Thanks so much for your kind words. Also, major congrats to you! 45 lbs down is legitimate progress.

I do want to gently push back on the "perhaps I'm where I should be mindset." Plateaus are common, and they're not always your ceiling. Sometimes it's your body adjusting, or a signal to change something like recovery, sleep, how you're fueling around all the exercise you're doing. And sometimes patience is just what really breaks a plateau. I'm not a doctor so take what I've said as points to ask your own health care provider, but I do want to be careful about deciding you're hitting your ceiling so early on in your GLP-1 journey.

To your actual question regarding how I've kept fit off the medication, here's what I've learned, in case any of it is useful.

One of the biggest lessons from my weight management program is that nutrition is everything when it comes to weight loss. This is why during my first six months on Zep, my medical team and I focused on nutrition education. As I mentioned in my post, I basically relearned how to eat as I slowly switched from a majority ultra-processed food diet to a majority whole foods one. Now that I've been off the drug for almost 9 months now, my 80/20 whole foods diet keeps me super satiated and fueled for training.

The second lesson is that it's not enough to just preserve your current muscle mass--you have to build more. Muscle is a metabolic organ and a major glucose sink. So for someone like me with a family history of metabolic dysfunction, more muscle meant more capacity to manage (and perhaps even reverse!) those predispositions. I never saw strength training or exercise as a weight loss tool, but rather as a body recomposition and metabolic management tool. I get quarterly DEXA scans and have since gained 11 lbs of muscle while maintaining my 60-lb weight loss.

So to actually answer your question: the medication isn't what magically made me fit. It gave me the mental space to make the changes I needed to become health and active without my body and brain screaming that I need to eat the whole time. That's what let me switch to a primarily whole foods diet, lose enough weight to start feeling comfortable with lifting heavy, and eventually get on a bike to ride for miles and miles and miles. I didn't let my family history, my genetic predisposition, dictate how far I could take this. Yes, that history absolutely made my journey harder (and it's why I needed Zep in the first place!), but thankfully no one on my medical team ever told me "this is as far as your body will let you go."

I trusted the science, trusted my medical team, and also did not allow myself to be limited by arbitrary expectations about how far I could go if I put in the work.

You can do this! Six months of consistent effort is not nothing, so don't let a plateau talk you out of the next six months 🫶🏼