Compound
Everything we've written on GLP-1 — 7 articles covering the mechanism, the evidence, comparisons, and practical considerations.
7 articles
Food noise — the obsession with eating you can't think your way out of
It starts before breakfast is over. You're still eating and already thinking about lunch — what you'll have, whether that's too much, whether you should have eaten what you just ate, what you'll do to compensate. By mid-morning there's a quiet negotiation running in the background: if you skip the afternoon snack, you can have a real dinner. If you have the good lunch, maybe just a small dinner. You're not even hungry. You're just... in it. The loop is running whether you want it to or not.
The GLP-1 discovery deeper history — Holst, Mojsov, and the science before the drug
In 1982, Jens Juul Holst was working in a basement laboratory at the University of Copenhagen, trying to understand what the gut did with glucose. Not what happened in the bloodstream afterward. Not what the pancreas produced. What the gut itself was doing — the biochemical signaling that happened in the intestinal wall in the seconds and minutes after food arrived. It was methodical, unglamorous work: isolating intestinal tissue from pigs and dogs, running extracts through high-performance liquid chromatography, measuring immunoreactive peptide fractions that no one had fully characterized. One of those fractions kept showing up in a way that suggested it was derived from the glucagon gene but wasn't glucagon. It behaved differently. It appeared in the intestine rather than the pancreas. And it seemed, in preliminary experiments, to do something interesting to insulin secretion.
GLP-1s in perimenopause — when nothing else is working
You are eating the way you ate at thirty-five. You're training four days a week, sometimes five. You sleep reasonably well, you don't drink much, you track your food on and off and it's not dramatic. And the weight is still going in the wrong direction, or it isn't moving at all, or it's moving to your abdomen and waist in a way it never did before and no amount of core work touches it. You've been told it's stress. You've been told it's perimenopause and to just wait it out. You've been told your labs are normal. And you're standing in a body that feels like it's operating on entirely different rules than the one you've lived in for the last two decades.
Weight regain after stopping a GLP-1 — what's biological, what's behavioral, what to do
You lost thirty pounds over nine months. You ate less without fighting yourself about it, which was new. The background noise of food — the constant low-level negotiation between wanting something and deciding not to have it — went quiet in a way it never had before. And then, for whatever reason — cost, the medication becoming unavailable, your provider recommending a break, your own decision — you stopped. The quiet lasted maybe three weeks. And then the noise came back.
The decades arc of peptide research — what's changed and what's recurred
In 1921, Frederick Banting was a twenty-nine-year-old Canadian surgeon with a research idea that his department chairman at the University of Toronto considered unpromising. The idea was that insulin — the pancreatic secretion that had been hypothesized for decades to regulate blood sugar — could be isolated and used to treat diabetic patients who would otherwise die. Banting had read a paper about the pancreatic islet cells and had a method in mind for isolating their secretion without contaminating it with the destructive enzymes produced by surrounding tissue. His chairman, J.J.R. Macleod, gave him a laboratory, a summer, a young biochemist named Charles Best, and a collection of experimental dogs. By the end of that summer, the extract worked in dogs. By January 1922, Leonard Thompson — a fourteen-year-old diabetic patient near death in Toronto General Hospital — received the first injection in a human being. By the end of the century, the compound that Banting and Best partially purified in that summer laboratory had been re-engineered through recombinant DNA technology, was being produced by bacteria carrying a human gene, and was keeping approximately nine million Americans alive.
Semaglutide vs. tirzepatide: how to actually decide between them
You've done enough research to know that both medications are weekly injectables, that both work through GLP-1, that both have produced results in trials that made headlines. And now you're at the actual decision point — which one, and why — and the information available online tends to either oversimplify it ("tirzepatide is stronger, tirzepatide wins") or hedge so thoroughly it says nothing useful. The honest answer is that it depends on specific things about you, and those things can be named.
Why you can't quit the thing you meant to quit — what biology contributes
You made the decision months ago. You were going to drink less — or stop. Cut the sugar. Stop vaping. Spend less time on the thing that was eating your evenings. You meant it. You started. You held it for a few days, maybe a week, and then something happened — a stressful afternoon, a social situation, a moment of restlessness that required an answer — and you were back in the pattern you'd decided to leave. You tried again. You've tried several times by now. Each attempt begins with genuine intent and ends in a version of the same place. The explanation offered by most of your life — by culture, by most advice — is that you lack willpower. That the difference between people who quit and people who don't is discipline, character, sustained commitment to the thing they said they wanted.