Just a heads up “weight loss” is a poor metric if it comes at the cost of lean muscle mass. It seems that 39% of weight loss associated with Ozempic comes from lean muscle mass which isn’t great.
When you diet to lose weight you lose lean muscle too unless you exercise to minimize it. What's the lean muscle mass loss from just dieting? I would guess that it's a relatively large number too.
I’m generally skeptical of pharmaceutical weight loss solutions as a bandaid over the underlying problem, but for this statement to mean anything you’d have to compare it to traditional methods of weight loss.
If you simply eat at a calorie deficit and aren’t taking specific steps to preserve muscle (resistance training and high protein), a lot of the weight you lose will be muscle mass.
Though a certain amount of lean loss is inevitable with significant weight reduction (usually about 25% of total weight loss), the goal is to increase the body’s overall proportion of lean mass – in other words, to improve body composition.
In 2020, Diabetologia published a body composition analysis of 88 volunteers with type 2 diabetes who used semaglutide for one year. These participants lost an average of 12.5 pounds. Of that weight loss, there was a 7.5-pound reduction in fat mass and a 5-pound reduction in lean mass.
In 2021, a major trial of semaglutide’s weight loss potency examined the body composition of a minority of participants. These patients did not have diabetes, and they took a much larger dose of the drug. The 95 participants to undergo a body scan lost an average of 18 pounds of fat — and 12 pounds of lean mass.
https://peterattiamd.com/the-downside-of-glp-1-receptor-agon...