I have been a fitness coach since 2000 and have been coaching CrossFit since 2012. Training is literally everything… my job & my business. Nutrition coaching is part of that.
I tracked my macros. I followed a couple different programs but landed on working with our in-house nutrition coach, Tiffany, for YEARS. I trained harder and harder, and continued to feel like I was sliding further and further from my goals. The number just kept creeping up.
When fitness is your livelihood, the thing you’re known for, there is a quiet shame that comes with weight gain. I stood in my own gym telling women their bodies were not broken while privately wondering if mine was. I stood in this gym wondering if I should even be coaching fitness, because I didn’t look like what people think a fitness coach is supposed to look like. I told clients “you can’t keep forcing what has stopped working,” then went home and forced myself harder into the exact things I knew weren’t working for me. I did what a lot of disciplined, accomplished people do. I decided the problem was that I wasn’t trying hard enough… I wasn’t disciplined enough. So I pushed myself even harder.
It didn’t work.
Doing everything right is not the same as your body cooperating
Here is what took me too long to accept. Effort was never my problem. Discipline was never my problem. My body was in a state of sheer survival from years of combat, owning my own business, COVID’s impact on businesses, beating my body into the ground and just the everyday stresses of life today, where the normal rules simply didn’t apply anymore. No amount of macro tracking was going to out-discipline what was actually happening underneath.
That is when I stopped trying to fix it alone and went looking for what was actually broken. I spent a year working with a functional medicine doctor on my inflammation and my nutrition from the inside out. I worked on my gut health. I brought in a nervous system practitioner to get my stress down, because I had learned that a body stuck in fight or flight does not let go of weight no matter how hard you train it. I did the deep, unglamorous, expensive work. I did everything I could to heal, and bring my body back without medication, before I even considered peptides or GLP-1s.
For a long time, a GLP-1 felt like cheating to me. Especially coming from the fitness industry, and believing, to my core, that you can get healthy with diet and exercise. It felt like resigning, like admitting I couldn’t do it on my own, and doing it on my own was tied up in my whole identity as a coach and gym owner. So I tried everything else first. It genuinely took me exhausting every other option before I was even willing to give it a chance.
The question my doctor asked me
After that year with my functional medicine doctor, once my inflammation was under control and we understood my body far better than I ever had before, my doctor asked me the question. Now that the foundation (nutrition, exercise, etc.) was set, would I be willing to microdose a GLP-1 to help kickstart the weight loss my body had been fighting me on?
Even then I hesitated. But I had a full year of evidence that my willpower was not the missing piece. So I said yes. Not as a replacement for the work… but as an addition to the work.
I kept training. I kept paying attention to my nutrition, eliminating what didn’t work for my diet. I even kept working with Tiffany on my macros as I followed the functional medicine doctor’s recommendations. I slowly started to add micro-doses of the medication to my weekly regimen, diligently tracking the smallest amount I could take to start to see a shift. It slowly started to quiet the food noise and let my body finally respond to the work I was already doing. And slowly, very slowly by GLP-1 standards, over two years, I lost 88 pounds. I maintained my muscle mass. I saw my mobility improve, my inflammation markers improve, my blood pressure go down, and a ton of other positive changes take hold. And in the end, I feel like I was able to change my whole life.
It was not overnight. It was not effortless. Two years of showing up, coupled the whole way with real food and real training. The GLP-1 was a tool. It was never the only thing.
Why I’m telling you this in a gym blog?
Because I watch people make the same mistake from the other direction now. They finally get help. They start a GLP-1. And then they think the medication is the entire plan. That the weight loss will be instant. They stop exercising, or they never start. They stop eating enough protein, or eat whatever they want. They drop weight fast and lose the wrong things (muscle) right along with it, and a year later they’re smaller, weaker, and scared of what happens when they stop.
That is the exact gap Cobra Command is built to fill.
If you are just getting started on a GLP-1, this is the most important window you have. Do it right now and you build results that hold. Do it alone and you gamble with them. The medication can handle what your biology couldn’t. The training, the coaching, the protein, the accountability, the community that actually knows your name? That is the part that decides whether you keep what you worked for in the long term. And we are here to help with it.
I’m living proof that a coach who does everything right can still need help. And I’m living proof that the medical side works best when it sits on top of real coaching, not in place of it.
Over the next two weeks I’m going to walk you through exactly how we do this at Cobra Command. What to protect while the weight comes off. Why muscle is the whole game for life. And a story from another one of our coaches that will change how you think about all of it.
For today, I just want you to know one thing. If you’ve been doing everything right and your body still won’t cooperate, you are not lazy and you are not failing. You may just need a different kind of support than the internet handed you.
That’s what we do here.
If you’re on a GLP-1 or thinking about starting one, come talk to us. Book a No Sweat Intro at Cobra Command and let’s build the parts of the plan that the medication can’t.
See you in the gym,
Jill
