GLP-1 and Bone Health Support Group

9g Collagen with Calcium, D3, K2 and Magnesium

Here are 7 reasons women on a weekly GLP-1 shot need to worry about their bones. I ran bone density scans for 22 years. I'm on the shot myself, and I'm down 46 pounds. If you want to keep what you're supposed to keep, read all seven. My name is Jennifer Miller. I'm 59. I live in Ohio. For 22 years I was a radiology technologist at a hospital outpatient center, and most of those years I ran the DEXA machine. That's the bone density scan. I've watched women read their T-score printout in the chair by my door, fold it in half, then in half again, and tuck it in the bottom of their purse like a bill they weren't going to pay. I retired two years ago. Fourteen months ago I started a weekly weight-loss shot. My doctor runs my prescription and I'm still on it. Every one of those 46 pounds is real. I'm grateful for it every single week, and nothing I'm about to say is against the shot, my doctor, or anybody's medicine. I also help run this page, and the private group behind it. About 3,100 women on the weekly shot. Every morning the posts come in. Down 38. Down 51. Down 60. I cheer for every one of them. And every few weeks a different kind of post comes in. A wrist in a purple cast. A photo from a hospital bed. A daughter writing on her mother's account because her mother can't hold the phone. Nobody told her. --- Before the list, you need to understand what's going on underneath it. This is the part I should have explained at the scan table for 22 years, and it's the part almost nobody hears. Your bone is alive. It's living tissue, with cells tearing old bone down and other cells laying new bone in, all day, every day, for your whole life. Most of your skeleton gets replaced about every 10 years. Which means the skeleton you have at 70 is being built right now, in your 50s and 60s, out of whatever you send it. And it gets built out of what you eat. There's no other supply line. Here's the part women never believe the first time I say it. About 90% of the protein in your bones is collagen. Not calcium. Collagen. Think of a concrete wall going up. Before anybody pours the concrete, the crew ties a grid of steel rebar. The concrete is the hard part you see. The rebar is what keeps the wall from cracking apart when something hits it. In bone, the minerals are the concrete. Calcium, magnesium, the hard part that shows up bright on my screen. About 60% of the magnesium in your whole body sits in your bones. Collagen is the rebar. A woven protein frame that the minerals lay down on. It's what gives bone a little bend. Let me tell you what that scan I ran for 22 years actually sees. You lie on a padded table. An arm swings slowly over your hip and your lower spine. Grey shadows come up on the screen. The machine is measuring how much mineral is packed into that bone. That's what the T-score is. It can't see the rebar. It can't tell you how well the collagen frame under that mineral is holding together. It measures the concrete and leaves the rest out. For 22 years I pointed at the grey on that screen and never said a word about the frame. My friend Bev finally drew it for me this April, on a strip of paper torn off the scan table. Lines for the frame. Dots for the mineral. Here's how the building works. Every day, one crew of cells in your bone digs out a little old bone. Another crew comes behind it and fills the hole back in. First they lay down the collagen frame. Then minerals settle onto the frame and harden it. To lay that frame, your body needs protein, because collagen is a protein. It needs vitamin C, because your body can't form collagen without it. It needs the amino acids collagen is made from, glycine and proline and hydroxyproline. To harden it, 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 switches on a protein called osteocalcin that binds calcium into bone. It needs magnesium. If the crew that digs runs on schedule and the crew that fills doesn't get its materials, the holes don't get filled all the way. Not in a day. Over years. And your body makes less collagen as you age. After menopause, it makes less, faster. So by the time most of us are on the weekly shot, the crew that fills has already been short of hands for years. Now look at your plate these days. You know the feeling. Four bites of chicken and you're done. The food noise is gone. That quiet is a gift. I mean that. But think about it from your skeleton's side. Eating far less means far fewer nutrients reach your bones. Less protein. Less calcium. Less magnesium. Less of the vitamin C your body needs to make collagen in the first place. Your bones don't get a special allowance because you're losing weight. They get whatever is left after the rest of your body takes its share. When people lose a lot of weight, especially fast, they don't only lose fat. I'll give you the numbers in the list. I'm not blaming the shot. Losing a lot of weight fast does this, any way you lose it. But the scale can't see any of it. The scale gives you one number. That number goes down, you feel wonderful, your sister tells you you look ten years younger, and nobody in the room asks what that weight was made of. I spent 22 years looking at the one picture that could show part of the answer. And I'll tell you what I learned on that table. Bone loss has no symptoms. None. It doesn't ache. It doesn't swell. It doesn't keep you up at night. For most women, the first sign is the break. About 1 in 2 women over 50 will break a bone because of bone loss. About 1 in 5 people over 65 who break a hip die within a year. My mother was one of them. Her name was Opal. She took a calcium tablet every morning for about thirty years, out of a little dish by the coffee maker. She'd tap the dish and say, "Not me, honey. I'm covered." She did everything she was told. At 81 she stepped off the church van onto the curb after Wednesday supper. Her hip broke. She never went home again. She died at 82, in a room with a window that looked at a parking lot. She had the concrete. Nobody ever talked to her about the rebar. Here are the 7 reasons. None of them prove anything is wrong with your bones. Only a scan and your doctor can tell you that. But every one of them is something the scale won't tell you. --- 1. The scale counts muscle too. Peggy Lund, 60, was one of the first women in my group to pass 50 pounds. She posted her old jeans held out in front of her like a fishing trophy. 400 comments. Here's what nobody put in the comments. In one big trial of a weekly weight-loss shot, nearly 4 in 10 pounds people lost were lean tissue, not fat. That's muscle, and the other parts of you that aren't fat. Muscle is what keeps you steady on your feet. Two months after the jeans photo, Peggy slipped on wet grass carrying the recycling to the curb. Broke her wrist in two places. She'd never been scanned. I can't tell you why her wrist broke. But her scale never asked what those 50 pounds were made of. 2. Your bones can shrink along with your waist. A 2026 study of 255 people on the newer weekly shots found that the more weight they lost, the more bone they lost at the hip. Sue Ellen Booth, 61, told me her slacks had started dragging on the kitchen floor. She laughed. "I lost so much weight my pants don't fit right." Most of the time, that's all it is. Sometimes it isn't. In the scan room I measured women who'd lost an inch or more of height and never noticed, because nobody measures you after 40. Lost height can come from the bones in your spine. You can't feel bone getting thinner. So at your next checkup, ask them to measure your height and write it down. Sue Ellen did. 3. You're barely eating, and your bones are last in line. Celeste Fischer, 57, was proud of eating once a day. A little chicken and some salad around 4 p.m. Down 42 pounds in eight months. Then I asked her to add up her protein. It came to about 25 grams. For the whole day. Remember the rebar. About 90% of the protein in your bones is collagen, and your body builds it out of what you eat. One small meal means one small meal's worth of building material, and your skeleton gets what's left after everything else takes its share. What I do: protein first, at every meal. Two eggs in the morning, even when the shot says I'm not hungry. Chicken or fish at dinner, eaten first, even if it's four bites. 4. Calcium only covers half the job. When a woman asks her doctor about her bones, the answer is usually one word. "Calcium." Calcium does help build and maintain strong bones. But it's the concrete. Pour concrete with no rebar and you get a wall that looks solid until something hits it. Trudy Hatch, 66, takes a calcium chew every night. "I'm covered," she told me. She's eating about a third of what she used to. The chews are the only thing on her counter for her bones. I used to be Trudy. A few months into the shot, I bought calcium chews. The caramel ones, two a day. I bought protein shakes and couldn't finish one. I bought a pink tub of collagen from the beauty aisle with a woman's cheek on the lid. It was for wrinkles. Then a "joint" pill with collagen on the front. About 1,000mg in a two-capsule serving. Studies on collagen peptides commonly use 2.5 to 15 grams a day. That pill was a sprinkle. At one point I had four bottles on my counter. By Thursday I'd forgotten all four. My best friend Bev Tran ran scans beside me for 19 years. She still runs that room. She came over for lunch on a Saturday in May, saw the four bottles on my kitchen windowsill, and held up the pink tub like a dead mouse. She said, "Jen. What is this. I drew you the frame in April." Then she set her own bag on my counter. It was called DensiaPlus. She's had it every morning for a year and a half. She said, "Every morning. In the coffee. Stop arguing with me." I turned the bag over, because 22 years in that job makes you read the back of everything. 9 grams of collagen in one scoop. That's nine times the joint pill. Plus calcium. Plus magnesium, the mineral that sits in bone. Plus vitamin D3, because without enough D your body absorbs only a small fraction of the calcium you take. Plus vitamin K2 as MK-7, which activates a protein called osteocalcin that binds calcium into bone. Plus vitamin C, which your body needs to make collagen. Plus zinc and boron. The collagen and the minerals, in the same scoop, in the coffee I was already drinking. Bev stirred one into my mug right there. It tasted like coffee. I ordered that afternoon. One thing I tell every woman in my group, because I had to learn it myself. Collagen isn't a complete protein and it doesn't replace protein-rich meals. I still eat protein first. The scoop goes in the coffee on top of that, not instead of it. 5. One fall can change everything. More than 95% of hip fractures are caused by falls. Ramona Kim, 58, down 44 pounds, posted a joke one night. "Anybody else need their husband for every jar now?" 37 women answered. Me too. Me too. Me too. Alma Reyes, 63, down 49 pounds, couldn't get off her own loveseat without rocking three times and pushing off the armrest. "My legs just don't have it," she wrote. Your grip and your legs are what catch you when you trip. Lose muscle fast and getting back up off the floor gets harder too. A large study in Brazil found that how well people did on that sit-to-stand floor test predicted who was still alive years later. And there's a reason it matters so much. When an older woman falls and can't get up, she lies there. On tile. On carpet. Next to the tub. A study found about half of older people who lay on the floor for an hour or more after a fall were dead within six months. Muscle starts breaking down. Kidneys get hurt. The skin where she's lying tears. Maxine Abernathy, 64, down 55 pounds, lives alone. One Saturday in May she knelt in her front flower bed to pull weeds around the tomato cages. When she tried to stand, her legs wouldn't do it. She couldn't get a foot under her. She grabbed the edge of the birdbath and it tipped over on her. Her phone was on the porch rail, about 20 feet away. She sat in the mulch in the afternoon sun for a little over three hours, calling out every time a car went by, until her neighbor pulled into his driveway and heard her. She didn't break anything. She was so dehydrated they kept her overnight, and her doctor checked her kidneys twice. She told the group that three hours in her own front yard scared her more than anything in her life. Maxine had lost 55 pounds and she'd never once practiced getting up off the ground. Nobody told her to. So practice. Every day. Next to the couch, so you have something to hold if you need it. Get down. Get up. If you can't do it yet, that's the most important thing you'll learn about yourself this year. 6. After 50, you're already losing bone. After menopause, a woman can lose about 1 to 2% of her bone every year for around five years. And your body makes less collagen every year, faster once your periods stop. Now put fast weight loss on top of that. Your bones are dealing with two big changes at once, and nobody adds them together for you. I'm adding them together for you now. 7. Nobody is checking. At every visit, your doctor sees your weight go down. A bone scan isn't part of a normal weigh-in. The scale is the only number most of us ever get. In 22 years at the machine, most of the women on my table were there because something had already broken. So at every checkup now, I ask my doctor a different question. Not "How much have I lost?" but "What am I keeping?" And ask whether a bone scan makes sense for you. If the answer is no, fine. Ask anyway. --- Here's what I do now, every day, on the shot. I eat protein first. Every meal, before anything else. I asked my doctor about a bone scan. He ordered one. I lift. Two cans of soup out of the pantry, in the kitchen, while the coffee brews. Rick, my husband, thought I'd lost my mind. Now he does them with me. I practice the floor. Down and up, on a folded quilt next to the couch, every night before bed. The first week I needed the armrest every time. That's what practice is for. I posted the floor test in my group last spring. More than 600 women tried it that week. Some of them could do it fine. A lot of them couldn't, and they told me so, and then they started practicing too. And one scoop of DensiaPlus goes in my coffee before anything else happens in my day. I haven't missed a morning. My daughter Kayla is an ER nurse. She's seen more women like Maxine than I have. She told me once about a woman they brought in after two days on her bathroom floor, still wearing the cardigan she'd put on for church. Kayla held her hand while they cut the sleeve off. The woman kept apologizing for the mess. Kayla was the one who made me promise to get rescanned. I go back next spring. I don't know what it'll say. I'll lie on that same padded table, and somebody younger than me will watch the grey shadows come up on the screen. What I do know is that I'm not leaving it to the scale. The scale will tell you that you lost 46 pounds. It won't tell you what those pounds were made of. It won't tell you about the muscle, or your hip, or the one small meal, or the calcium chew doing half a job, or the fall, or the years after menopause, or the question nobody asks at the weigh-in. Those seven are on you to check. So if you've been cheering for the number every morning and haven't asked what it's made of. If your jeans are falling off and you've never had a bone scan. If most days you eat one small meal and call it a win. If the only thing on your counter for your bones is a calcium chew. If you hand jars to your husband now, or rock twice to get off the couch. If you're past 50 and nobody has added those things up for you. If no one at your weigh-in has ever asked about your bones. Then you're where Peggy was. Where Sue Ellen and Celeste and Trudy and Ramona and Alma were. Where Maxine was, the week before her flower bed. Where my mother was, with her little dish by the coffee maker. Nobody told them. I'm telling you. If you're on the weekly shot, your doctor runs that, the same as mine does. Celebrate every pound. You earned it. Then go sit on your lowest couch, cross your arms, and stand up. A few women in the group asked me to put all 7 on one page with the sources, so they could show their doctor or their sister. I did. 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. Number 7 is the one to do this month. At your next checkup, ask your doctor, "What am I keeping?" Peggy asked hers in September. She's booked for her first bone scan. P.P.P.S. Up to 70% off: buy 2, get 1 free, or buy 3, get 2 free. 90 days to try it, and you can send it back empty or full.