Weight Loss Injections
a question I receive often is:
“I take medications for weight loss, can I still get nutritional guidance from you?”
And the answer is yes absolutely!! Rest assured that in my personalised nutritional therapy clinic I have, and am happy to see clients on weight loss medications. If you are on these medications and looking for dietary support, either to get you through digestive side effects, making sure you’re eating enough of the right nutrients while eating a lot less or support while you come off of the medication to prevent weight regain, I can help you with this all while working alongside your medical team. I am so proud to create a non-judgmental environment where we can best support your weight loss with or without medications.
Weight-loss injections like Wegovy (semaglutide) and Mounjaro (tirzepatide) have gained attention over the past few years as new treatments for weight loss. They can be used to manage type 2 diabetes or treat obesity, by helping you lose weight when you combine it with exercise and changes to your diet.
You may see them referred to as a GLP-1 agonists. This is because they work by mimicking your bodies natural fullness cues* reducing your appetite and helping you to feel fuller for longer. This makes it easier to adhere to diet changes if you’re not battling hunger every moment of the day.
For type 2 diabetes it works by lowering your blood sugar levels and helping your body to make more insulin if it’s needed. It also slows digestion which keeps your blood sugar levels stable after meals.
The NHS in England currently prescribes weight loss medications to patients living with obesity who meet specific criteria. However there are many many online pharmacies that prescribe these medications privately too – a service which many people use.
An estimated 1.6 million adults in England, Wales and Scotland used drugs such as Wegovy and Mounjaro to help lose weight between early 2024 and early 2025
“Why would you support a client on these medications if you follow a holistic lifestyle intervention forward approach?”
Well firstly I do not replace your healthcare professionals, so it is never my place to give you medication advice.
And being a healthy weight is super important because living with excess weight and obesity increases your risk of many health problems, including cardiovascular diseases like heart attack, stroke and coronary heart disease. Helping people to live longer, disease free is my passion and why I got into nutrition in the first place.
Now we have research suggesting that weight-loss injections not only aid weight loss, but also reduce the risk of having a heart attack or stroke or dying from heart disease in people with excess weight.
These medications can be incredibly life changing for some people! However, the nutritional support alongside them is not always there, it’s not personalised or in depth enough for each individual.
“So do I need nutritional therapy with my weight loss medication?”
Weight-loss drugs are meant to be only part of a weight-loss plan. Healthy eating, behavior changes and exercise are vital for prescription weight-loss drugs to work well.
A lowered appetite will likely mean you are eating less, but eating less is not always the only important component of weight loss. There is an incredible opportunity to use this lowered appetite to instead transform your diet into something healthier, more balanced and more supportive of long term health! It’s easier to make dietary changes for the better when you’re feeling less hungry.
Secondly, there are some real risks to a lowered appetite. If you’re less hungry and eating less food, you need to make sure your diet still has enough of the protein, vitamins and minerals that it needs to function properly. The level of weight loss sometimes seen on these medications is essentially a medically induced form malnutrition, if it’s not done with a good understanding of what a person needs to be eating every day. Without that, you are more likely to experience negative effects linked to simply not eating sufficient nutrition.
We also know from research that the rapid weight loss associated with the medications can lead to reduced muscle and bone mass too. And in fact, this is one of the major risks to yo-yoing with weight loss injections. Weight re-gain is often in the form of fat mass whereas the weight loss causes some lean mass loss (muscle and bone density). Sufficient protein (from healthy sources) and resistance exercise could help to off set these effects.
That’s why eating and understanding a healthy balanced diet is still important.
Coming off of Weight loss Medications?
These GLP agonist weight-loss medications work by mimicking the hormones in your body that slow down your digestion, and supress your appetite (make you feel fuller). This helps you eat less, consume less calories and lose weight.
When you stop taking the drug, (especially if your diet has stayed the same just less eaten) your appetite will return to normal, and lots of people find they start eating more and regain the weight they lost while taking the drug.
A meta-analysis (our best available research) was published in the British Medical Journal in 2026. They reviewed how much weight was regained in the year after stopping weight-loss medicines or attending behavioural weight-loss programmes.
They found people lost 14.7kg after taking weight-loss medicines, but that after people stopped taking these drugs, they regained around 0.8kg a month. They predicted these people would return to their original weight just 1.5 years after starting treatment.
Those who took part in the behavioural weight-loss programmes and did not take any weight-loss medicines, lost less weight on average but, they regained weight much more slowly at 0.1kg a month after the programme finished. The researchers estimated these people would not regain all the weight they’d lost until nearly 4 years after treatment.
The researchers also estimated that the improvements seen in cardiovascular risk factors, such as high blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels would also be reversed within 1.4 years after stopping the medicines
Remembering that a lot of the weight lost so rapidly is lean mass (muscle and bone) and most of the weight regained is fat mass; there is a possibility these people even end up in a worse position metabolically than before they started! I’ve certainly seen this on social media when women who have taken medications without supervision and then done DEXA scans and found they have a shocking body composition.
This is why NICE guidance that says that lifestyle changes, including dietary changes, are needed alongside weight-loss medicines to help manage weight after stopping medicines.
Support should be offered for at least a year after stopping weight-loss injections to help maintain your weight loss!
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