Anyone can write the prescription. Protecting your muscle is the medicine.

Because the shot on its own is, in our view, the version most likely to leave you worse off in a year — and we've decided not to do it that way. Handed out without a training and nutrition plan, these medications strip muscle along with fat, quietly lower the metabolism that kept your weight in check, and set up a rebound that lands as fat once the medication stops. That isn't a hypothetical; it's the pattern. We use the same medications the online clinics do. The difference is everything we build around them, and the physician watching your labs and your body composition while you use them. If what you want is a subscription and a needle in the mail, we're honestly not the right clinic. If you want to be leaner and stronger and stay that way, we are.

When you lose weight quickly, some of it always comes from lean tissue — that's true of any diet. What's specific to these medications is how sharply they cut appetite, which makes it easy to under-eat protein and skip the stimulus that tells your body to hold onto muscle. In trials of the medications used on their own, a substantial share of the weight lost — by common estimates a quarter to a third, sometimes more — is lean mass rather than fat. Resistance training and adequate protein change that equation dramatically: together they signal your body to keep, and often build, muscle while the fat comes off. That's why they're built into the program from the first dose rather than offered as an afterthought.

That is the honest risk with the drug-only approach, and it's worth being clear about: when the medication stops, appetite returns, and studies show much of the lost weight tends to come back. Here's the part that matters most — if you lost muscle on the way down, you regain the weight as fat, on a body that now burns less at rest than when you started. That is how people end up worse off than before they began. Our entire program is built to prevent exactly this: preserve and build muscle throughout, so the body you're maintaining is metabolically stronger, and plan the transition off the medication deliberately rather than falling off it. Some people stay on a low maintenance dose long term, and that's a reasonable medical choice too — one we make with you, not for you.

Yes, and it's the part we're strictest about — with one exception. For the great majority of people we won't run the medication without a resistance-training plan, because without it we'd be helping you lose the muscle that protects your health and your result. The exception is the uncommon case where weight itself is the acute medical threat and the priority is to bring it down quickly; there the calculus shifts, and Dr. Chris makes that call with you. To be clear about what this involves: it is not bodybuilding and it does not require a hardcore gym. It's two to three manageable sessions a week, scaled to exactly where you're starting — enough to give your body the signal it needs.

We prescribe the branded, FDA-approved medications — semaglutide and tirzepatide — chosen and dosed for you by a physician. That distinction matters: because Dr. Chris is a licensed doctor writing a real prescription, you know exactly what you're getting and exactly how it should be dosed, rather than ordering 'research' peptides of uncertain origin off the internet. Which of the two, and at what dose, depends on your history, your goals and how you respond.

It's real, and it's mostly a story about losing the wrong tissue too fast. Rapid weight loss takes fat from the face along with everywhere else, and when muscle and overall tissue quality decline at the same time, the result can read as gaunt or aged rather than lean. The same things that protect the muscle on your frame — adequate protein, resistance training, and a loss that is steady rather than crash-fast — are what keep the change looking like health. It's one more reason we titrate deliberately instead of racing the dose upward.

Depth, supervision, and what we're actually measuring. A subscription optimizes for one number on a scale and a dose that climbs on a calendar. We start with comprehensive bloodwork and a body-composition baseline, pair the medication with the training and nutrition that make the loss durable, and have a physician — the same one, who knows your history — tracking your labs, your markers and your lean mass across the whole program. When something needs to change, there is a doctor accountable for changing it. That's the entire point of doing this in a medical clinic rather than through a mailbox.

We won't put a number on it before we've met you, and you should be a little skeptical of anyone who does. What we can tell you is what we aim for: fat loss rather than scale loss, muscle preserved or built along the way, and a result you can actually keep once the medication's job is done. How far and how fast depends on your starting point, your biology and how the plan fits your life — which is exactly what the baseline visit is for.