I Was Wrong About GLP-1s. Here's My Story.

If you'd asked me a year ago whether I'd be recording this episode, I would have said no way. For a long time, I had a pretty firm opinion about GLP-1 peptides — and it wasn't a good one. But six months into my own peptide journey, my entire perspective has shifted. 

And today, I'm sharing the whole honest story with you.

If you've struggled with food noise (if you know, you know). If inflammation is constant. If the pounds won't budge no matter what, you need to listen to this episode.

I'm walking you my very personal journey of how I went from being judgmental about peptides, to using them myself. I'm sharing what they did for me, what they absolutely did not do for me, and the four foundational pieces every woman needs in place before she even considers them.

This is a personal, vulnerable, and educational conversation, and I'm glad that you're here to take this journey with me. I hope you'll listen with an open mind, and maybe you'll update your beliefs, too!

What You'll Learn

• Why I used to believe peptides were the easy way out (and what changed my mind)
• What pushed me to research GLP-1s in the first place
• My personal story and journey from the last 6 months with peptides
• Three things peptides will NOT do for you (and why this matters)
• The four non-negotiables every woman needs in place before considering peptides

Resources and Ways To Connect

• If you're peptide curious, join me for this educational seminar to learn more (June 9th at 6 pm MT). It's FREE!
• Build the right mindset to approach your health journey
• Connect with me on Instagram

Transcript

Ashley (00:08)

there my sweet friend and welcome back to the family fork. So I want you to take a deep breath with me because I kind of need one before we get into this one because I'll be really honest with you this episode is one that I never thought I would be recording.

If you'd asked me a year ago whether I'd be sitting here talking really openly into a microphone about my experience with GLP-1 peptides, I would have told you absolutely not. And I probably would have said it with a bit of an edge to my voice because for a long time, I actually had a pretty firm opinion about peptides. I kind of thought that they were the easy way out.

And I thought women who were using them just didn't want to do the hard work of strength training and cleaning up their nutrition. I am not proud of how I used to think about this and we'll get into that. But today I am going to share with you my honest journey of starting GLP-1s, which I'm just going to call peptides for most of this episode.

I want to walk you through why I even started looking into them in the first place, what they did for me, what they did not do for me, and what I think you absolutely need to have in place before you consider using them. Now, before I go any further, I want to say very clearly that nothing in this episode is medical advice. This is just my personal story, my journey.

what this approach has looked like for me with my own medical team. So please just keep that in mind. All right, let's get into it. If you're new here, I want to back up just a second. So I was able to lose 65 pounds without the use of peptides. And this is when I was deep in perimenopause. It was at 46 years old. And part of me, I don't know, I feel like I have to say that out loud.

somewhat have to defend my credibility before I tell you the rest of this story. I'd already done a lot of hard work. I'd done years of mindset work, changing to anti-inflammatory nutrition, strength training. I really did lose the weight on my own, even though it was a difficult journey. And then in 2025, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. My cancer was the hormone positive type, which meant that as part of my treatment,

I went on to estrogen blocking therapy and that estrogen blocking therapy pushed my body into a full medical menopause pretty much overnight. Now, I'm not going to get into that whole journey in this episode because it probably deserves a whole separate conversation, but I do want you to understand the context of where I was. Now,

Because my cancer was hormone positive, I am not a candidate for hormone replacement therapy or what they're now calling menopause hormone therapy. So one of the most common tools that women in menopause have access to for managing symptoms and supporting their body, it's just not available to me.

And in this menopause overnight, there were two things specifically that really started to be hard for me to manage. The first one was food noise. Now, if you have food noise, you already know exactly what I'm talking about. It's this unending record player in your brain all day long thinking about food. You can be eating a meal and you're already thinking about what you're going to eat next.

You finish lunch and you're wondering, huh, am I still hungry? Do I just want something sweet? Am I dehydrated? Should I have a snack? And then you start planning dinner. And then after dinner, you're thinking about, ⁓ should I have a treat before I go to bed? That food noise has always been there for me. But in perimenopause and then in this medical menopause, it got so loud. It was constant and unending. And it was creating kind of this

anxiety and a lot of sadness for me. I just felt like I couldn't get a break from my own brain. I was used to look at my husband and think how can he eat breakfast at nine in the morning and then not eat again until like three or four in the afternoon. Now granted as a health coach I will tell you that's not how I recommend fueling your day but for years I have watched him and I think how is it possible that you're not thinking about food like right now?

because I think about it all the time. I literally could not wrap my brain around it. Now, the second thing that I was struggling with was inflammation. I had my labs run and I could see that my inflammatory markers had gone up since starting the estrogen blocking therapy. And I had read some research about GLP-1s being supportive in reducing systemic inflammation. So yeah, of course, that piqued my interest.

And then there was the weight piece. Even though I had lost 65 pounds before my cancer journey, I'd gained some of the weight back during treatment. Not a ton, but it was like 10 or so pounds that it just didn't feel good to me. And when I looked back over the last two years, I had basically been fluctuating within this like same five to 10 pound range. No matter what I did, I was eating anti-inflammatory. I was in a calorie deficit.

I was burning 480 calories in a single strength training session. That's not even with cardio and the weight would not come off. Can you relate to that? The combination of constant food noise and increased inflammation, it made it really difficult for me to actually sustain a calorie deficit. And my body, I just felt like it was fighting me and my brain was definitely fighting me. I was tired. To be honest, I was just tired.

So I started doing my research. And I mean real research. I talked to my oncologist, my functional practitioner. I talked to a really good friend who was already using peptides and who walked me through her own personal experience, things that she had learned, what to watch out for. I read a bunch of studies. I asked questions. And the more that I learned, the more that I realized what I had believed about peptides, specifically GLP-1s.

It was really based on stigma, not on science. It was based on assumptions, not on understanding. I had a lot of shame as I was making this decision because of how I used to talk about peptides and also because of the stigma, because I had spent years building a brand around doing the hard work and earning whatever that means, earning your health. And here I was considering something

that I had previously written off as the easy way out.

But when I sat down with my oncologist, she told me she was 100 % supportive of me starting a microdose of weight loss peptides. So I felt comfortable that I was making an informed choice for my body. So I started. Now, let's talk first about what the peptides did for me. And then we'll talk about what they absolutely did not do, because that part is just as important. So initially,

I did lose a couple of pounds, but I want to be honest, it was not dramatic. I think across the whole first stretch, I lost maybe four or five pounds. That was it. I was microdosing, which means a very low dose, and I wasn't expecting it to do anything dramatic. So I was genuinely OK with that because the weight was not the primary reason for me starting.

But here's what I did not expect. As I continued to microdose, I started learning my body's hunger cues for what felt like the first time in my entire life. And I'm not exaggerating when I say that. I had lived my entire life with constant food noise.

And I had never really known what it felt like to be hungry versus thirsty versus craving sugar versus just wanting a little something to eat. just, couldn't tell any of the signals apart and they all blended together into this like constant chatter in my brain about food.

And when the food noise went quiet, I could finally hear my body. I started recognizing when I was actually hungry. And maybe even more importantly, I started recognizing when I was full. I had never really felt full in the middle of a meal before. I would just eat what was on my plate. And then I would assess afterwards, do I want some more? But with the peptides, I would be in the middle of eating and my body would say, okay, we're done.

We're good. That forced me to eat slower and more mindfully. It actually encouraged me to stop eating at my desk for lunch, which if you work in a home office like I do, you know how hard that can be.

I actually had to get OK with wasting some food at first because I would fix for dinner some salmon, brown rice, and broccoli, and I couldn't eat it all. So I had to learn over a few weeks what was realistic portion sizes for my body now versus what I had been serving myself before. Now, one thing I want to flag here, I never stopped tracking.

I was using MyFitnessPal the whole time so I could see how many calories I was eating and what my macros looked like. This is so, so important when you are on the GLP-1s because the risk is that you eat too few calories or you don't get enough protein and then you start having negative side effects like losing muscle or losing hair. I'll come back to that in a minute. But then about a month in, I started noticing this decrease in inflammation.

My brain fog was clearing, and my hair, it actually stopped coming out in the shower the way it had been. I felt more focused and alert, and I actually felt better in my body. So for the reasons I started microdosing, this is exactly what I was hoping it would do. It quieted the food noise in a way that I seriously had never experienced.

and it lowered my inflammation. And as a bonus, it helped me take off a few pounds. Now, I want to talk about what these weight loss peptides do not do for you, because it is really easy right now to look on social media or anywhere and see women who have successfully lost the weight with these peptides, but there's another side that's important to discuss.

The GLP-1 peptides, they will not fix a bad diet. So if you're eating processed foods or drinking a lot of alcohol, those things are still going to impact your body, your inflammation, and your gut health, which if you've listened to the podcast for a while, you know I find that very important. Yeah, you might want a little bit less of these things, but the peptide is not magically going to improve your health if you continue to eat processed foods.

As I mentioned, they're not going to clean up your gut health. Now I have talked about on this podcast before about my long history with Candida overgrowth. And I noticed early on that even on the peptides, my Candida was still a problem for me. I still had these really annoying sugar cravings, which that was a signal for me that my gut was still out of balance. So I had to use some other supplements and make some other adjustments to clean that up.

The peptides, they weren't going to do that work for me. GLP-1s will not balance your macros. You still have to know what you are eating. You have to make sure you're getting enough protein, you're getting enough carbs to fuel your strength training and just your day. And when you hear about women on GLP-1s who are losing their hair or losing muscle mass, losing weight way too fast,

Not always, but it is often because they're not eating enough calories and not eating enough protein. So the GLP-1, it's not going to solve that for you. You still have to pay attention.

So after six months of microdosing, I have to be honest, I have completely changed my tune. And I really want to apologize for anyone that I would have ever offended in the past years when I was speaking from a place of not knowing better. I'm glad that I can use this platform to share that I'm capable of updating my beliefs, because you know I encourage you to do that too.

And now I know that GLP ones can be a really supportive tool. They are not a magic wand. They are one tool in the toolbox of perimenopause and menopause. And they sit alongside anti-inflammatory nutrition and strength training. A lot of doctors call this lifestyle medicine. The peptides do not replace either of those things.

And for me, because I can't take hormone replacement therapy, this gave me a way to bring some balance back into my body without adding hormones, which again, is not possible with my type of breast cancer.

Okay, so if you're thinking about weight loss peptides or you're already using them or maybe you're what you considered peptide curious and you don't have any idea where to start, I want to walk you through four things that you need to have in place.

These are the things that can really support how the peptides work for you or if you end up in that group of women who are losing weight too fast or losing hair or losing muscle.

So the first one is mindset. This is exactly what I teach my students inside the perimenopause weight loss method, because no peptide is going to give you the right mindset. You have to bring that to the table yourself. You have to understand that perimenopause, menopause, and just aging in general, it's all a journey. You need to know how to think about your body, how to think about food, how to manage setbacks.

Creating the right mindset is your insurance policy on every other investment that you make. It's the insurance policy on your time in the kitchen, your time in the gym, and yes, maybe your investment in peptides. So without mindset, the rest of it, it doesn't stick. The second is anti-inflammatory nutrition. I have been on peptides for six months and I've talked to a lot of other women using them and I will tell you,

that anti-inflammatory nutrition is one of the best things that you can do to support your body while you are taking the GLP-1s. The peptides slow your digestion. So you want what you are eating to be working for your body, not against it. So that means real whole foods, protein at every single meal, and cutting back on the inflammatory stuff that's going to sit in your stomach longer because that's how the GLP-1s work.

The third is strength training and this is non-negotiable.

The risk is there to lose lean muscle mass when you use the weight loss peptides if you're not careful. And losing muscle in midlife is one of the worst things that you could do for your future self. We need more muscle as we age to support our bones and to prevent against things like falls. So the way you protect yourself is by eating enough protein and then picking up the really heavy weights. This is not your season to be on the elliptical for an hour.

but it is the season to be lifting heavy and fueling your body properly so that the weight you lose is fat and not muscle.

And finally, support. You need somebody in your corner who can help you figure out why something's not working, why your peptides have stalled, how to actually get in enough protein in your day, or how to stay consistent when life gets messy, because it always does. This is exactly what I provide inside the method. My students, they get the live coaching calls with me every week, daily access to me in our chat group.

protein guides, anti-inflammatory meal plans, recipes, snack guides, all of it. Everything that you need is there because trying to do this alone is just a recipe for getting overwhelmed and potentially giving up.

GLP ones have honestly been a very meaningful tool for me. And I'm grateful that I was humble enough to change my mind, do the research, talk to my medical team, and find an approach that worked for my specific body and my specific situation. They quieted my food noise, lowered the inflammation, and as a bonus helped me take off a few pounds.

And because I didn't have a medical necessity for them, mine weren't covered by insurance. So I had to find a quality source that worked for me, which brings me to this point, because you're probably wondering, like, how do you actually find safe, good quality peptides? How do you even know what to ask your doctor? And what should you be watching out for? So.

I am hosting a seminar where I'm actually going to answer all of these questions because it's so new for me. It's all fresh in my brain. We're going to talk about safety, quality, sourcing, and what you need to have in place before you ever start. So if you're listening to this episode live, the seminar is on June 9th in the evening. So the link to register is in the show notes. And if you're listening to this after June 9th, don't worry about it.

That same link will get you to a replay so that you can still get all of the information. If you'd asked me a year ago if I would be making this episode, I definitely would have told you no way. But I am so glad and grateful that I was willing to update my beliefs. And in doing so, I was able to improve my health. I've always been someone who is willing to consider alternative approaches because

Conventional medicine, it hasn't always given me everything I needed on my own health journey over the last 12 or 13 years. So to me, this just felt like one more step for advocating for my own body.

I do hope that whether or not GLP ones would be right for you, I hope this episode gave you the permission to look at them honestly, without shame, without the stigma, without this assumption that you have to be either all in or all out. They're just a tool. They're not a magic wand. And like any tool, they work best when you have the rest of your foundation in place.

If this episode resonated with you or if you have questions for me, please come find me on Instagram.

Just send me a DM to @theashleymalik I really do love hearing from you. And I read all of my messages. And if you are peptide curious, please go grab your spot for the seminar at the link in the show notes. Thanks for being here with me today. And thank you for letting me share something this personal with you. I'll see you next week on the Family Fork