The Truth About GLP 1s & Weight Loss | Dave Knapp

Dave Knapp (0:00)

When I learned about what these medications were doing in the human body, I was like, everybody's gonna be on them. People just don't feel like they have the time to wait on the FDA and big pharma.

Mark Bell (0:10)

Man, if you don't change some of who you are at the core, you're still probably gonna be stuck.

Dave Knapp (0:16)

If your wife is taking a thimble full of insulin to maintain that blood sugar in a fasted state, but you're taking a gallon, that is not the same. We've learned that there are some very cardio-protective benefits of especially semaglutide.

Mark Bell (0:29)

And just because you have a couple of extra LBs on you, doesn't necessarily mean that you have a bunch of terrible things going on on the inside. And just because you're lean and look great, doesn't mean you're not full of plaque and maybe developing Alzheimer's and like all kinds of crap could be going on.

Dave Knapp (0:45)

They're not doing massive obesity trials. Guess what they're doing? They're doing trials in smoking cessation, alcohol use disorder, opioid use disorder, major depressive disorder.

Mark Bell (0:59)

All right, Dave Knapp, how did you get yourself into all this? And how did you start your YouTube channel and get into all the GLP one, twos and threes, all of the GLPs?

Dave Knapp (1:12)

I got into it with the type two diabetes diagnosis back in 2021 This was fresh off of COVID.

I'm still grappling with whether that had anything to do with it. Usually folks get like a slow march to diabetes, right? So you go in to the doctor or your doctor's like, hey, if you keep doing whatever you're doing, you're gonna end up with diabetes, right? I had none of that. I mean, I've always been overweight. I've always struggled with obesity my entire adult life. But interestingly, it's like if I go back 20 years, almost every year, I would do keto for anywhere from three to six months out of the year. And I would be able to drop 20 pounds. It's just that I could never quite keep it up forever. And so on the upswing, if I lose 20, I gained back 25 or 30 And I literally yo-yoed on this for 20 years until I waltzed in the doctor's office and I got the type two diabetes diagnosis. And it was like dumbfounding to me because my A1C had always been normal and I had never been warned like, hey, this is coming.

So it was actually fresh off of a really rough bout of COVID that I got. And I thought I had long COVID. I was telling my wife, it's like, I feel like I'm gonna die. I said, I don't know if I have cancer or what the deal is, but something's wrong. And I went into the doctor and he said, well, that something that is wrong is that your A1C isn't eight, you have diabetes. And I was like, wow, it's like 36 years old at the time.

And so from that point, the doctor's like, well, what do you want to do, Dave? And I said, well, I don't want to be on medicine my whole life. I'll tell you that much.

And I was like pretty skeptical about the medical world. And just at that time, it was COVID, it was just crazy time. And it's like, I don't want to be on medicine. I'll tell you that. So he goes, well, the one thing that you can do if you want to stay off medicine is you have to eat keto. And I was like, well, great. I'm already keenly familiar with keto. The weird thing is that it had stopped helping me lose weight about a year prior to it. It was like all my old tricks that I used to go to just did not work anymore. And like, I understood the science of keto. I understood about hidden carbs. And like, so, but it just had simply stopped working. And so, so I was like, well, you know, I want to be around longer for my kids. I lost my old man at 54 from a massive heart attack. He was a smoker, but he wasn't even that overweight, no diabetes.

So I'm like, I'll do whatever I have to do. And so I buckled down for a full year, did just hardcore keto, wore the CGM that went right to my doctor's computer. So he could see that my, my blood sugars were flat lined. I, you know, I was eating no carbohydrates. And we got to the end of the year, my A1C went from an eight to about a 5.2, I think it was. So non-diabetic, really good A1C. But my weight had only gone from 319 pounds to 312 pounds. And so, so I was really able to control the diabetes. Now the other interesting thing is that my insulin levels, even at the, the A1C that I was at, was still off the charts high, interestingly enough. And so my doctor's like, well, you know, here's the deal. There's about four people out of the 600 that I've had in this program that just cannot lose weight on this program. And I, I don't know what it is, but I think you're a candidate for bariatric surgery. And I was like, rearranging my anatomy at 37 wasn't super high on my, my want to do list, but neither is dying young. And so whatever it's going to take. And so I ended up thankfully not having insurance coverage for bariatric surgery. But my doctor says, well, you know, since you're diabetic, there's this new class of medications that's accomplishing hormonally what bariatric surgery does. Most people think that bariatric surgery only works because you're just cutting your stomach down, you're eating less, you're absorbing less nutrients. And that is certainly part of the equation. But the other part is there's this rebalancing of all these hormones that are dysregulated. And one of those hormones have, or they belong to a family called nutrient-stimulated hormones of which GLP-1 is one. And so he introduced me that day to a drug called Manjaro. And I took it home, took home the prescription. And I thought, I'm not going to take something that I don't know anything about. So I went online to learn everything I could about this. And all I could find was, there's a lot of women that were on YouTube like, hey, I lost 100 pounds on Ozempac. And that kind of content, which I was like, good for you. That's really great. It was exciting for me at the time. But I was like, how? How does it work? And I could find nobody talking about how these medications work, what they were, where they came from. And I was like, that's what I want to know before I inject something into my body. And so really, I just started reading clinical trials. I started following the companies that make them. And I started to just share the information that I was learning for myself until ultimately it morphed into this platform that we now today call On The Pen.