or morally deficient. I reject that kind of thinking completely.

It means the mechanism matters.

I want to know what remains when the external intervention disappears.

Has the person learned how hunger actually behaves? Do they understand protein, strength training, sleep, stress, and satiety? Have they developed confidence in their ability to participate in their own health?

Those questions are difficult to capture on a pharmaceutical trial spreadsheet.

But they determine much of what happens during the next twenty years of someone’s life.

Stewardship is inconvenient. Training requires time. Protein requires planning. Fasting occasionally requires sitting with hunger. Strength takes years.

Human beings have always been attracted to shortcuts, and modern commerce has become exceptionally skilled at selling them.

But some things cannot be outsourced.

You can outsource a training program.

You cannot outsource the repetitions.

And you can pharmacologically suppress appetite.

You cannot inject discipline.

The Body Is Not Empty

One of my favorite moments during a Fast.Eat.Live. fast occurs when someone tells me they are hungry.

I usually smile.

Not because I enjoy their discomfort.

Because I know what may happen next.

The sensation comes and goes. The body continues working. Energy remains available.

Eventually, they begin understanding the strange truth hiding in plain sight.

They are not empty.

They are carrying stored energy.

Their body has been saving it for precisely the circumstance they have intentionally created.

No breakfast arrived.

No lunch arrived.

The kitchen is temporarily closed.

So, the metabolic system begins opening another pantry.

Triglycerides stored inside adipose tissue are broken apart. Fatty acids become available. The liver begins producing more ketones. The person who thought they had “no energy because I haven’t eaten” discovers that the human body has been carrying a reserve tank the entire time.

That discovery can change someone’s relationship with hunger.

And perhaps what they recover is trust: trust in the adaptability of the body, in their ability to practice restraint, and in the knowledge that food will still be there—and may taste even better—when the fast ends.

Stewardship and Transformation

My Christian faith inevitably shapes the way I see all of this.

I do not believe the human body is an accident.

I studied kinesiology, exercise physiology, and biology before earning my degree in 1997, and I have spent the decades since coaching people and continuing to study nutrition, physiology, and human performance.

The longer I study the body, the less interested I become in reducing it to a machine.

Machines are crude compared with us.

The human body stores energy during abundance and retrieves it during absence. It remodels bone in response to stress. It builds muscle when repeatedly asked to produce force. It adapts to training, temperature, altitude, sleep, nutrition, stress, and recovery.

Adaptation is everywhere.

As a Christian, I see design in that adaptability.

Fasting appears throughout Scripture, although never as God’s ancient weight-loss program. Its purpose was spiritual: repentance, prayer, preparation, grief, discernment, and the intentional quieting of one appetite to attend more closely to something greater.

Yet I find it fascinating that this ancient practice also exposes us to physiological states modern abundance has made increasingly rare.

Modern people can go decades without missing a meal.

Historically, that is unusual.

Perhaps the question is not why fasting feels strange today.

Perhaps the question is why uninterrupted eating feels normal.

I have no interest in romanticizing obesity or minimizing how difficult changing it can be.

I have coached people too long for that.

But empathy does not require lowering our expectations for human beings.

Sometimes love asks more of people because we believe there is more available to them.

I do not want to help someone become a smaller version of the same unhealthy person.

I want to help build someone stronger and more capable: a person who understands food and their own metabolism, protects muscle, values sleep and movement, can tolerate temporary discomfort, trains with confidence, and still knows how to gather around a table with gratitude and joy.

Health is not merely an outcome.

It is a practice.

As a Christian, I would call that stewardship.

As a coach, I would call it transformation.

And as a student of human physiology, I continue to be amazed by how often the path forward begins not by overpowering the body, but by finally learning how to work with it.

Before the shot, remember the fast.

Editorial comments expressed in this column are the sole opinion of the writer. Always consult a physician before starting an exercise or diet regime

Fast.Eat.Live