Rachel Porter

Fix yourself at the cellular level

I was grateful for the weight loss shots. I need you to understand that. I was grateful the day I started them. I was grateful when 38 pounds came off. I bought new jeans. My doctor high-fived me. For seven months I thought I had been handed a miracle. It took me eleven months to understand what the miracle was actually doing to my body. If you are on weight loss injections right now — any of them — or if you were on them and stopped, please read all of this. What I am about to tell you comes from a woman who celebrated a drug that was quietly eating her body from the inside. I was part of the celebration. That is the part I cannot forgive. My name is Denise. I'm 53 years old. I'm not a doctor. I am a woman who has lived in her own body for 53 years and I know it better than any chart in any office. I had been struggling with weight since my mid-forties. Perimenopause hit like a switch. Nothing changed about what I ate, but my body changed what it did with what I ate. Twenty-two pounds in three years. All midsection. The kind of weight that doesn't respond to dieting because it's not about the food — it's about the hormones. My doctor suggested the shots. "Revolutionary results," she said. "Most patients lose 15-20% of body weight." I started that spring. The first injection was at the doctor's office. I sat in the chair and felt the needle go in and I thought: this is the beginning of getting myself back. I need to tell you what the first seven months looked like. Because if I don't tell you how good it was, you won't understand how bad what came after was. Within three weeks, food went quiet. That is the only way I know how to describe what happened. The constant negotiation — what am I eating, when am I eating, the bargaining, the guilt, the hunger that came back forty-five minutes after a meal — went silent. I sat at the dinner table and ate a normal portion and put my fork down and was done. I lost 38 pounds in seven months. 167 down to 129. My doctor was thrilled. My friends told me I looked amazing. I tried on a dress in a size I hadn't worn in eight years and it fit and I cried in the dressing room. Then the nausea came. Not the first-month nausea everyone talks about. This was month eight. Violent. Five days of not keeping anything down. I went to urgent care on a Tuesday night for IV fluids. They said it was a known side effect. Delayed gastric emptying. They sent me home. Three weeks later it happened again. I told my doctor. She lowered the dose. It happened again. She stopped the drug. And then the part nobody warns you about started. Within five weeks the hunger came back louder than it had ever been in my life. Not just appetite — a screaming, desperate need to eat that felt chemical. Because it was chemical. My body was in rebound, and the signal that had been silenced was now amplified. I regained 44 pounds in nine months. I want to be precise about that number. I did not go back to 167. I went to 173. Six pounds heavier than the day I started. But the weight was not the part that scared me. The part that scared me was what happened to my body underneath the weight. I noticed the stairs first. We have fourteen steps in our house. I've climbed them ten thousand times. Before the shots, they were just stairs. After the shots — after the rebound — they became an event. My legs burned by step six. My thighs felt like they were filled with sand. I had to grip the railing with both hands. Then the jars. I used to open everything in my kitchen without thinking. After the rebound, I couldn't open a jar of pasta sauce. Both hands. Full grip. Nothing. I ran it under hot water. Nothing. I wrapped a rubber band around the lid. The rubber band snapped and I stood in my kitchen crying. Then the fatigue. Not tired — depleted. By 2 PM every day, my body felt like it had been unplugged. I'd fall asleep in my car during lunch. I'd sit at my desk reading the same sentence over and over because my brain couldn't hold it. I told myself it was the weight. I told myself it was aging. I told myself every excuse that women tell themselves when their body starts failing and nobody explains why. Then my friend Rachel — a physical therapist — asked me a question that changed everything. "Denise, did your doctor tell you how much of the weight you lost was muscle?" I stared at her. "What do you mean?" "The weight loss shots cause the body to break down both fat AND muscle for energy. Every study shows it. 30 to 40 percent of the weight lost on these drugs is lean tissue. Muscle." I felt my hands go cold. "You lost 38 pounds. If 35% was lean tissue, that's about 13 pounds of muscle. Gone." "But I gained 44 back." "How much of that do you think was muscle?" I didn't answer because I already knew. "Maybe three pounds," she said. "The rest is fat. Your body regained fat, not muscle. So right now you're six pounds heavier than when you started, carrying about ten fewer pounds of muscle than you had before the first injection." She let that land. "Your body composition is structurally worse. Not because you failed. Because the drug took muscle on the way down and replaced it with fat on the way up. And muscle is the engine that burns calories, supports your joints, maintains your metabolism, and keeps you independent." "That's why the stairs burn. You have less muscle to carry you up them. That's why the jars won't open. Your grip strength dropped because the muscle that powers your grip was consumed by the drug. That's why you're exhausted at 2 PM. Your resting metabolic rate crashed because you have less metabolically active tissue." "The shots didn't just fail. They physically restructured your body. They ate the engine." I sat there in Rachel's living room feeling like someone had just explained my entire last year in five minutes. "Can I get it back?" Rachel leaned forward. "Here's the thing nobody tells women after weight loss drugs — or after forty in general. Your body makes a molecule called creatine. Every cell uses it to produce ATP — the actual fuel that powers every muscle contraction, every brain function, everything. Your body makes some naturally. But production declines with age. And women produce 70-80% as much as men to begin with." "After the shots, you have significantly less muscle AND significantly less cellular fuel. It's a double depletion. Your muscles are smaller and the cells that remain are running on empty. That's why recovery feels impossible. That's why the weight training you tried didn't work. You can't build muscle if the cells don't have fuel." "Creatine is the fuel. Five grams daily — the clinical dose — has thirty years of research specifically in women showing measurable increases in lean muscle mass, grip strength, bone density, metabolic rate, and cognitive function." "I tried creatine powder," I said. "After the shots. It made me so bloated I quit after a week." "That's why most women quit creatine. The powder sits in your stomach and pulls water into your gut before it absorbs. The bloating isn't the creatine — it's the form." She held up a bottle. YOLO Creatine + Electrolytes. Gummies. "Five grams in a gummy. Starts absorbing in your mouth and upper GI. No stomach, no bloating. Plus electrolytes, which creatine needs as cofactors to function properly. Two gummies a day." "That's it?" "That's it. The fuel the shots depleted. In the form your body can actually use." I ordered it that night. Not from hope — I'd spent $16,000 on hope over fourteen months of injections. I ordered it because Rachel is a physical therapist who measures grip strength for a living, and she measured mine that day: 36 pounds. The clinical threshold for sarcopenia risk in women is 44. I was eight pounds below the danger line. The drug had put me below the danger line. And no one had measured. Week one. The 2 PM crash disappeared on day four. I sat at my desk at 3:30 and realized the fog hadn't come. My brain was working. Not fighting to work — just working. The way it used to before the shots took everything and gave back less. Week two. I was carrying a laundry basket up the stairs. Full load. Wet towels. I made it to the top without stopping. Without the railing. Without the burning. My legs just went. Step after step. I stood at the top of my own staircase and held the basket and I couldn't move for a minute because I hadn't done that in eleven months. Week three. The jars. I picked up a jar of salsa from the fridge. One hand. One twist. Open. I stood in my kitchen and looked at my hand the way you look at something that's been returned to you. The grip was back. Not all the way. But the signal was reaching the muscle and the muscle was answering. The connection that had been severed was rebuilding. Week four. The scale moved — down three pounds. But Rachel told me to ignore the scale. "The scale lies to women after muscle loss. You could gain two pounds of muscle and lose four pounds of fat and the scale says you lost two. But your body recomposed itself entirely." She tested my grip again. 48 pounds. I'd crossed back over the danger line. Month two. I tried on the dress. Not the one from the dressing room — that one is packed away. A different one. One I hadn't worn in two years. It fit differently. Not because I'd lost weight — I'd barely lost seven pounds on the scale. But the shape was different. My waist was smaller. My arms had definition. The softness was being replaced by something solid underneath. My husband looked at me and said something that broke me open: "There you are." Month three. Rachel ran the DEXA scan she'd been wanting me to do since day one. Lean muscle mass: up 4.8 pounds. Body fat percentage: down 5.2 points. Grip strength: 54 pounds. Resting metabolic rate: up 140 calories per day. The engine was rebuilding. Four pounds of muscle back. Each pound burning an extra 35 calories per day at rest. My metabolism was restarting because the tissue that drives it was coming back. And the weight? Still dropping. Slowly. The way real, durable, muscle-driven weight loss works — not by starving the body but by rebuilding the furnace that burns the fuel. I'm sharing this because I know there are women reading this who are where I was. Maybe you're on the shots right now and everything looks great. Your doctor is celebrating. Your friends are complimenting you. The scale is going down and down and nobody is measuring what's going down with it. Maybe you stopped the shots and the rebound hit and you're heavier than you started and weaker than you've ever been and nobody can explain why the weight came back worse. Maybe you've never taken the shots but you're over forty and the muscle is leaving anyway — slowly, quietly, 3-5% per decade accelerating after menopause — and nobody has named what's happening to your body. Your cells are depleted. The fuel is gone. The engine is shrinking. And every diet, every drug, every restriction that takes more weight off without rebuilding the engine is making the problem worse. YOLO Creatine + Electrolytes. Five grams, clinical dose. Gummy form — no powder, no grit, no bloating. Plus electrolytes your body needs to put the creatine where it belongs. The fuel the shots took. The fuel aging takes. The fuel nobody told you was disappearing. 🛡️ 50% Off + Free Shipping. 365-day money-back guarantee. Two gummies. Every morning. Rebuild the engine. If the muscle doesn't come back, every dollar does. But if your grip comes back. If the stairs get easy again. If you stand in front of a mirror and the shape starts changing from the inside out — you'll wish you'd started the day you stopped the shots. I lost 38 pounds on injections. Thirteen of them were muscle. Nobody told me. Nobody measured. Nobody warned me that the drug was eating the thing my body needed most and calling it weight loss. Now I know. Now you know. P.S. — I told four women at my gym. All four had been on the shots. All four had stopped. All four had rebounded. Every single one said the same thing: "I'm weaker than before I started." They all started the gummies. Three of them texted me within a month. Same message, different words: "The stairs don't burn anymore." The fourth one called me crying because she opened a jar. P.P.S. — Grip strength below 44 pounds in women predicts all-cause mortality. Not fitness — mortality. The shots put me at 36. Eight pounds below the danger line. Nobody measured. Nobody mentioned it. If you've been on weight loss injections and your hands shake when you carry groceries, that's not a side effect. That's a survival metric that nobody is tracking. P.P.P.S. — If you tried creatine powder and quit because of the bloating — you haven't tried creatine. You tried the wrong form. Powder sits in the stomach. Pulls water into your gut. Makes you feel like a balloon. Women quit. Gummies absorb through the mouth and upper GI. The water goes to muscle cells, not your stomach. That's the difference between bloating and building.