The better question is should you.
GLP-1 weight loss injections such as Ozempic and Mounjaro can cost hundreds of dollars a month without health insurance coverage—which seems steep for a drug that mimics a hormone your body makes naturally. It begs the question: Is the drug necessary for life-changing weight loss or are there ways to boost your GLP-1 without medication?
The answer isn’t as clear cut as you might imagine, suggests endocrinologist Caroline Messer, M.D. That’s because the body’s response to GLP-1 is complex.
Caroline Messer, M.D., is an endocrinologist with board certification in internal medicine, diabetes, and metabolism. She specializes in treating metabolic disorders.
Simran Malhotra, M.D., is a board-certified lifestyle medicine physician and wellness coach. She specializes in the holistic prevention and treatment of chronic disease.
GLP-1, or glucagon-like peptide-1, is a hormone that plays a major role in appetite regulation, digestion, and insulin release through a process called the incretin effect (1).
You can think of the incretin effect as a relay race that your hormones tag team. When you begin eating a meal, it sends a signal to your gut to begin the race, which it does by releasing the GLP-1 hormone. GLP-1 then passes the baton to the next team member, the pancreas, to secrete insulin.
“As your body releases more insulin, your blood sugar lowers and you start to feel full,” Messer explains. GLP-1 doesn’t stop there. It also slows down gastric emptying, or how quickly food leaves your stomach, making you feel fuller longer, which helps prevent overeating. But the main way that GLP-1 drugs help with weight loss is by stimulating receptors in the brain that directly reduce appetite and cravings.
The incretin effect works efficiently for most people. However, conditions such as obesity and type 2 diabetes—and lifestyle choices like eating too many sweets or being sedentary—can interfere with your body’s response to the incretin effect (2). An impaired incretin effect can cause all sorts of issues that could make it harder for you to lose weight, such as:
GLP-1 medications mimic high levels of the naturally occurring hormone and bind to its receptors in the body. GLP-1 drugs heighten the incretin effect, reducing appetite and making it easier to stay in a caloric deficit for weight loss.
Prioritizing healthy foods, exercising regularly, and getting enough sleep all cause your natural GLP-1 levels to rise temporarily (only for a couple of minutes, as opposed to GLP-1 medications, which last for a week) (5, 6, 7). So, should you try to increase your GLP-1 with lifestyle changes?
While tweaking your habits can modestly increase your GLP-1, this small boost likely won’t result in massive weight loss. In fact, research presented at the American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery’s 2024 annual meeting shows that lifestyle changes alone are not as effective at promoting sustainable weight loss compared to GLP-1 agonist medications (8).
Messer also believes that when it comes to hormones, how much GLP-1 you have naturally isn’t actually what’s driving weight gain or inhibiting weight loss. Instead, it’s incretin resistance, or how well your body responds to the hormones GLP-1 and GIP. (For context, GIP is a hormone that works in tandem with GLP-1) (9).
“Nobody is lacking these hormones—they’re developing resistance to them,” Messer explains. This resistance can be caused by a multitude of factors, though recent research points to excessive visceral fat as one of the main ones (6). “What we need to be thinking about is not only how we can create more GLP-1, but how we can restore our sensitivity to it so that we can feel full after eating.”
While research shows that GLP-1 medications are more effective than lifestyle tweaks to improve your GLP-1 (8), the following may modestly support weight management by promoting incretin sensitivity and bumping up your GLP-1 levels, according to physician Simran Malhotra, M.D.
The incretin effect begins with eating, so it’s no surprise that your dietary choices matter when it comes to improving sensitivity. Luckily, you don’t need to start a strict diet or fasting regimen to achieve this, Messer suggests.
One of the most effective ways to boost your GLP-1 levels and response is by eating a fibrous, plant-based diet packed with fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, nuts, and seeds (10). Why? Fiber helps slow down digestion, boost satiety, and support healthy blood sugar levels.
“Our gut microbes use these plant fibers to produce compounds called short-chain fatty acids, which boost our natural GLP-1 levels and sensitivity,” Malhotra explains (11).
At the same time, limit sugary snacks (soda, candy, flavored yogurt, and fruit juice) and refined carbohydrates (white bread, pastries, and pasta), which can cause blood sugar spikes and press your pancreas to produce more insulin (12). (Plus, these foods are calorie-dense, which can throw another wrench in your weight loss.)
Over time, chronic spikes in blood sugar can cause insulin resistance (13), making it harder for your natural GLP-1 to effectively regulate your appetite.
Scorching calories and building muscular strength aren’t the only benefits of regular exercise. Staying active can also improve your GLP-1 levels and response by promoting insulin sensitivity (14, 6).
When you exercise, your muscles rely on glucose for energy. As your muscles expend this energy, your body shuttles glucose into muscle cells via the GLUT4 transporter, without the need for inulin. Over time, this process can improve your insulin sensitivity (15, 16).
Over time, this can reduce insulin resistance, allowing your body to respond better to your natural GLP-1 signals.
“GLP-1 sensitivity goes hand in hand with restoring insulin sensitivity,” Messer explains. “As you work out consistently, you’ll see those incretin levels drop because the body is saying, ‘Phew, I don’t need to work on overdrive anymore.’”
Research suggests that moderate-intensity aerobic exercises—which are activities that make you breathe a little harder but are not too difficult to maintain, such as swimming, cycling, or jogging—are especially effective at supporting the incretin effect (6).
You wouldn’t think that snoozing in bed would promote weight loss, but it turns out that not getting enough shut-eye can wreak havoc on your GLP-1 levels.
“When I meet with my weight loss patients, I’m always stressing sleep hygiene,” Messer says. “Sleep is so important. I’m even prescribing non-addictive sleeping aids and referring them to sleep psychologists.”
Sleep deprivation—and an out-of-whack sleep schedule—can cause your GLP-1 levels to plummet (17). That’s because circadian rhythm, the body’s natural clock, also plays a role in the timing of GLP-1 secretion. (And while slightly increasing GLP-1 levels won’t result in extreme weight loss, you certainly don’t want to cause them to nosedive, either.)
A 2023 study found that folks with a misaligned circadian rhythm (due to factors like night shift work or insomnia) tend to have a low GLP-1 response and a high risk of insulin resistance and obesity (18).
At the same time, research shows that getting seven to nine hours of quality sleep each night may improve incretin sensitivity and GLP-1 levels (7).
Expert opinions vary. Supplements such as berberine are sometimes touted as “nature’s Ozempic,” but Messer says that herbal remedies are unlikely to have an impact on GLP-1 levels—especially not to the degree that a GLP-1 medication can.
“There are supplements that might raise your GLP-1 slightly, but the body is too resistant to care,” Messer says. She also notes that supplements may not work for most people struggling with GLP-1 resistance and that it can be frustrating to waste money on protocols that don’t work.
“It’s not fair to people who are struggling with their weight to say, ‘Just take this supplement and you’ll be fine,’” Messer says. “Because they won’t be fine. And then they’ll feel like they’ve failed.”
Malhotra, on the other hand, is less skeptical of supplements and sometimes recommends them alongside other lifestyle changes, such as diet and exercise.
“Some herbs such as yerba mate, ginseng, curcumin, and berberine have been shown to improve metabolic health markers, enhance weight loss, and can help you feel full by boosting GLP-1 production (19),” Malhotra says. However, she adds that more research is needed to fully understand the effectiveness and safety of natural GLP-1 boosters.
We know what you’re thinking: You just told me that boosting my GLP-1 won’t do much. So, how can Ozempic, which attaches to the GLP-1 receptors—mimicking high levels of the hormone—help me overcome resistance and lose weight?
The amount of GLP-1 in weight loss injections is so much more than your body produces on its own, so it can help you overcome that resistance while you’re on the medication, Messer notes.
“For example, when you have insulin resistance, we give you a whole bunch of insulin,” she explains. “But it’s a pharmaceutical dose, meaning so much more than your body would be able to produce, which shocks your body into improving its insulin response.”
But if you can increase your GLP-1 sensitivity naturally, do you even need weight loss medications? Frankly, weight loss medication will provide better results, especially if you’ve been struggling with overeating, Messer says.
“In my practice, I’m pretty lenient about giving GLP-1 medications. I don’t make people suffer trying to restore their GLP-1 sensitivity on their own,” Messer says. “By the time people who have been trying to lose weight come to me, they’re miserable. And I’m here to help.”
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