GLP-1 and Bone Health Support Group

9g Collagen with Calcium, D3, K2 and Magnesium

I spent 22 years running bone density scans. More than 30,000 women lay down on my table. And I'm about to tell you what I watched happen on that screen to the ones who had just lost a lot of weight, fast. Something I never once said out loud. I'm saying it now. If you're on a weekly shot, or you've lost 30 pounds or more this past year, what follows is about you. I've been retired two years. There's no supervisor to answer to anymore and no radiologist down the hall. I'm 59. I help run this page and a private group of about 3,100 women on the weekly weight-loss shot, and I'm on it myself. Rick, my husband, says I've told him this at the dinner table a dozen times. He says it's time I told the people it's actually for. I was a radiology technologist at a hospital outpatient center in Ohio, mostly running bone density scans. DEXA, if you've had one. You lie on a padded table in a paper gown. An arm slides over you, slow and quiet. Hip. Spine. Sometimes the wrist. The woman on the table looks at the ceiling tiles. I looked at the screen. Grey shadows. A spine stacked in rows. When bone is thick, it glows almost white. When it's thinning, it goes grey and soft at the edges, like a photocopy of a photocopy. A tech isn't allowed to read you your scan. That's the radiologist's job. So for 22 years I said the same sentence to every woman who sat up and asked me how it looked. "Your doctor will go over the results with you." Then I'd watch from the window as they folded the printout into their purse and walked across the parking lot to go to lunch. And in 22 years, I watched the same grey creep onto that screen in women who had followed every instruction they were given. Women who took their calcium every morning. Women who walked the mall at 7am. Women who had finally lost the weight, and came in glowing about it. By the book. Bone loss has no symptoms. Nothing aches. Nothing warns you. About 1 in 2 women over 50 will break a bone because of it, and often the break is the first sign anyone sees. Two names have stayed with me longer than the rest. Eileen, in 2011. Connie, in 2024. I said the same nine words to both of them. Eileen Marsh was 66. A retired church organist with long fingers and a laugh you could hear down the hall. Her hip came up grey. Her lower spine came up greyer. Her doctor told her what doctors told women in 2011. Take a calcium tablet. Walk more. So she did. A calcium tablet every morning with her orange juice. Around the block after supper, rain or shine. Eileen came back for her follow-up scan two years later. She was folded forward at the shoulders. She had to turn her whole body to look at me. Two vertebrae in her lower back had settled down on themselves like a stack of crackers somebody had leaned on. She hadn't fallen. She'd bent over to pick up a hymnal. Eight months after that, she stepped down off her back porch with a bag of trash and her hip broke. She lay on the concrete under the clothesline for about two hours before a neighbor heard her. She never went home. About 1 in 5 people over 65 who break a hip die within a year. Eileen died in a nursing home in March, eleven months after the porch. That summer her daughter found me in the hallway and asked me, quietly, if there was anything that would have shown up sooner. Anything her mother could have done besides the calcium and the walking. I had seen the grey in 2011. I said what I'd been trained to say. "I'm so sorry. Her doctor would be the one to ask." She thanked me. She thanked me. Connie Dunbar lay down on my table thirteen years later. It was 2024. She was 57. Ran the front office at a dental practice. Bright pink reading glasses on a beaded chain. She had a baseline scan in the system from two years earlier. Back then, her bones were fine. Not perfect. Fine. Eileen had the old advice. Connie had the newest tools there are, and she used them well. She'd lost 52 pounds in about ten months. Her doctor was thrilled. She showed me a photo on her phone. Connie in a sleeveless navy dress at her son's wedding, the first sleeveless dress she'd worn in fifteen years. I told her she looked beautiful, because she did. She told me, proud, that she ate like a bird now. Coffee and a few crackers until noon. Three or four bites of dinner. "I'm just not hungry anymore, Jennifer. It's wonderful." She was there because six weeks earlier she'd broken her wrist. Her office had taken her out to lunch to celebrate her 50th pound. Walking back to her car, her heel caught the edge of a parking lot curb. She put her hand out. The wrist went. A curb. I ran her scan and watched it come up beside her baseline. Her hip had gone grey in two years. The edges had gone soft on the screen, like the picture was out of focus. Her lower spine looked like it belonged to a woman fifteen years older. I said, "Your doctor will go over the results with you." She folded the printout and tucked it in her purse. Seven months later, her name came up on my schedule again. She came down the hallway in a wheelchair, with a walker folded across her lap like a lawn chair. She'd broken her hip climbing out of the bathtub. Not off a ladder. Out of a bathtub. More than 95% of broken hips start with a fall. Most of them are falls like that. She was living in her daughter's spare room now. A twin bed. A commode beside it. And the navy dress hanging in a dry cleaner's bag on the closet door, because she couldn't make herself give it away. When I helped her onto the table, she looked up at me and said, "I did everything right this time. Didn't I?" I stood at that screen a long time after she left. Connie had done more right than Eileen ever got the chance to. And the bone on my screen was worse. Faster. Younger. Nobody told her. Nobody told her the scale only counts what leaves. It never tells you what it was. There's something else I never told anybody, not even Rick. Around 2016, I started noticing a different kind of woman on my table. Women who'd just lost forty, fifty, sixty pounds, fast, and were so happy about it. So I stuck a yellow sticky note inside my locker door. Every time one of those women came through, I made a mark. Connie was number 197. When I cleaned out my locker two years ago, that note had 212 marks on it. I peeled it off the door and put it in my wallet, behind my driver's license. 212 women. Celebrating. Folding their printouts into their purses. Going to lunch. That's what I carried out of that building. Here is the part I have to own. Fourteen months ago, in August, I started a weekly weight-loss shot. My doctor and I decided on it together. I'm down 46 pounds. I'm grateful for it, I'm still on it, and my doctor runs my prescription. Three months in, I started a Facebook group for women on the shot. I figured maybe forty of us would trade recipes. It's 3,100 women now. The first thing I pinned to the top of it was a post I wrote at my kitchen table at 11 at night. "Celebrate the number. You've earned every pound." And every week, the same posts came in under it. "Anyone else's rings sliding off?" "I'm freezing all the time." "I can't finish a meal. Is that normal?" "I'm done for the day by two o'clock." And every week, I cheered. Hearts on every one. Celebrate the number. I had a sticky note with 212 marks on it in my wallet. I had watched Connie Dunbar come down that hallway in a wheelchair. And I was cheering for the exact thing I'd watched on that screen. Then the other posts started. A wrist in a purple cast, captioned "Guess I'm clumsy now." A woman who couldn't get up off her kitchen floor until her son came by. A daughter posting from her mother's account, because her mother couldn't hold the phone. I read every one of those at my kitchen table. And every time, I thought about my mother. My mother's name was Opal. She took a calcium tablet every morning for thirty years. She kept them in a little dish by the coffee maker, and she'd tap the dish with one finger and say, "Not me, honey. I'm covered." When she was 74, she brought me the paper from her own bone scan, because she didn't understand it. I looked at it for maybe ten seconds. I'd seen ten thousand like it. "Just keep taking your calcium, Mom." She was so relieved. She folded it into her purse. At 81 she stepped down off the church van after Wednesday supper, and her hip broke. She had surgery, then rehab, then a nursing home. She never went home again. She died at 82, in a room that smelled like somebody else's laundry. I was the expert in the family. I gave her one word. And there I was, with 22 years of scans behind me, giving 3,100 women the same kind of answer. So I did what my mother did. What half my group was doing. I bought things. Calcium chews, the caramel ones, two a day. Protein shakes I couldn't get halfway through on the shot; by January there were five half-full bottles sweating in the fridge door. A pink collagen tub with a woman's glowing face on the lid, because my hair was coming out in the shower drain. A "joint" pill for my knees on the stairs. Four bottles on my kitchen windowsill by the end of January. Forgotten by Thursday. I'd spent 22 years looking at bone on a screen, and I had no idea whether anything I was swallowing ever got there. In February I spent 70 minutes on my own bathroom floor after the bath mat slid. That's a story for another day. My doctor kept my prescription right where it was and ordered a scan. Bev Tran ran it for me in April. Bev ran scans beside me for 19 years. She's 60, she still runs that room, and she has never once in her life waited to be asked for her opinion. She ran my scan after the last patient of the day. I'm not going to talk about my number here. That's between me and my doctor. What I want to tell you about is what Bev did after. She shut the door, sat me down on the same padded table where I'd watched 30,000 women lie down, and said, "Tell me what you're doing about it." I told her all of it. The group. The pinned post. My mother. The chews. The shakes. The windowsill. She listened. Then she said, "Jen, you've been looking at this wrong for 22 years." "Bev." "I'm serious." She tore a strip off the paper roll on the table and took a pen out of her scrub pocket. "What does that machine measure?" "Mineral." "Right. Calcium, mostly. That's what lights up white. But bone isn't chalk. Bone is a frame. A living frame made of collagen, with mineral laid down on it. About 90% of the protein in bone is collagen. The machine can't see the frame. It only sees what's stuck to it." She drew a box of crisscrossed lines on the paper. Then she put dots along the lines. "Lines are the frame. Dots are the mineral. You need both. And your body makes less collagen every year, and faster once your periods stop." She tapped the paper. "Bone isn't a rock, Jen. It's living tissue. Most of your skeleton gets replaced about every ten years. You are building your hip right now. Out of whatever you fed it this week." Then she poked me in the stomach. "So what did you feed it this week?" I didn't answer. "When women lose a lot of weight, especially fast, it isn't only fat. In one big trial of a weekly shot, nearly 4 in 10 pounds people lost were lean tissue, not fat. And a 2026 study of 255 people on the newer shots found the more weight they lost, the more bone they lost at the hip." "I'm not quitting my shot, Bev." "Did I say quit? Your doctor runs your shot. Keep it. I'm talking about your plate. You're eating maybe a third of what you used to. That means far fewer nutrients are getting to your skeleton. Same bones. Same rebuilding. A fraction of the supplies." She pointed at the dots. "Your chews. Your mother's tablets. That's the one-word answer. Calcium. Dots with no lines. Calcium isn't useless. It just can't do the whole job alone." She pointed at the lines. "Your shakes. Protein first, yes, every meal. But half a bottle in the fridge door isn't a meal. And that pink tub is for your face." I folded that strip of paper into my purse. 22 years, and I'd finally done what all my patients did. Then I did what everybody does next. I went shopping again. I doubled the chews. Four a day. I bought a separate K2. A separate vitamin C. I turned the joint pill box over in the car and read the back. About 1,000mg of collagen in a two-capsule serving. One gram. By the next Thursday, all of it was lined up on the windowsill next to the tub, and I'd forgotten every bottle. Bev came over for lunch on a Saturday in May. She walked into my kitchen, saw the windowsill, and held up the pink tub like a dead mouse. "Jen. What is this." "You know what it is." "And this?" The joint pill. "Read me the collagen." "A thousand milligrams. Two capsules." "That's a sprinkle. Studies on collagen peptides commonly use 2.5 to 15 grams a day. And you're never going to remember six bottles. Nobody does." Then she reached into her purse and set a bag on my counter. "Same thing I've done every morning for a year and a half. DensiaPlus. One scoop. In your coffee. Stop arguing with me." She stirred one into my mug right there. I stood watching it, waiting for the clumps. There weren't any. It just disappeared. The coffee tasted like coffee. Then, before she sat down: "And Jen. Protein first, every meal, before anything else on the plate. Lift something every day. Soup cans are fine. And practice getting up off that floor every night." I took the strip of paper out of my purse and checked the back of the bag against it, line by line, the way I used to check a patient's name against the order. The lines. 9 grams of collagen peptides. The joint pill had one. The dots. Calcium, and magnesium, because about 60% of the magnesium in your body is in your bones. Vitamin D3, because without enough D you absorb only a small fraction of the calcium you take. Vitamin K2, the MK-7 kind, because it switches on osteocalcin, the protein that binds calcium into bone. Vitamin C, because your body needs it to make collagen. Zinc and boron. All of it in one scoop. In the one thing I still drink every morning, even on the days I can't face food. I ordered it that afternoon. My own bag came the following Wednesday. Bev made me write one more line at the bottom of that paper strip, and I'll pass it on the way she said it. Collagen isn't a complete protein and it doesn't replace protein-rich meals. So the scoop goes in my coffee, and then protein comes first. Two eggs, even when I'm not hungry. Cottage cheese at lunch. Chicken at dinner, even if it's four bites. I haven't missed a morning since. Here's what the months have actually looked like. No miracles. Just mornings. Week 1, I ate two eggs every day and hated every bite. The scoop went in at 6am before I was awake enough to argue with it. Week 2, Kayla, my daughter, came home off a night shift and dropped the pink tub in the trash without a word. Week 3, the bottles came off the windowsill. Rick carried the bag to the curb like it was a ceremony. Week 6, I logged one ordinary Tuesday of food in my phone. More than double the protein of the Tuesday before Bev's lunch. Still not where my doctor's nurse wants it. Closer. Month 4, Kayla came home for Sunday dinner and watched me put the chicken on my plate first. She just nodded. I lift soup cans in the kitchen while the coffee brews. Rick bought me a pair of pink 5-pound dumbbells for my birthday. I still use the soup cans. Don't tell him. Every night before bed, I put a folded quilt on the living room rug, sit down on it and get back up. Rick counts. The first week I needed the couch and his knee. That's what practice is for. The sticky note isn't in my wallet anymore. It's taped inside the cabinet door above the coffee maker. I see it every morning when I reach for the scoop. I'm still on my shot. My doctor still runs it. At every weigh-in now I ask him one question: "What am I keeping?" Bev is rescanning me next spring. I don't know what it'll say. Nobody can see that from the outside, and I won't pretend I can. And this month I took "Celebrate the number" down from the top of my group. I wrote a new pinned post. I told them about the scan room, and the frame and the mineral, and the sticky note. I told them I'd been wrong. Then I asked them to log one ordinary day of food and post the protein number. By the next morning there were over 900 comments. 29 grams. 34 grams. 22 grams. Photos of fridge doors full of half-finished shakes. A pantry shelf with three pink tubs on it. One woman in Tennessee wrote that she'd been down 61 pounds and proud of it, and that she'd just realized she hadn't eaten an egg since spring. Another wrote, "I've been counting pounds for a year. Nobody ever asked me to count anything else." And over and over, the same sentence. "My mother broke her hip too." I read every one of them at the kitchen table until 1am. Rick brought me a blanket and sat down across from me. Kayla is an ER nurse. She sees the hips come in on night shift. Women in their 50s and 60s, down forty pounds, on the bathroom floor at 3am. She read my post on her break and called me from the ambulance bay. All she said was, "Mom. Finally." If I could go back to that table in 2024, I wouldn't try to read Connie her scan. I'm still not allowed to. I'd ask her what she ate for breakfast. I'd ask her what she was keeping. And I'd tell her the thing I learned 22 years too late, from the woman at the next screen. The machine only sees the mineral. The scale only sees what leaves. Nothing on the outside sees the frame. I think about Eileen Marsh on the concrete under her clothesline. I think about Connie Dunbar in her daughter's spare room, with that navy dress on the closet door. I think about my mother folding her scan paper into her purse at 74, because I told her she was fine. I think about 212 women going to lunch, and me saying, "Your doctor will go over the results with you." I'm not saying it anymore. If your rings are sliding off. If you're cold when nobody else is. If you need a hand on the couch to get up off the floor, and you laugh it off. If dinner fits on a saucer now. If you've caught your toe on a curb lately and blamed the shoes. If your mother shrank. Or broke a hip. If there's a pink tub in your pantry, chews in your cabinet, or half a shake in your fridge door. If you've only ever counted what's coming off. Bone loss has no symptoms. The scale only counts what leaves. And nobody is going to tell you. So I am. Your shot is between you and your doctor. Eat your protein first. Practice the floor. And feed the frame along with the mineral, every morning. I wrote the whole story up on one page: the scan room, the bathroom floor, what Bev drew on that strip of paper, and the one question I ask at every weigh-in now. It's the link under this post. DensiaPlus is 9 grams of collagen with calcium, magnesium, vitamin D3, vitamin K2 (MK-7), vitamin C, zinc and boron. One scoop in your morning coffee. That's the whole routine. Right now it's up to 70% off: buy 2 bags, get 1 free, or buy 3, get 2 free. It comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, empty or full. Count what you keep. P.S. If you take a blood thinner like warfarin, talk to your doctor before starting anything with vitamin K, this included. Calcium can affect how some medications are absorbed, so ask your doctor or pharmacist about timing. Keep taking everything you've been prescribed. P.P.S. The sticky note still has 212 marks on it. I haven't added one since I retired, and I don't plan to. If you're in my group, I'd rather you post your protein number than your weight this Wednesday. P.P.P.S. Up to 70% off: buy 2, get 1 free, or buy 3, get 2 free. You have 90 days to decide, and the guarantee covers an empty bag the same as a full one.