Subscribe on Apple 

Subscribe on Spotify 

The excitement of those first 6–12 months has faded. The scale isn't moving like before, your body feels different, and suddenly year two of GLP-1 treatment doesn't feel straightforward anymore.

This is where many people hit a wall. Progress slows, plateaus arrive, and it's easy to worry you're failing. After months of rapid changes, the slower pace feels frustrating… even defeating. Add in metabolic adaptations and the pressure of maintaining new habits, and year two can feel like uncharted territory.

But this isn’t the end of your progress. In fact, it’s where sustainable success begins.

Here’s what to expect, and how to thrive, in year two and beyond.

Shift #1: From Rapid to Steady Progress

The first major shift you need to make is letting go of the rapid weight loss mindset. In those first 6-12 months, many people see dramatic changes. The scale drops consistently, energy shifts, and cravings quieten down. It feels like validation every time you step on the scale.

But then things slow down. You plateau. And if you're still chasing those dopamine hits from watching numbers drop, year two is going to feel like failure.

It's not.

Plateaus don't mean your medication stopped working. They mean your body is adjusting, recalibrating and, most importantly, that you're entering the phase where sustainable progress happens.

This is where non-scale victories become everything.

Ask yourself:

• Has your metabolic health improved? Are your blood sugars more stable? Cholesterol better?

• Have your cravings reduced compared to before treatment?

• Do you have more energy than you did a year ago?

• Is your mobility different? Can you move in ways you couldn't before?

Generate a list of 50 non-scale victories (use AI if you need to!) and search your life for evidence. How many are true for you? This isn't about ignoring progress, it's about recognizing all the progress you're making, not just what shows up on a scale.

Steady progress is still progress. And the habits you build here will carry you further than any rapid drop ever could.

Shift #2: Understanding Metabolic Adaptations

Your body adapts and that's not a flaw, it's biology.

As you lose weight, your body adjusts to the lower weight, reduced calorie intake, and increased movement. Your metabolism recalibrates. This is normal, expected, and something you can work with rather than against.

But it does mean you'll need to keep adjusting your approach.

This might look like:

• Dose adjustments with your physician
• Adding supplements or medications as needed
• Increasing protein intake as your needs change
• Evolving your movement routine as your ability level changes, and what worked six months ago might not challenge you anymore
• Addressing sleep, stress, or other lifestyle factors that impact your progress

The key here is to adjust one thing at a time rather than overhauling everything at once. Make small, intentional changes and see what moves the needle.

If you've spent years not moving much and suddenly you're capable of more, you might need skilled help. A good personal trainer who understands how to ramp you up slowly, who works with clients with similar backgrounds, and who prioritizes your long-term health over their own bottom line can be invaluable.

Metabolic adaptations aren't the enemy. They're a sign your body is responding and your job is to keep responding back with patience, consistency, and smart adjustments.

Shift #3: Building a Maintenance Mindset

Year two is where you transition from active weight loss mode to long-term maintenance (even if you're still losing weight).

The key difference is your mindset.

Maintenance isn't about watching numbers drop. It's about asking: How do I make this work no matter what?

These four words change everything: "I do it anyway."

• I move, no matter what.
• I prioritize protein, no matter what.
• I manage stress, no matter what.

This is where you build the identity that sustains you for years. GLP-1 is a tool, but it's not the whole strategy. You still need habits, systems, and a mindset that carries you through the days when motivation is low and the scale won't budge.

Think of maintenance like maintaining a house or hotel. You don't renovate once and never touch it again. You repaint, you update the furnishings, you fix what breaks. Maintenance is an active process.

To stay where you are, you have to keep adjusting. And that's not a failure, it's just what long-term success actually looks like.

In the beginning, everything was new. You had motivation because you were seeing rapid changes. Now, you need to build a completely different flame to keep you going. One that's fueled by identity, consistency, and the belief that you're worth the continued effort.

Your Year Two Game Plan

Year two doesn't look like year one… and that's a good thing.

It looks different because you're transitioning from rapid results to something more sustainable. The scale becomes less central and the focus shifts to building a life that genuinely supports your health, regardless of what any number says.

Instead of chasing quick drops, you learn to appreciate steady progress. You figure out how to work with your body's adaptations rather than fighting them. And gradually, you develop that "I do it anyway" approach that keeps you consistent through year two, year three, and beyond.

If you're feeling stuck or frustrated right now, that doesn't mean you're failing. It usually means you're right at the edge of figuring out what actually works long-term. The strategies that got you through the first year were important, but the ones you develop now are the ones that last.

Want to hear the full conversation about navigating year two and beyond on a GLP-1? Listen to the complete episode for more insights, real-life examples, and actionable strategies to help you thrive long-term.

TRANSCRIPT:

Disclaimer: The transcript below is provided for your convenience and may contain typos, errors, or grammatical inconsistencies, as it has not been professionally edited or proofread. Please enjoy it as-is and read at your own discretion.

Please note: The content shared in this podcast and blog post is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider for personalized medical guidance.  

What to Expect in Year 2 of GLP-1 Treatment

 Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. I'm actually really excited for today's episode because I don't know that I've ever done an episode that so explicitly focuses on year two and beyond on a GLP one. Today is really about what to expect in year two of a GLP one treatment, but really. 12 months and beyond is the focus of this.

You can extrapolate year 2, 3, 4. At this point. I have patients that for over 10 years, to be honest, have been on a GLP one, some of them 20 plus years, if it was for diabetes reasons. We've had these medications a long time. Anyone out there, if you're starting a GLP one, you're thinking, oh, I don't know.

We don't have a lot of research on this. Some medications are newer, like Tirzepatide that hit the market in 2022, which is Zep Mound, Manjaro, things like that. But the other ones we've had a long time. Alright, so I'm gonna talk about kind of three different areas that I think are really important to keep in mind long term when you're on a GLP one.

When I say long term, it means you are in this for a good amount of time. You're not planning on next week coming off of it. Remember, if you've actually had a chronic long-term weight management struggle, this is not your fault. It is a medical genetic. Endocrine neuro, it affects every single organ system in your body when you have this as a medical condition and these medications help manage that.

The first shift that needs to occur is that you have to go from the mindset of rapid to steady progress. Everybody repeat after me. I'm not expecting rapid progress anymore and I'm okay with steady progress. Usually in the first six to 12 months, that first half year to year. You are just, things are flying.

Now. I know we don't all fit this. I never fit this. I've definitely been in the more, more hypo responder category, although it's still been great and amazing and I'm getting closer to that a hundred pound mark. But again, it does not matter. You do not need to be in that flying off category. But most people in the first year, we'll be seeing.

Some changes that are a little bit faster, and then what starts to happen is that you start to plateau. You start to maintain. This does not mean that the medication has stopped working. If you didn't hear that episode, make sure that you go back. We did that very recently where I talked about that. What I really need to stress here is that you need, instead of getting those dopamine hits from the scale going down constantly.

And hopefully you're using a body composition scale. So you're seeing fat go down and not muscle. So when I say the scale go down, I am implying for the rest of this episode I'm implying fat loss. Instead of focusing on that, I'm getting all these dopamine hits, I'm getting validation. My self concept is only the way it is because of that.

What we need to do is let that go and we need to emphasize the importance of non-scale victories. Write this out if you need to. Have things improved with your metabolic health? Meaning, are your blood sugars better? Is your cholesterol better? Look at things like that. Do you have reduced cravings? Are you someone that 24 7?

I mean, when I think back. Prior to medications years ago, I just all the time was like, can we get Dorito chips? Can we get this candy? What about that Chinese food? What about that Domino's Pizza? Everything was just all the time. What combinations, what flavor profiles? How can we have it? Where can we have it?

Ooh, yay. If we're alone and we can really enjoy this food. If that's improved, that's a massive win. It doesn't matter only the number, have your energy levels changed? I've had this moment here recently where I've noticed distinctly I have very different energy the past few years compared to prior.

That is a blessing. That is not something that's guaranteed. And you gotta quantify these things because you very quickly habituate. You get used to what's happening. Is your energy better? Is your mobility better? I can do a lot more. I don't even know that I could do the squats and the things that I'm doing before. In the past, there's no way I could have done majority of the things that I'm starting to do now, and I'm still doing very basic things, but the mobility is very different.

So put into ai, go to chat, GPT, whatever you're using, and say, tell me 50 non-scale victories, and then search your life for these. If you are in, in fact, this is my, I'm realizing as I talk, I'm like, this is the moment everybody. So in this shift, when you're going from rapid to study progress and you're gonna start to find these non-scale victories, generate that list for yourself.

This is what I would do, to be honest, if you were in 30 30, like I'm thinking to myself, in fact, I'm, I'm gonna do this. Okay. I thought babies being birthed as I'm talking, me and my friend always joke about this. We're like, thought baby, thought babies being birthed. I would generate a list that's a mile long, and then I would search in that list what is all true for me.

I would find evidence for how many things are going right. How many things are heading in the right direction? That steady progress part, this is how you change how you think about yourself. You start to let go of that, this is a morality problem, or I'm doing something wrong. You start to look for all the evidence of, look at all the ways I'm taking care of myself and things that are going right.

So I would get that non-scale victory list. I'm gonna do that this week in 30 30. If you're in 30, 30 this September round, you will have done this already with me by the time you hear this, and I want you to look. Are any of these true? It is endless. The list of wins that you could generate. I just mentioned a few.

All right. The second thing that you need to realize is that metabolic adaptations are real. What does this mean? Your body just very simply put, it adapts to the lower weight and the reduced calorie intake that you've been having. It adapts to you moving more. It adapts to what you're doing with nutrition.

When this is occurring. You might need dose adjustments. You might need a supplement added, you might need another medication added. You might need to really change lifestyle factors. What do I mean by that? Your protein intake might need to change radically. Your ability level is greatly changing as you go down this road. With movement, this is a prime example. A lot of times I find with my patients, they are scared to increase movement because you might have come from a world again, a lot of people that work with me have significant challenges that they're working on, and they don't think that their body's capable of these things because they might have.

30, 40 years not have moved very much. Their ability level was hampered, and then now they can do more. But you might need some skilled help in that. You might need to hire a, a personal trainer. So many of you personal trainers out there, I hope some of you're listening, you're phenomenal. And some of you are gonna injure us.

Our job as a person that's gonna hire them is gonna be to vet them. Do they have other clients that have similar stories to us that might have some arthritis in the knees? Do they know how to slowly ramp you up? I have a patient where this person was out because of a foot injury. It was a fracture, after weeks and weeks of being gone from the gym, they're coming back.

I can tell that the trainer's amazing. 'cause they said, Hey, we're gonna bring you back once a week for this really modified weight, and then we're gonna, in a few weeks have you come back to twice. And they're ramping this person up slowly. And I said, hallelujah. That trainer sounds like they know what they're doing. They didn't just say, well come back to three times a week. They care more about your health than their finances of upping the plan that you're on. That is part of it. Do you have to change movement? What about sleep? Has that suffered in any way? What are other things that we can change?

There are always a million things that you can adjust, but keep in mind, especially year two and beyond, you have to keep adjusting these things. I wanna tell you, if there's one thing that I think I'm the champion of for my own body, it's that I never let the hypo responder thing be a defining characteristic of me.

I actually looked back and over the summer from June to, no, what was it? Over the past few months, I can't remember what it is, but I have the data. I think I'd lost five pounds and I wanted to judge that. Okay. Because I'm like all of you, and I think only, and I've had to extinguish that word in my vocabulary, but when I looked back on it, I thought.

But you are so steady at the numbers that you reach, the new habits and things you do are so locked away. I am able to keep making progress even years into this because I have built out the skillset to always see what's the next step and what's possible. I'm not as scared of hunger anymore.

That used to be something that really derailed me and I have a whole new relationship with that. I'll try to do an episode on that 'cause some of you have asked, but these are things that have slowly evolved over time. I continue to do massive amounts of work as far as how much coaching I get and emotional processing and different movement techniques and nervous system regulation techniques.

And then of course I bring these things into my programs as they're hitting my patients and me. But the point is you can get so far if you don't let metabolic adaptations and things like that get you down and you just look at, is there an emotional factor I can work on? Is there a behavioral thing I can work on?

Is there a nutrition thing, a sleep thing, a stress management thing? A physician adjusting something, you will get so much further. But that's number two. Don't let metabolic adaptations knock you out. Find the interventions that are possible. Is it dose adjustment or what else? The third thing is that you're gonna need to come from, again, from this sort of active weight loss phase to more of like long-term maintenance mode.

Now, long-term maintenance mode can still mean that you're losing. But the mindset is different. The mindset, and we talked about this in number one above, but the mindset is no longer, I need to see these numbers going down all the time. It's really how do I make this such that these things happen no matter what.

I saw a great video the other day and the person was talking about basically how do you make it the furthest with, mindset or all the sort of successful things in life? And they talked about the four words that are gonna change your life. I do it anyways. If you tell yourself that's a core identity where I move no matter what.

I have these new food relationships, no matter what, this is the most rewarding part if you can get to this. That's really the building, the sustainable maintenance part of things. GLP one is a tool, but it's not a short term fix, we talk about this a lot. It's included in the things you're doing, but you still have all these other areas and things that you can do.

That's really when we talk about building out the sustainable part that is. A lot of where your work needs to go year two and beyond because in the beginning everything was new, everything was amazing. You had motivation 'cause you were seeing things fly down all the time. Now you have to build a completely different flame to keep you going long term.

And so I just to recap here, you need to move step number one from this rapid to more steady progress. It does not mean that things aren't working. You're gonna have to find a lot more wins. Number two, metabolic adaptations are real, right? The body's adapting to the things you're doing. You are going to adjust them.

And I wanna say they're a little nuance there. You're gonna adjust one thing at a time. You don't just go ham with changing 20 things that's not the answer. And then three, you're really looking at the sustainability of what you're doing. And you're really looking, is this really maintenance now something that occurs with maintenance?

Let's draw an analogy for a moment. I don't know why I always think about this. I think about hotels, how they're run. I went through this phase here recently. I think I shared this with you guys where I was listening to a lot of books about hospitality. I don't know why I just went down the rabbit hole and I.

Thought it was fascinating with running restaurants, running hotels, things like that. The thing with the hotel is for that to stay amazing over decades. And again, I'm no expert. You need to keep updating things and renovating things. The carpets need to get changed. The rooms need to get renovated every so often.

Things need to continue to get changed. And this is the case too, in regular homes, but I don't know why the hotels just stick out much more in my mind. You need that for maintenance. Maintenance is not this. Okay, I did it and now I never again change things. In order to stay where you're at, you're gonna have to keep changing things to even maintain where you're at.

Maintenance is not just calories in match, calories out. I hate that thought process. Maintenance is an active process when you're maintaining a house properly. If you think about hotels being updated, houses being updated, when you're maintaining that property, you know that you have to keep investing into it for it not to be a dump at the end of it, like all of us have seen those houses where unfortunately someone just.

Maybe they got chronically ill or something happened and they weren't able to maintain the home anymore, 30, 40 years later they sell it. And this is actually the house that my parents bought, by the way, in the past. They were joking, they got a good deal on it when they were first married and moved back to the states.

All those kind of things. But. The house, I actually grew up in that house my whole life, but they were joking that when they went up the staircase, there was a banister and they would hold onto it and it just fell over. So it's that type of thing where it's like you need to maintain houses with repainting and.

Doing seasonal wor yard work. Otherwise, everything looks horrible. That's the same thing with your body. That's really your two and beyond. You need to move into what are things that I do to keep myself up and I've got news for you. It's always gonna be different. It's still a little bit of an active process.

I hope that this episode was helpful for you. I wanna ask you a big favor. If you liked this, please make sure to write a review wherever you're listening or share this with a friend that you think could benefit from this. Because we have a very unique mix on this podcast of sort of combining not only.

Episodes on the science and the medications, things like that, but also a lot on mindset, stuff like that. And also just, I always say real life approaches, so all of that. Alright. Also, I wanna just throw it out there. I know it's early, but we have actually opened enrollment for the January 30, 30. What I'm doing this time, I'm capping how many get in there because I've seen that we have a perfect size right now to the September group.

We will not exceed that size. So if you are someone that is wanting to do that January round, I would recommend sooner rather than later that you sign up because we're not exceeding a certain number in there because it's not small group anymore when there's too many people in there. Alright, if you have questions about anything, again, feel free to always email me.

I hope that you have an amazing rest of the week here and we'll touch base on Friday. Take care.