Holiday Eating After Ozempic: How to Keep the Weight Off

Welcome back. Thanksgiving and Christmas are upon us and for many health conscious individuals, those large meals can be quite daunting, especially for those who just lost some weight using GLP1 medications like WGO. Joining us today is physician and endocrinologist Dr. Holly Wyatt. She's also the co-author of the upcoming book, Losing the Weight Loss Meds: A 10-week Playbook for Stopping GLP1 Medications Without Regaining the Weight. She has 25 years of clinical and research experience and has followed over 10,000 participants. Welcome, Dr. Wyatt. Great to have you here. >> Oh, it's a pleasure to be here. Thanks for thanks for asking me. >> Dr. Wyatt, for those currently taking or have recently taken these weight loss drugs, how should they navigate Thanksgiving meals without regaining their weight? Well, if they're still on the drug, the medication is going to do a lot of the heavy lifting and kind of control how much they eat. But if they've come off the drug or really for anybody who's trying to you've lost some weight, you don't want to lose your momentum during the, you know, during the holidays, it it's there's some things you can do. There's some tips you can do. And a big one is to remember that the holidays aren't just about food. I think so many people there's a lot of food. you've got to navigate it, but also make it about connection, not just about the food. Um, that's a big one. And slow down. The medications help people kind of slow down, you get full faster, but if you're not on the medications and you've lost a some weight, you want to eat and enjoy it. I say, you know, food is is is fun. You want to have some joy with it, but you want to stop at what I call that fabulously full point. And to do that, you slow down and you kind of recognize when I'm getting full and you you you don't just keep eating. You stop at that point and wait. Those are a couple things that I think people can do to navigate this holiday time when the meals might add up and put on help you put on some extra weight. >> You're talking about slowing down. So, is that one way we can train our bodies to mimic ompic naturally instead? >> Yeah, that helps. There's other ways. There's lots of ways you can try to do what the GLP1 drugs are doing um by the combination of foods you're eating, kind of the timing of the meals, um you can do that. So, there's lots of ways you can try to kind of mimic. It's not about certain foods. I know a lot of people say, "Oh, I'm going to eat these foods and it produces GLP1." That doesn't work. The the natural GLP1 your body makes is very short acting. But you can combine protein uh with carbohydrate, kind of use volume in a in a way that helps mimic the delayed gastric emptying, makes your hunger stay more in control. So, you can definitely use food to uh mimic or I like to say even kind of replace the GLP ones if you're coming off of them, if you're not on them anymore. But you know, we all know Thanksgiving and Christmas, their meals can be extravagant and large and don't really contain the right nutrients to mimic ompic naturally. So, what can we do around the meal to help during this case? >> Okay, I'm going to give you a tip. This is something I do and a lot of my patients and clients, this is something to just when you when you have a meal and you want to experience it, you want to eat what's there, right? You're not going to put special food out. you're going to enjoy what's there. I call it a um tasting menu or a tasting plate. And a lot of times if you're on GLP1, you're not going to be able to eat as much. So, this works. Or if you're not on one of the medications and you don't want to eat as much so you don't regain the weight, this also works. And what I do is say, go to the go to the the food and put a little bit of every single thing on your plate. And people are going to say, "What are you doing?" And I'm like, "I'm going to taste everything. I don't want to miss a thing." Put that on there. Slow down. taste everything, get it, get your full satisfy, you know, be satisfied from all the different things and then you can decide how much and what you want to go back for. But the idea of this tasting menu, this tasting plate can be really helpful to slow you down. You get a taste of everything. And at my house, some of my relatives now have adopted the same the same uh tip or the same trick really. Let's let's do a tasting plate first and then we can always go back if we want a little bit more. So also according to your research there are three types of weight regain. Can you tell us more about what they are and how they can each be avoided? >> Yeah. So we've noticed that there's three profiles I kind of like to say of people when they either stop the the medications or they're in they've lost a lot of weight and they they may regain. And one of them is a a a non-stop food seeker. And this is a person who's really driven by food. And when they go on the GLP1s, that stops. That food noise stops. They're not seeking out food. But when they come off the meds, that's going to come back. So, they're a non-stop food seeker. And we've got to do some specific plays, some specific uh strategies to stop that, to kind of reset their appetite. The second profile we see is what I call the sedentary sitter. And these are people who maybe the appetite's not driving them, but they get no physical activity. their job or whatever cause causes them to sit a lot and that keeps their metabolism from functioning fully. It it it kind of keeps their metabolism at a level where they can't adjust where they can't if you eat a little bit extra at Thanksgiving your metabolism can't adjust and instead you tend to put on the weight. So, you want to um increase physical activity and we talk specifically about how to do that in the book in a way that allows you to restore that metabolism to get that metabolism up there. So, it's helping you. And the third I I see pretty um frequently is the setback cyclinger. Um a lot of people can relate to this. Something happens, curveballs, life happens, and you you get off track. it, you know, any type of life event, you maybe turn to food to numb your emotions or to deal with it or it just gets you off your plan, get you off your game. It kind of throws you off. And so, you need to learn some new techniques if you're in that profile, what you're going to do when life throws you a curveball because life will always be putting things in our our path that we can't control. And we've got to learn new ways to deal with that, not deal with it by eating or by by using food. >> Great tips, Dr. Holly White. Thank you. Great to be here.