Announcing my new book: Super Body

With all the recent buzz about weight loss achieved with GLP-1 agonist drugs, intermittent or prolonged fasting, time-restricted eating, etc., there has been one major oversight: loss of muscle. With ALL of these methods of losing weight, there is an obligatory loss of significant amounts of muscle and, with it, serious long-term health consequences. During an effort to lose weight, most people think about calories burned, waist circumference, dress or pant sizes, but rarely do people consider the status of muscle—but that’s a BIG mistake.

It is now a well-established scientific fact: weight loss achieved by reducing calorie intake, regardless of whether through diet, drugs like GLP-1 agonists, or bariatric procedures like gastric bypass, all involve loss of muscle. Typically, 25% of weight lost is muscle. It means that the $12,000 or so you paid for a year’s worth of Wegovy or Mounjaro that led to, say, 40 pounds of weight loss means that 30 pounds was fat, 10 pounds was muscle. Picture 10 pounds of ground beef on your kitchen table—that’s a lot of muscle.

Imagine you are a 150-pound 50-year old woman intent on losing weight. At the start, approximately 27% of body weight, or 40.5 pounds, is muscle, approximately 10% less muscle than you had in your twenties due to the expected age-related loss of muscle that everyone experiences. She chooses to inject one of the GLP-1 agonist drugs over a year and loses 40 pounds: 30 pounds fat, 10 pounds muscle. She now weighs what appears to be a healthy 110 pounds. She now carries 30.5 pounds of muscle, a significant loss from one year earlier, even more if compared to her body composition of 30 years earlier. We now know that the loss of that much muscle is associated with:

• A reduction in basal metabolic rate (BMR), the rate at which her body burns calories to conduct the work of living: breathing, digestion, manufacturing proteins, etc. This effect is, for all practical purposes, permanent: It will require many years to recover BMR and actually will probably never recover. It means that, even if you maintains a vigorous physical and low-calorie lifestyle, she is going to regain weight as virtually all fat.
• Because weight regain is virtually all fat, she will be more likely to be pre-diabetic, a type 2 diabetic, and have increased risk for coronary disease, Alzheimer’s dementia, breast cancer, and other conditions with greater risk than she was before she lost weight.
• Loss of substantial muscle that means a future of increased risk for falls, fractures, frailty, loss of independence, as well as dying younger by several years.

That’s right: It’s not just about cosmetic differences; it can be about life and death differences. Did your doctor tell you this before handing you the prescription for the latest weight loss drug or advising a consultation with a surgeon to discuss your bariatric procedure? I doubt it.

In short, the consequences of ignoring loss of muscle can be profound, even catastrophic. All we need do, as I did in developing all the concepts in my Super Body book, is review all the evidence generated by organizations like our own National Institutes of Health and insights gained through large databases that have tracked people who have lost weight, such as NHANES and EPIC Norfolk, that have shown, time and time again, that loss of muscle is a health disaster.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. Ideally, I’ve caught your attention before you embarked on a tragic program of weight loss. But, even if you have yo-yo dieted many times over the years, frustrated with the loss of control over shape, body composition, and health, you can still take action to minimize the effects of prior weight loss mistakes. No, it will not involve hours at the gym lifting weights or taking largely useless muscle-building supplements like creatine. It will involve an entirely new set of concepts that are natural, accessible, affordable, and effective, lessons I learned when I conducted our own human clinical trials that yielded unexpected and significant effects.

Before you make the mistake of paying lots of money and sacrificing your health and longevity, it is important that you familiarize yourself with these concepts by reading my new book, Super Body, scheduled for release Dec 15th, 2025, available for pre-order now at:

Hardcover edition:

HBG landing page: www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/william-davis-md/super-body/9780306835995/
Amazon: www.amazon.com/gp/product/0306835991
Barnes&Noble: www.barnesandnoble.com/w/super-body-william-davis-md/1147241313?ean=9780306835995
Books-a-Million: www.booksamillion.com/p/9780306835995
Bookshop: bookshop.org/p/books/super-body-a-3-week-program-to-harness-the-new-science-of-body-composition-and-restore-your-youthful-contours/077984f489f568b2

Audio books:

Apple Books Audio: books.apple.com/us/audiobook/id9781668648216
Audible: www.audible.com/pd/SUPER-Body-Audiobook/B0F812W3X2
Libro.FM: libro.fm/audiobooks/9781668648216
Audiobooks.com: www.audiobooks.com/audiobook/9781668648216

The original IHB post is currently found on the: ⎆Infinite Health Blog, but accessing it there can require an unnecessary separate blog membership. The copy of it above is complete, and has been re-curated and enhanced for the Inner Circle membership.