GLP-1 and Done: Read an Excerpt from My New Book
America Has a Weight Problem. But Have We Been Asking the Wrong Questions?
I've spent years helping people lose weight. I've also spent years living and working around the world, from Singapore to Vietnam, Cambodia, Indonesia, Peru, Colombia, Guatemala, and beyond. Those experiences have changed the way I look at food, health, and what Americans consider normal.
And the more I think about it, the more I believe we need to challenge some of those assumptions.
America has become exceptionally good at making food convenient, abundant, inexpensive, and available around the clock. We've built communities around cars, turned grocery shopping into an exercise in bulk acquisition, and created a food culture in which bigger portions, extra toppings, sugary drinks, and drive-through convenience are often treated as perks rather than choices with consequences.
Then we wonder why losing weight is so difficult. Enter GLP-1 medications.
I'm not anti-GLP-1. Far from it. These medications are changing lives, and for many people, they offer relief from years of battling appetite, cravings, and weight. But I believe we're at risk of overlooking an extraordinary opportunity if we focus exclusively on how much weight we can lose without asking what we should learn while we're losing it.
A medication can help you eat less. But who teaches you how to eat better?
That's the question at the heart of my new book, GLP-1 and Done: The Exit Strategy You Need to End the Pen and Reframe Food
In Chapter One, The Beginning — Not the Finish Line, I explore how America's relationship with food evolved, how our definition of normal may be working against us, and why the rise of GLP-1 medications makes perfect sense in the environment we've created.
Some of what I write may challenge your assumptions. You may agree with me. You may disagree. That's fine. I'm not looking for a room full of people nodding their heads. I'm interested in an honest conversation about food, weight, health, and the opportunities these medications create.
I'd especially like to hear from you in the comments section.
Are you currently taking a GLP-1 medication? Are you considering one? Have you had success with HCG in the past, but the weight slowly crept back?
If you're already on a GLP-1 like Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound or Mounjaro? Are you concerned about what happens when you stop—or whether you'll need to remain on it indefinitely? Perhaps you've had a great experience. Perhaps you've struggled with side effects, maintaining muscle, eating enough nutritious food, or figuring out what comes next.
Whatever your experience, I want to hear your perspective.
Chapter One: The Beginning — Not the Finish Line
Take a second and think of a few of the most iconic American foods. Think of three. Now ask yourself a simple question: could you eat it with one hand while sitting in traffic?
The answer is yes, isn't it?
Now ask yourself another question. Would you shop differently if you had to carry your groceries home on foot? What if everything you bought had to fit into the dainty little basket on the front of your bicycle? Or clipped to the footwell of your motorbike alongside a bag of ice? Or sitting on your lap on the subway or bus? It sounds a little strange to Americans, because we don't shop that way. But in much of the world, it's not quirky or odd in the least. It's normal. People buy what they can carry. They buy what they need for today, maybe tomorrow. They buy food the way it was bought, or bartered, for hundreds of years — with some immediacy, some intention, and a hint of freshness.
On the flipside, a friend once asked me, after her first trip to an American grocery store — not even one of the big ones — "Are we grocery shopping or stockpiling for Armageddon, like in the movies?" She had never seen groceries fill the trunk of a car before. And honestly, I hadn't noticed it was odd until I started living elsewhere and returned home with a different perspective. I'm not even sure "grocery store" is the right label anymore. They look and feel more like industrial distribution centers with a produce section attached as an afterthought. Endless aisles. Towering shelves. Don't get me wrong, I love a party, but I don't need everything from toilet paper to taco sauce party-sized.
Not everyone has the same normal. While most foreign cities were designed for foot traffic, our cities were developed to facilitate automobile traffic. But no sooner did the automobile become affordable to all than we moved out of our cities, exchanging proximity for a yard, an extra bedroom, and a long commute.
And this is where our story really begins. With awareness.
The freedom of the open road is great. We have many freedoms in America. But one thing we are not free from is consequence. The sprawling, overengineered, convenience-obsessed lifestyle we built around the speed and scale of the automobile has left us isolated, sedentary, over-anxious, and overweight. We live far from our food, so we shop differently. We shop differently, so our food is "built" differently. Our food is built differently, so we eat differently. And when you combine that with the American instinct that more is better, bigger is better, fast is the only speed, and enough is never enough, it is not surprising that GLP-1s have become as widespread as they are.
In fact, it makes perfect sense. Let's roll back the clock.
My grandparents' generation grew up with scarcity, during the Great Depression. They knew what it meant to go to bed hungry. They knew what it meant to want and not have. Then, following the monumental sacrifices made by that generation both at home and abroad, came the postwar boom, and America caught fire — in the best possible way. The GI Bill expanded education and home ownership. Manufacturing exploded. Skilled workers flooded an ever-expanding job market. Cars became affordable for every household. Highways connected everything. A generation that had grown up with nothing suddenly found itself living in a country where everything was possible, even the moon. That kind of prosperity changes people.
And when that generation finally got its house, its yard, its mortgage — its American dream — it made a promise to its children: you will not suffer the way we did. You will not go to bed hungry. You will clean your plate. You will be grateful, because I never saw that much food when I was your age. That instinct was understandable. It was loving. But over time, it snowballed. The Boomers did much the same with their kids, only with a little less edge and a little more marketing. Food became fun. Food became plentiful. Food became entertainment. Sugary cereal came with cool prizes. Kool-Aid was cool, especially with a heaping scoop of processed sugar. Fast food mascots with names of their own became household names. Habits were being formed that would last beyond a lifetime — habits that would last for generations to come.
At first, that abundance did not look like a crisis. It looked like success. The good news was that nobody was going hungry. The bad news was that prosperity, convenience, predatory advertising, and industrial-engineered food eventually collided. Fat got blamed. Sugar got a pass. Processed food got cheaper and acquired really good PR. Portions got bigger in the name of value. Kitchens got quieter. The drive-thru got louder. What started as freedom from scarcity slowly became freedom from restraint.
When a scoop of ice cream on a cone is no longer enough, and is replaced with a twenty-ounce milkshake with a candy bar and a sleeve of Oreos blended into it, given a cool name and made available without leaving the comfort of your car, you get the Standard American Diet, appropriately acronymed SAD. The perfect storm of unhinged abundance with only one direction: more.
The irony is almost too perfect. After spending generations building the fastest, most convenient food culture on earth, we reached for an equally fast and convenient solution. A weekly injection. A uniquely American problem met by a uniquely American remedy.
This is the reason I wrote this book. I have spent enough time living and working abroad to understand that this crisis is not universal. It is not simply "human nature." It is not inevitable. It is contemporary America. Other cultures eat. They indulge. They celebrate. They gather around food. But they do it inside systems that still resemble life rather than logistics. The difference is not just what they eat. It is how they shop, how they move around, how they gather, how often they cook, how they socialize, how they gather around their food, and how quickly they eat it.
What they don't do is also significant. They don't add an additional 200–300 calories in sauce, dip, and/or ranch dressing to every meal and act as if it doesn't count. They don't turn every lunch into a combo, every combo into a super-size, and every free refill into a go-cup in the name of value. They don't take a perfectly acceptable burger and add three more unnecessary layers of cheese, bacon, aioli, and fried onions just because it's on the menu. They don't confuse abundance with quality. And perhaps most importantly, they don't build their entire food culture around speed, portability, and shelf life, then act surprised when that culture produces obesity. That is what the Standard American Diet really is: not just bad food, but a culture of unnecessary additions, constant excess, and normalized overconsumption.
A different perspective on these SAD behaviors is eye-opening.
But listen, this is not a condemnation of the American way of life. But once you've watched a Vietnamese woman prepare an amazing dinner from only two small bags of groceries — one still kicking with live shrimp — over a simple propane-powered hot plate rather than a dual-oven rangetop stove, you start looking at a trunk full of shrink-wrapped inventory a little differently. Once you've lived in places where the word fresh is implied and not a special feature, you start questioning your normal. When food is bought daily because there are no trunks on a bicycle and your apartment is right around the corner from your grocer, you begin to understand that the American way of shopping is not just different. It is consequential.
And once you see patients in multiple countries, from the wealthiest, like Singapore, to the poorest, like Indonesia or Guatemala, and they all say the same things — I don't want to take any pills, or can you fix me because I don't want surgery? — when proactive care is preferred to damage control, when invasive medicine is the last option rather than the first, when overweight patients are the exception rather than the norm, you realize that obesity is not a simple failure of willpower. You start seeing things for what they are: the predictable result of a uniquely American lifestyle.
Yet for all of our excess, all of our convenience, all of our modern abundance, we are still desperate for peace of mind. We count carbs. We count steps. We count REM sleep. But the numbers never add up.
That is why GLP-1s have exploded.
They solve a real problem. They reduce appetite. They quiet food noise. They create psychological relief for people who have spent years fighting hunger, impulse, guilt, gain, and an unfair perception of failure. For many people, they offer something they have never felt before: the security of believing that finally, this time, it's gonna work. A hand-held, doctor-prescribed, physiological guarantee.
That relief has tremendous value.
However, relief is not the same thing as resolution. A resolution solves a problem. Relief quiets it temporarily. This book is about the difference.
And let me be clear: this is not an anti-obesity rant, nor is it an anti-GLP-1 manifesto. I understand the appeal. It is clear. If you've been struggling with your weight for years, if you blame a lack of discipline and your appetite always overshadows it, if every previous attempt has ended in frustration, I understand why the pen feels like freedom. Making weight loss less difficult has value. Quieting appetite has value. But the breathing room created by knowing that "this time it will work" is life-changing. That is the peace of mind you've been searching for.
But simply eating less of a poor diet, without examining the how and the why, is not the solution.
Leave a comment below. Ask a question. Challenge an assumption. Tell me what you wish someone had explained to you before you started your weight-loss journey. I'll be following the discussion, and your questions may help shape future conversations as I continue writing this book.
This is an excerpt from a work in progress, and I'm sharing it because I believe the conversation is important. My goal isn't simply to help people lose weight. It's to help them understand food well enough to build a healthier life, enjoy what they eat, and make informed decisions about their future.
Because the opportunity GLP-1s provide is significant. The tragedy would be to waste it.
Let's talk.
— Zach LaBoube, DC
Author of HCG 2.0 — Don't Starve, Eat Smart and Lose
GLP-1 and Done — Coming Soon
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