Two GLP-1 stories crossed my desk this week. One is a magazine telling patients how to get off the drug. The other is a governor explaining why he is on it. They are the same story, told from opposite sides.
The weaning story
Apple News is carrying a Women’s Health piece under the headline “Experts Say It’s Possible to Maintain Weight Loss After Quitting a GLP-1. Here Are the Exact Steps to Take.” Forbes ran a physician’s list of five strategies for the same purpose. Both take it as given that getting off the drug is the goal, and that a patient who follows the steps will get there.
I checked the steps against their evidence, and the result is on the site: Can You Really Wean Off a GLP-1? The short answer is no, not by any method that has been tested. No trial has compared weaning against stopping outright. The one built to do so has no results yet. In the trials that did stop the drug, most of the lost weight came back within a year. And the steps themselves, protein, fiber, exercise, weigh-ins, are the advice people were given before the drugs existed. That advice failed most of the people who followed it. That is why the drugs exist.
Why the goal is the shaming
The harm in these articles is not the advice. Protein and exercise are fine. The harm is the goal they set without any basis: that a reasonable patient should be working toward the day they stop.
Nobody writes that article about blood pressure pills. Nobody tells a person with type 1 diabetes that the exact steps will get them off insulin. Those are understood as maintenance treatments. A signal the body does not supply has to keep being supplied, and stopping means the condition comes back. GLP-1 drugs work the same way. Appetite is regulated by hormones, one of those hormones runs weak in people carrying extra weight, and the drug supplies it.
So when a magazine sets total weaning as the goal, it hands patients a test that most of them will fail, and then a verdict. The weight came back. You did not follow the steps well enough. That is the old willpower story wearing a lab coat, and it is the same story that made people feel they were cheating by taking the drug in the first place. I wrote about that one in the first issue: Is Taking a GLP-1 Drug Cheating?
The governor
The other story is JB Pritzker, in the Chicago Sun-Times on September 21. He has lost 80 pounds over two and a half years on a GLP-1 drug. He was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes at 58, went on insulin, switched to the GLP-1, and has been off insulin for nine months with normal blood sugar. He walks along the lake most mornings and plays tennis with his daughter.
Asked whether the drug is cheating, he said: “I don’t think it’s cheating. I think it’s what I need to succeed.” He described the food noise going quiet the way patients describe it. He used to want the whole cake. Now one slice is enough, and he does not walk around thinking about the next meal.
Two things in that interview matter for this issue. He waited to go public until he was confident the weight loss would persist. And he did not announce a plan to get off the drug. He described a treatment that is working and a life that is better for it. That is what maintenance looks like when the patient is not being shamed about it.
The takeaway
Getting off the drug is not a goal the evidence supports. No taper has been tested against stopping, and the advice offered for holding the loss is the advice that failed before the drug. Staying on a treatment that works is not a failure. It is what maintenance means, and nobody owes anyone a demonstration that they tried to quit.
Whether to continue, taper, or stop is a decision for you and your doctor. The papers say what the evidence can and cannot promise. They do not say what you should do.
Sources: Pines JM, Forbes, 7 September 2026. Women’s Health headline via Apple News, September 2026. Sfondeles T, Chicago Sun-Times, 21 September 2026. Wilding JPH et al. Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism 2022;24:1553–1564. Aronne LJ et al. JAMA 2024;331:38–48. Budini B et al. eClinicalMedicine 2026;93:103796. Yevusiak T et al. PLoS One 2026;21(7):e0354237 (the REST protocol). Mann T et al. American Psychologist 2007;62:220–233. Sumithran P et al. New England Journal of Medicine 2011;365:1597–1604.