Unless you have been living under a rock, you will have heard talk of these magical weight loss injections.
Just last week, I saw an article where Wes Streeting (the health secretary) claimed half of his MP colleagues are taking the weight loss pokey poke.
That in and of itself is neither noteworthy nor interesting. But what is both of those things was the discussion in the comments around how people who are already in good to great shape are using them to turbocharge their results.
I’m also hearing how the use and abuse of these drugs by everyone from run of the mill fat people who possess the self-control of a two year old to those who train hard but are too vain and impatient to be satisfied by what they can achieve naturally is causing my fellow PTs to wail and gnash their teeth believing they will be “replaced” by pharma.
To a certain degree, that’s true. Just how ShatGPT et al have cut bloody chunks out of the market for writers, graphic designers, translators, coders, and so on, and so on, so too will weight loss drugs eliminate the need for certain PTs who offer certain solutions to certain types of people.
Thing is, this is nothing new.
These substances are just the next in a long line of pharmaceutical interventions vain, lazy, and stupid people have used to paper over their personal shortcomings.
For example, a few years ago TRT started being used by lots of sad middle-aged men who needed a medical veneer to justify abusing steroids.
Before that, came pre-workout drinks containing literal reformulations of amphetamines favoured by insecure folk seeking validation for their HaRdCoRe workouts and women with eating disorders running marathons to get even more skeletal (the latter of whom had a nasty habit of dropping dead, which formed a large part of the case for having that particular substance banned in the UK) .
And before that, was “proper” gear that has long been the go-to for those who claim to care about their health and fitness yet don’t think twice about injecting stuff that was probably brewed in someone’s filthy bathtub.
Honestly, I cannot say I am the least bit perturbed by these four horsemen of the pharmaceutical apocalypse. ‘Cuz Yours Baldly has been around long enough to know with cast-iron certainty that junkies make terrible customers and clients.
So, yes, the market for fitness products (particularly information products like the books and newsletter I sell) and services is going to get a whole lot smaller in the coming years.
But, really, it’s a winnowing.
The wheat is being sorted from the chaff, until all who remain are those who actually want to train because they believe it’s a process that makes them a better person in general. While those who want to cheat their way to results by taking some substance (legal or otherwise) will have the option to do that and brag about their unearned progress to anyone who will listen.
But, deep down, they’ll never be truly satisfied because they’ll be forever hobbled by the pain of knowing they didn’t earn what they’ve got.
Moreover, they’re still the same feckless and impulsive person underneath that drug-enhanced physique because their pharma of choice overrode the need to confront and overcome those character flaws. Meaning when they stop taking the medication (perhaps due to nasty side effects), they’ll wind up right back where they started, or, more likely in an even worse position.
The immoral of the story?
Do the work and put in the years, regardless of what others are getting up to.
It’s tough, but that’s the point.
Something else that is tough yet beneficial is reading books. But there is no better way to expand your knowledge of training to make your workouts more efficient and effective for better results (albeit results that are slow in coming and nowhere near as dramatic as what you’ll get by abusing drugs).
It’s for that reason I gift my Private Coaching clients with their choice of three books, which we then work through together for the six months we spend together. (The principle advantage of doing it this way is that clients have all of the information they need to continue pursuing their chosen goal long after we have parted ways.)
For more about that, consult my 13-page PDF called “The Systematic Method of Training”.
It is obviously a pitch for my Private Coaching service first and foremost, but it also contains a lot of teaching – particularly around why people train hard and get results only to fall off the wagon and lose everything they’ve bust a gut to gain.
If you want the PDF, email me the word INFO (my address is phil at philtyreman dot co dot uk), and I’ll fire it over.
Thank you,
Phil Tyreman