Deborah Rustad Facebook ad: “This is why some women max out on GLP-1 shots”

About this ad

Meta Ad Library ID

2010170923021279

Platforms

Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and Threads

Relaunches

0

Niche

Supplements & Wellness

How we count

Ad text

I do the check-in weights at a weight loss clinic. About 50 women a week on GLP-1. I see women max out their dose all the time and think they have to switch to a stronger drug. I tell them to do this instead. I’m a medical assistant at a medical weight loss clinic. I’m not going to say which one, and I’m not going to use anybody’s real name, because these women trust me with a number every week and I’m not going to abuse that. But I need to say this somewhere, because I’m not allowed to say it at work. And because some of you are about to make a decision I’ve watched play out from the best seat in the house. Here’s my job. You come in, I take you back, you step on the scale, I write the number down, I put you in a room. I also book the follow-ups, which matters for this story. I’ve done it for three years, about forty women a week, almost all on semaglutide or tirzepatide. Which means I see two things your provider doesn’t. I see the whole year, on everybody, at the same time. And because your dose is written right next to your weight in the chart, I see the ladder. You know the ladder if you’re on it. Start low. Lose beautifully. Slow down. Go up. Lose again, a little less this time. Slow down. Go up. Every rung buys a little less than the rung before. I’ve watched that shape so many times I could draw it with my eyes closed. And at the top of the ladder, there’s a speech. I hear it through the door. “You’re at the maximum dose. There’s nothing left to try. We could switch you to the other medication and start the titration over.” Nothing left to try. I’ve heard that sentence said to women who did every single thing right. Women with food logs. Women with 25 still to go. And here’s the part I’m really writing this for. The part only somebody at my desk gets to see. Most of them take the switch. And because I book the follow-ups, I watch what happens next. They start the new drug at the bottom. The first months are wonderful. The waiting room gets its success story back. Eight pounds, six pounds. “It’s so much stronger,” they tell me at the scale, and they’re not wrong, you can see it in the charts. And then, months in, on the new drug, on the way up the new ladder... the shape comes back. Each rung buying less. The stall. The same stall. I’ve weighed the same woman through her wall on drug one and her wall on drug two, eighteen months apart, and watched her face when the second one arrived. She recognized it before I did. Nobody talks about those women. The switching posts in the groups are all from month two of the new drug, when everything’s wonderful. The women in month nine of the new drug aren’t posting. They’re in my book. Then, last year, it was my turn. I’d started on the staff discount like half the staff does. And I climbed the whole ladder. Every rung bought me a few pounds and a couple of weeks of nausea, then less than the rung before. Thirty pounds total, and I’m not ungrateful for them, but I had 25 more to go, and at the top dose, the number just stopped. Five months. The maximum. Nothing. And my top-dose months looked like everyone else’s top-dose months, which is the detail I’d been writing down for three years without understanding it. The food noise wasn’t even gone. On the strongest dose in the building, a calm week was quiet, and a hard week, and I was having a hard year, my son’s family had moved back in with us after his job went, four extra people in a three bedroom house, the noise came straight back. Days after my shot. Standing at my own counter at 9pm having a conversation with a box of crackers, on the maximum dose of an appetite medication. Like stress had a manual override on the strongest version of the drug there is. And my sleep. It had gotten worse with every rung, and at the top it was the worst it’s ever been. Wired at 3am, heart doing something I could feel, watch flagging it, sleep score in the gutter. I’d heard patients describe that exact thing at the scale for three years. “Is it normal I sleep worse the higher I go?” I’d said, “I’ll mention it to the doctor.” Nobody ever did anything with it. Including for me. Labs, because of course. Thyroid, full panel, the works. Everything came back fine. And then the provider I work next to every day, a good clinician, someone I’d send my sister to, said it to me in the break room. “Deb, you’re at the maximum. There’s nothing left to try. We could switch you and start the titration over.” The speech. Through the door it takes about forty seconds. From the receiving end it takes the floor out. Because here’s what nothing left to try means when you take it home. On every other rung there was somewhere to put the blame. The dose was too low. At the top there’s nowhere left. If the maximum doesn’t work on you, you’re not underdosed anymore. You’re the problem. When I pushed, I got the version patients get. “Are you weighing everything?” I weigh people for a living. “Some patients just top out.” And from the office manager, “you of all people know how this goes. Take the switch. Everyone takes the switch.” Everyone takes the switch. I went and stood in the records room, between the filing cabinets, and cried where nobody could see me. Because I of all people knew exactly how it goes. I’d weighed how it goes. Eighteen months from now I’d be at the top of the second ladder, at the same wall, and there is no speech for that one. I’ve never once heard a speech for the top of ladder two. That night at 1am I googled “maxed out semaglutide switch tirzepatide stall.” The switching forums. Month two posts, everything’s wonderful. I scrolled for the month nine posts. You have to dig for them. They’re there. “Stalled again, same as the first drug, doctor says give it time.” Every one of them read like my book. I drafted my answer to the provider. “Let’s do the switch.” It sat in my phone. Unsent. Because I kept thinking about the one chart in three years that didn’t have a ladder in it. I’ll call her Bev. Bev had been coming in for over a year. Early dose. Never once went up. And her number never stopped. Not fast, a few pounds a month, but it never stopped, through the holidays, through what I happened to know was a rough year for her, because you hear things at the scale. No speech. No switch. Just down, steadily, on a dose most of my book had left behind in their first six months. I’d been quietly fascinated by her chart for a year. The week after my speech, fascination stopped being the word. At her next check-in, I asked. Quietly, off the record, while she was taking off her shoes. “Can I ask you something? What are you doing that nobody else in this building is doing?” She laughed. “You’re going to be mad.” “Why would I be mad?” “Because it’s something my other doctor made me start before my first shot here. It costs about $30. And I assumed you all knew, because she acted like it was standard.” Her other doctor. A functional medicine doctor across town. Before Bev’s first injection, that doctor told her something Bev had written down in her phone. She showed me, standing at my scale in her socks. “Every woman I put on these medications starts magnesium first. Because the shot is about to create the exact deficiency that stops it from working. And the higher they climb on the dose, the faster it digs.” I read it twice. Magnesium? I TAKE magnesium. Every night. Since week two. For, let’s say, the reason every woman on these shots ends up taking it. We tell patients to take it. The bottle from the drugstore was on my nightstand that morning. “What kind?” The drugstore kind. I had no idea there were kinds. We’d been recommending it for three years and nobody in the building knew there were kinds. “That’s the problem. Wrong form. Let her explain it the way she explained it to me. Because it explains your whole ladder. Everybody’s ladder.” So here it is, the way Bev gave it to me, in her socks at my scale. Your stress response works like a thermostat. Turns up under pressure, turns back down after. Magnesium is the fuel that lets it turn back down. When you’re depleted, the thermostat sticks on high, and your body reads that as an emergency. An emergency means storage mode. Hold onto everything. Release nothing. The shot quiets your appetite. It does nothing about storage mode. So you can take your foot off the gas all you want. Stress is still standing on the brake. Now here’s the trap, and three years inside a weight loss clinic never once covered it. Almost all of your magnesium comes from food. Most women over 50 are already running low. Stress burns it, medications drain it, even the soil our food grows in has less than it used to. Then you start a GLP-1, and suddenly you’re eating half of what you ate before. The drug is doing its job perfectly. But half the food means half the magnesium. “Now look at the ladder,” Bev said. “Every rung up means eating less than the rung before. Less food, less magnesium, deeper hole. The top dose is where everybody’s eating the least they’ve ever eaten. Your maximum isn’t where the drug is most powerful. It’s where the tank is emptiest.” “That’s why every rung buys less than the one before. The drug gets stronger and the buffer gets thinner at the same time.” And then she said the part that only made sense to somebody with my job. “And that’s why the switch doesn’t save them. The new drug starts at the bottom, so they eat a little more again, the hole fills a little, and it works, for a while. Then the new ladder starts cutting the food again, rung by rung, and the hole opens back up. They switched the drug. Nobody switched the math.” I stood at my scale and watched three years of charts rearrange themselves. The ladder shape, on everybody. The top-dose women sleeping worst and being told it’s anxiety. The switch, the honeymoon, the second wall. The same woman’s face at wall one and wall two. And Bev, flat dose, full tank, never a speech. “My dose is smaller than anyone’s,” she said, putting her shoes back on. “But my body isn’t fighting it. The ladder was never measuring the drug. It was measuring the hole.” I pushed back. Obviously. I work in a clinic. “We run labs on everybody. Everybody comes back normal.” “You check everything that comes back normal. A standard test measures the magnesium in your blood. Almost all of it lives inside your cells, and no routine panel looks there. You can be starving at the cellular level and pass every test. Nobody checked mine either. Nobody checks anyone’s.” Everything we tested, on everybody, was fine. The thing that wouldn’t have been fine, nobody tested. We had a sentence instead. Nothing left to try. And a sentence is where the investigating stops. “This sounds like the cortisol girls on Instagram,” I said. “The moon face videos. If a supplement fixed stress we’d all be taking it.” “I said the exact same thing to her,” Bev said. “And she said, I’m not selling you a cortisol detox. Your medication changed how much you eat. When you eat that little, you replace what’s missing or your body fights the drug. That’s not a trend. That’s arithmetic. And the women at the top of the ladder are eating less than anyone, so for them it’s more arithmetic, not less.” “But I’ve been taking magnesium this whole time.” “Wrong form. The type in the bottle you have never made it to where it matters.” She took a light blue bag out of her purse. SPNutrition. Magnesium bisglycinate gummies. “This is the kind my doctor specifically told me to take. Bisglycinate. Not just whatever bottle says magnesium on the front. Absorption is up to 90%.” And the gummy is the other half. Because you chew it, it breaks down like food unlike a pill, so your body treats it like food. These shots slow your stomach way down, so that matters more than it sounds. And at the top dose, my stomach was barely moving at all. A pill could sit in there half the day. Two gummies before bed. That was the whole protocol. That was the thing I was going to be mad about. Three years of charts. A ladder I’d climbed to the top of. A switch sitting drafted in my phone. And the difference between Bev’s chart and every other chart in my book was a $30 bag her other doctor treats as standard care. I still half didn’t believe her, so I went home and researched for three hours. The studies on magnesium and the stress response. The nutrient gaps that show up when people eat this little. The switching forums again, which I now read differently, because the month nine posts weren’t describing a drug failing. They were describing the same empty tank wearing a new label. It all checked out. I’d scrolled past this stuff for three years assuming it was scammy. Some of it is. The arithmetic isn’t. I ordered that night. And I never sent the switch message. 60 day money back guarantee. I’d just been offered a whole new ladder as my best option. $35 was not the risk in my life. Day one, nothing. I want to be honest about that. End of week one, I was falling asleep faster. The forty minutes of ceiling staring shrank to ten. Week two is when it happened. I slept through the night. Straight through, no 3am, first time since my son’s family moved in. Even shot night. My watch noticed before I did. And that Friday, I stepped on my own scale at work before anyone was in, and the number moved. Two pounds. In one week. After five months of nothing, on the dose that was “done.” And here’s the part I need to be precise about, because I know exactly how a chart gets read. Nothing about my medication changed. Same drug. Same maximum dose. The exact dose there was nothing left after. Same food scale, same notebook, same house with six people in it. The medication hadn’t topped out. There was never anything wrong with the maximum. My body finally had the fuel to stop fighting it. Weeks three and four, steady. A pound, sometimes two, most weeks. The way the bottom rung had felt, except it didn’t fade. Then a genuinely bad stretch at home, the kind that used to freeze my scale solid, and the noise stayed quiet straight through it. That’s when I actually believed it. Down 14 more as I write this. My chart looks like Bev’s now. Same rung, no wall. For five months I thought I’d gotten everything the drug had to give. That the ladder had measured me and found my limit. And I was one unsent message away from betting eighteen more months and thousands more dollars on a second ladder I already knew the top of, because I’d weighed the women standing on it. The ladder never measured me. Every rung up meant less food, and less food meant less magnesium, and the top of the ladder is where the tank runs emptiest. The drug didn’t run out at the top. The fuel did. And it would have run out at the top of the next one too. And not one person in a white coat thought to look for it. I want to be fair, because I work with these people and they are not villains. They’re trained to adjust the dose. When the dose runs out, they’re trained to switch the drug. Nobody is trained to ask what two years of eating half your food has been draining. Here’s the part that bothers me most. I still work there. I still do the check-in weights. I still book the follow-ups. And every week I check in another woman at the top of her ladder, watch the door close, and hear the speech. Nothing left to try. We could switch you. And I am not allowed to say one word. So I’m writing this instead. For her, whoever she is this week. I still take my injection every Sunday night. Same drug, same maximum dose, never switched, and whether switching is right for anyone else is between them and their provider. It just turned out the question I needed answered was never which drug. I still have stress, all six of us under one roof of it. I just stopped running on empty. Every night before bed, two gummies. Thirty seconds to chew. My magnesium replenishes, my body comes off high alert, and the strongest dose I’d already climbed to finally gets to act like it. That should be standard care for every woman starting these injections. And doubly so for every woman near the top of the ladder, eating less than anyone, being told she’s out of options. Bev’s other doctor treats it that way. My clinic offers a different ladder. If you’re at or near the maximum and the scale stopped anyway... If every increase bought you less than the one before... If you just got the nothing-left speech and there’s a switch sitting drafted in your phone... If you’re already on drug two and the shape is coming back and nobody warned you it could... If you already take magnesium, the drugstore kind, every single night, because a clinic like mine told you to... If your sleep has gotten worse with every rung and you’re wide awake at 3am on the top one... I’m not saying you definitely have a magnesium deficiency. I’m a medical assistant, not a doctor, and I’ll say that as many times as I need to. But I’ve spent three years watching ladders from the best seat in the house, and I’ve watched exactly one chart that never needed one, and before you start a whole new ladder, I’d want you to know what I knew when I deleted that message. Spend $35 finding out if it was ever the ladder. SPNutrition is a small company. They make their gummies in limited batches using pure magnesium bisglycinate, the specific form Bev’s doctor put her on from the beginning. Right now they’re running a sale. I checked the site this morning and ordered a second bag for a woman I love who is three weeks into the stronger drug after maxing out the first one. Her month two is wonderful. I want her month nine to be too. I can’t say that to a patient. I can say it to her. To be honest, I panicked a little when I saw the sale banner, because every time they run one of these, they sell out fast. They have a 60 day money back guarantee too. Two full months. That’s longer than it took me to feel the difference. If nothing changes, you get every penny back, no questions asked. But if it works? If by the end of week one you’re falling asleep without the ceiling staring? If by week two the 3am wake ups stop and your number moves for the first time in months, on the dose they told you was finished? You’ll wish you’d started it the same day as your first shot, all the way down on the bottom rung of ladder one. I know I do. Anyway, I’m linking an article below that explains the magnesium link better than I can. Just take 2 minutes to read it. 👇 https://spnutrition-us.com/pages/advertorial-magnesium

Where the ad sends people

spnutrition-us.com

This is why some women max out on GLP-1 shots

Read more