GLP-1 and Bone Health Support Group

Losing weight on a GLP-1 shot has 4 stages

Losing weight on a GLP-1 shot has 4 stages. Women post about the first two with pictures, and they post about the fourth from the floor. Almost nobody posts about stage 3. If you're six months in, you're rarely hungry, and the jar lids have started going to somebody else in the house, you may be in stage 3 right now. I know the stages because I've spent 11 months reading the posts of about 3,100 women on the shot. And because I sat in stage 3 myself all last winter and never knew it had a name. My name is Jennifer Miller. I'm 59, and I live in Ohio. For 22 years I was a radiology technologist at a hospital outpatient center, most of those years on the bone density scanner. I scanned more than 30,000 women before I retired in the fall of 2024. In August 2025 my doctor and I decided on a weekly weight-loss shot. I take it on Wednesday mornings. I'm down 46 pounds, I'm still on it, and I'm grateful for it every week. My doctor runs my prescription. Nothing in this post is against the shot, or your doctor, or anybody's medicine. It did what it was supposed to do. It took the weight off. In November 2025 I started a private Facebook group for women on the shot. There are about 3,100 of us now. I help run this page, and the private group behind it. In March of this year I searched the group for one question: "Has anyone else broken something?" 63 posts came up. This October I went back through all 11 months and counted 174 posts that mentioned a fall. After that search in March I started doing something I never did in 22 years at the scan room. When a fall post came in, I clicked on the woman's name and scrolled back through everything she had ever posted, all the way to her first week. The posts come in the same order nearly every time. Four stages. Most of the time I could tell you the month a woman moved from one stage to the next, just from what she posted. I'm going to walk you through all four, because most of us only hear "down 40" and assume everything underneath is fine. Nobody knows what the stages look like until she's lying in the last one. --- Stage 1. The appetite goes. This is the stage everyone posts about, and it's a good one. For most women it starts in the first few weeks. The noise in your head about food goes quiet. The 3 p.m. trip to the pantry stops. You forget lunch and don't notice until supper. The posts sound like this. "Left half a sandwich on my plate and didn't even think about it." "First time in 30 years I'm not hungry at 9 at night." "Down 10 the first month!!" I cheer for every one. I wrote posts like that myself. I was down 10 pounds my first month and 20 by Halloween. That quiet is what the shot is for. Your doctor wanted it for you, and it works. What nobody says in stage 1 is that the food you stop eating carried more than calories. It carried the protein, the calcium, the magnesium and the vitamins your body has counted on every day for 50 or 60 years. The shot turns the hunger down. Your body still needs all of it. Nothing goes wrong in stage 1. Stage 2. The plate shrinks. Somewhere around month two or three, the plate itself changes. Women post pictures of it. Four bites of chicken and a spoonful of rice, with a caption like "This is supper now!" One woman posted her Easter dinner on a bread plate: half a deviled egg, a strip of ham the width of two fingers and a spoonful of potato salad. "Look how far I've come." It got more than 200 hearts. One of them was mine. My plate looked like that too. Half a yogurt. A few bites of chicken. Crackers. Coffee. When you eat that little, there's less room for the nutrients food used to supply. Less protein. Less calcium. Less magnesium. Less vitamin C. Your body doesn't give your bones a special allowance because you're losing weight. They get what's left. Bone is living tissue. One set of cells takes old bone away and another set lays new bone down, every day you're alive. Most of your adult skeleton gets replaced about every 10 years. Stage 2 still looks like winning. The scale goes down every Wednesday. The jeans won't stay up. Your doctor is pleased. Stage 2 gets more hearts than any other stage in my group. Stage 3. Protein falls. This is the one nobody posts about. It's also the most dangerous one. In stage 3 the plate is small and it stays small, and protein is the first thing to go. The meat gets left on the side. The eggs get skipped because the smell turns your stomach. The protein shakes you bought in stage 2 sit in the fridge door a third finished. Coffee and crackers carry you to supper, and supper is four bites. Nobody takes a picture of a shake she didn't finish. There's nothing to celebrate and nothing to show. So stage 3 is the gap in every woman's posts. The pictures go straight from the bread plate to the floor. If you scroll back, though, stage 3 is there. It hides in the little posts. "Is it just me or did pickle jars get tighter this year?" "Nobody warned me my rings would spin on my fingers." I wrote that one. "I hold the stair rail every time now. Getting old I guess LOL." "Why am I cold all the time?" "I have to rock two or three times to get off my own couch." Nobody reads those as a stage. They read like birthdays. Here's what I think is going on in stage 3, after 22 years of watching bone on a screen. When a woman loses weight, especially fast, the weight she loses can include lean tissue as well as fat. Lean tissue is muscle, and the other parts of you that aren't fat. The scale gives you one number. It can't tell you which is which. The scale only counts what leaves. Muscle opens the jar. Muscle holds you on the stairs and stands you up off the couch. When the jar goes to your husband and the stair rail turns into a habit, your body is telling you something the scale can't. Under the muscle is the bone. My friend Bev Tran still runs the scan room where I worked. She drew bone for me once on a strip of paper torn off the scan table roll. Crossed lines first. "That's the collagen frame." Then dots of ink all along the lines. "That's the mineral." Collagen is about 90% of bone's organic framework. It's the woven protein the mineral settles onto. Calcium is the hard part, and it helps build and maintain strong bones. Magnesium is in there too. About 60% of the magnesium in your whole body sits in your bones. To build the frame, your body needs protein to start with. It needs vitamin C, because it can't form collagen without it. It needs copper, which cross-links the collagen fibers so they hold together. To lay mineral onto the frame, it needs calcium. It needs vitamin D3, because without enough D your body absorbs only a small fraction of the calcium you take in. It needs vitamin K2, which activates a protein called osteocalcin that helps bind calcium into bone. Every bit of that comes from what you eat. In stage 3, what you eat has mostly stopped. Nothing hurts in stage 3. Your labs can look fine. Your doctor is happy with your weight. You're tired by 4 and cold by supper, and you blame your age. It feels like nothing. That's why it's the dangerous one. I was in stage 3 from about December to February. I had four bottles on my kitchen windowsill and a fridge door full of shakes my husband Rick called the graveyard. I didn't have a name for any of it. Stage 4. The floor gets hard. This is the stage that finally gets posted, usually with a photo. In stage 4, getting down and getting back up stops being something you do without thinking. You go down on the back step, the bath mat, the curb, the wet leaves. And then, more often than anyone admits, you can't get back up. The posts sound like this. "Down 41!! Oh, and I took a tumble yesterday LOL." A purple knee. A wrist in a splint. "Clumsy me." Mine came on a Tuesday afternoon in late February, when the bath mat slid and I lay on my bathroom tile for 70 minutes until Rick came home at 5:10. Nothing broke. I'd been in stage 3 for three months and nobody had seen it. That includes me, and I'd spent 22 years looking at bone. --- Earlier this month a message came in that I've thought about every day since. She's 62. She does the books for her son's plumbing business from her kitchen table, and she lives alone in a one-story house. She's been on the shot since December 2025 with her own doctor, and she's down 37 pounds. She asked me not to use her name, and I won't. She gave me permission to share her words. On Sunday, October 11, at about 5:50 in the morning, she got out of bed to use the bathroom. Her foot caught in the top sheet, which had slid off the end of the mattress, and she went down sideways onto the bedroom carpet. Her right hip hit first. This is what she sent me that afternoon. "Jennifer, I don't know who else to tell. I wasn't hungry from week two. By Valentine's Day I was eating supper off a salad plate. I can't remember the last time I ate an egg. And this morning I couldn't get up off my own bedroom carpet. My phone was on the dresser, charging. I lay there 25 minutes. I tried to get my knees under me and my legs wouldn't do it. I finally crawled to the nightstand and pulled myself up on it and the bed frame. I have a bruise on my hip as big as my hand. I'm 62 and I've never fallen in my life. I'm down 37 and I thought I was doing everything right. I take a calcium and D every morning. What did I miss?" I read it twice. Then I scrolled back through her posts. December: "Week two and I forgot lunch. Who am I??" February: a photo of her supper on a salad plate. "This is enough now!" April: "Anybody have a trick for jar lids? I've been driving them over to my son's." July: "Hold the rail, ladies. Mine is my new best friend LOL." Then nothing about food at all for three months. Then Sunday. Stage 1. Stage 2. Stage 3. Stage 4. I wrote back and asked her three questions. "When did you last eat meat at lunch?" "I honestly couldn't tell you. Spring?" "When did jars get hard?" "April. I thought it was my hands." "When did you start holding the rail?" "July. I didn't think about it. I just started." So I told her what I'd have wanted somebody to tell me in February. "You've been in stage 3 since about March. Seven months. Sunday was the first day it showed." She wrote back one line. "Seven months and nobody noticed. Not even me." Seven months. Nobody posts stage 3. Then I told her about the calcium. She'd done what women our age were told for 30 years: a calcium-and-D tablet with breakfast. I said it myself at the scan room door for 22 years. "Calcium. And walk more." Calcium is real, and it matters. It's the dots on Bev's strip. But a calcium tablet is half the drawing. It doesn't bring the frame. It doesn't bring the vitamin C or the copper the frame is built with, or the K2, or the magnesium. And no tablet puts protein back on the plate. That part has to be food. She'd been feeding the dots, on a salad plate, for seven months. Calcium alone. Then she asked me what I do. I'm a retired tech, not a doctor. I don't tell anyone in my group what to take. I tell them what I do, and I send every question about their prescription or their pills to their own doctor or pharmacist. So that's what I told her. I take one scoop of DensiaPlus in my first cup of coffee every morning. Bev put the first scoop in my coffee herself, at my kitchen table, in May. I'd spent that winter on a windowsill full of bottles I forgot by Thursday. Calcium chews. A D. A magnesium. A "joint" pill. And a pink collagen tub with a woman's face on the lid that I bought for my hair. I read the back of Bev's bag that day like a requisition, line by line. 9 grams of collagen peptides. Calcium. Magnesium. Vitamin D3. Vitamin K2 as MK-7. Vitamin C. Zinc. Copper. Boron. The crossed lines and the dots, in one scoop, in the cup of coffee I was already drinking on mornings I couldn't face a plate. That's why I've kept it. It's one habit stacked on one I already had. I haven't missed a morning in five months. The rest of my morning looks like this now. Rick cooks two eggs, and I eat them before I touch anything else, even when the shot says I'm not hungry. Two cans of soup come out of the pantry, and I lift them in the kitchen while the coffee brews. At night I lay a folded quilt on the living room rug, sit down on it and get back up while Rick counts. The first weeks I needed the arm of the couch and his knee every single time. In August I got up with one hand while my daughter Kayla counted out loud. I credit the quilt for that, and every night I didn't skip it. Then I told her the thing I tell every woman who asks. Collagen is not a complete protein. It doesn't replace protein-rich meals. Protein comes first, on the plate. The scoop goes in the coffee on top of that, never instead of it. And I told her to call her doctor Monday about the fall, and to take him two questions: one about her bones, one about protein. She called Monday. Her doctor saw her Tuesday. A bruised hip, nothing broken. He left her shot alone and asked her to come back in a month to talk about a bone scan. He also told her it was fine to start practicing getting down onto the floor and back up, slowly, with something sturdy beside her. She ordered her own bag that Tuesday night. It came Friday. Here's her first week and a half, from her own messages. Habits, and nothing else. Friday, October 16. First scoop, in her coffee. "Tastes like coffee." Two scrambled eggs before the crackers. "Took me 20 minutes to eat them." Saturday. Eggs again, first. Then the crackers. Sunday, one week after the carpet. She pulled a kitchen chair into the bedroom, set it next to the bed, got down on the carpet and got back up, three times, with both hands on the chair. Her son came over to watch the first time. Every day after that. A scoop every morning. Eggs or leftover chicken first, before anything else. The floor every night, with the chair. Last Wednesday she sent me a photo of the kitchen chair, still standing by her bed. Under it she wrote, "Scoop and eggs first every morning. The floor every night. This chair hasn't been back in the kitchen since Sunday." She doesn't know what's happening inside her bones. I don't know about mine either. Nobody can tell that from the outside. Her doctor will tell her more than I can when she goes back next month, and Bev will run my rescan next spring. We both know what we do every morning, and we write it down. --- So where are you? Answer these four tonight. Nobody's watching. 1. Has your appetite gone quiet? That's stage 1. Good. Your doctor wanted that for you. 2. Is supper on a salad plate or a bread plate now? That's stage 2. 3. When did you last eat protein at breakfast? Do you hand jars to somebody, hold the rail every time, or rock to get off the couch? That's stage 3. 4. Have you gone down this year, or had trouble getting back up off the floor? That's stage 4. If you said yes to number 4, you're where the woman on the carpet was two weeks ago. She keeps a chair by the bed now and practices with it every night. Write your answers on a piece of paper and take it to your next appointment. Ask your doctor your one bone question and your one protein question. Then start with the plate. Protein first. And with your doctor's OK, practice the floor with a sturdy chair beside you. --- If you haven't been hungry since week two. If your supper fits on a bread plate and you post it proudly. If there are shakes a third finished in your fridge door. If you drive your jars over to your son's, or hand them to your husband. If you hold the rail every time now and call it getting older. If you've gone down once this year and told everybody it was nothing. If the only thing you take for your bones is a calcium tablet. Then one of those stages is yours. Stage 3 doesn't hurt and it doesn't show up on the scale, and nobody in a group of 3,100 women posts about it. I'm posting about it. Your doctor runs your shot, the same way mine runs mine. Celebrate every pound. Then look at what's on your plate tomorrow morning before the coffee gets cold. I wrote the whole thing up on one page. It's the link under this post. DensiaPlus is 9 grams of collagen peptides with calcium, magnesium, vitamin D3, vitamin K2 (MK-7), vitamin C, zinc, copper and boron. One scoop a day, stirred into coffee, tea or water. It's the Fall Sale. Right now it's up to 70% off: buy 2 bags, get 1 free, or buy 3, get 2 free. Every bag comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, empty or full. Count what you keep. Jennifer Miller, 59, retired radiology technologist and group admin, Ohio 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. She sent me one more message last night. "Seven months in stage 3 and I didn't know it had a name. The chair stays by the bed." P.P.P.S. Up to 70% off: buy 2, get 1 free, or buy 3, get 2 free. 90-day money-back guarantee, empty or full.