People Will Drink Gasoline to Be Skinny

People will drink gasoline to be skinny. I've said it for years, and I mean it.

We know when something isn't right. We know it in our gut. But as long as the number on the scale keeps dropping, it's working, and working is all that seems to matter. People smoked cigarettes for decades knowing exactly what it was doing to them, because it kept them thin. People took diet pills that were flat-out addictive, and didn't care, because they were skinny. We have always been willing to trade our health for a smaller size, and we always find a new way to do it.

Then GLP-1s came along. Genuinely one of the most incredible tools medicine has handed us in decades. And somehow, we found a way to misuse this one too. I watched it happen with my own hands, on my own massage table, before a single client ever said a word to me about it.

I've been a massage therapist for nearly 35 years. I know what someone's body feels like when it's nourished and I know what it feels like when it's not. So when clients I'd worked on for years started showing up on my table thinner, and something about them just felt different under my hands — depleted, not toned — I knew something was wrong before they told me anything.

This was early on, when GLP-1s were just starting to explode. People were getting prescribed rapid weight loss doses with no plan for anything else. No lifestyle support. No conversation about protein or muscle. Just the dose, and good luck.

And it worked, in the sense that the scale moved. But watching it happen to people I already knew, on the same table I'd worked on them for years, I could see they weren't just losing fat. They were losing muscle right along with it. And nobody was telling them that mattered.

I started sending clients back to their prescribing doctor to say something wasn't right — that this was happening too fast, without the support that should've come with it.

And when clients brought their concerns back to their own doctors, they got blown off. They were told everything was fine, that the weight loss was safe. It wasn't. But the scale was moving, so nobody wanted to slow down and ask what else was moving along with it.

This was never just about the number

Here's what I needed people to understand then, and still need people to understand now: this was never just about the number on the scale. If someone loses weight fast without lifestyle support behind it, they're not just getting smaller. They're losing the muscle that keeps their metabolism working, their body strong, their results actually lasting. Then the weight comes back, because the muscle that would've held it off never had a chance.

This wasn't a flaw in GLP-1s. It was a flaw in how they were being handed out — no education, no plan, no one checking in to see what the body was actually doing underneath the number everyone was so excited about.

Why I had to lean into the educator side

That's exactly why I had to lean harder into the functional nutritionist side of my practice — the side of my work that needed to step forward in that moment. As a peptide specialist and wellness educator, understanding what these prescriptions actually do is exactly my job. What's out of my scope is prescribing or telling someone to change their dose — that's between them and their provider. But I can educate someone on what a dose is actually doing in their body, on what to watch for, on what their own tissue is trying to tell them — so they walk into that conversation with their provider already informed, already empowered to make the decision that's right for their body.

I never set out to become an educator on top of everything else I already do. I just couldn't keep quiet while people I cared about, and plenty of people I didn't even know, were being handed a fast result and nothing else. No explanation. No support. No one teaching them what their own body needed.

I did, and it turned into the whole second half of my career. And I love it. I'm having the time of my life doing this.

xo

~Jess

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