With around 12 percent of Americans using GLP-1 agonist injections to manage weight, a new study sheds light on why some struggle to lose fat with this treatment. GLP-1 medications mimic the hormone glucagon-like peptide-1, which regulates blood sugar and suppresses appetite, originally developed for type 2 diabetes treatment.
Researchers from Japan tracked 92 individuals with type 2 diabetes on GLP-1 drugs, exploring weight loss and eating behavior patterns such as emotional eating, external eating (eating triggered by sight or smell of food), and restrained eating (calorie restriction).
The findings revealed that individuals prone to emotional eating or restrictive diets lost less weight than those who eat in response to external cues. Emotional eating may be driven by psychological factors less affected by GLP-1 medications.
Professor Daisuke Yabe emphasized that pre-treatment assessment of eating behavior could predict weight loss success and guide treatment.
While promising, larger clinical trials are needed before such assessments become routine in weight management therapy.
