My Story & Clinical Curiosity
In 2021, I was freshly postpartum, navigating life with four kids and a body still reeling from back-to-back pregnancies marked by gestational diabetes. My third and fourth pregnancies were both complicated by GDM, and during that fourth, CGM monitors weren’t easily accessible over the counter yet. So I relied on finger sticks. Constantly. My fingertips were bruised, sore, and raw by the end.
But worse than that was the emotional weight of it all.
Despite following all the guidance, despite restricting carbohydrates down to 30 grams a day — something I wouldn’t recommend to any of my patients now — I couldn’t get my fasting glucose to stay below 95. Most mornings, it was in the low 100s. I didn’t require insulin. I had a healthy, uncomplicated home birth. But I walked away from that experience deeply unsettled, convinced there was more to the story. I was determined to understand the root cause of my insulin resistance.
Insulin resistance is when your cells stop responding properly to insulin — a hormone that helps move glucose out of your blood and into your cells for energy. When this process breaks down, your body makes more insulin to compensate. But over time, this can lead to elevated blood sugar levels, inflammation, hormonal disruption, and eventually, chronic disease.
So I did what I always do when something doesn’t add up: I started reading. Deeply. Widely. I followed all the experts. I experimented on myself. I even tried a female-friendly ketogenic protocol recommended by a popular integrative physician.
It made me miserable.
Around that same time, I was seeing an influx of women in my private practice who were experiencing the exact same patterns, and not just postpartum women like me. These were women in their 40s and 50s, many in perimenopause. Their morning blood sugars were elevated. Their glucose spiked after foods that should have been safe — things like broccoli. They were doing everything right. And still, their metabolism was working against them.
As a clinician, I’m a problem solver. I love the nuance and complexity that a functional and integrative approach offers. And what I started to understand in this season changed the trajectory of my practice: blood sugar doesn’t just go bad because of food. It goes bad because of modern living.
Circadian disruption. Gut inflammation. Emotional stress. Sleep deprivation. Hormonal decline. Each one of these can destabilize blood sugar. And in turn, unstable blood sugar can worsen all of those things. It’s bidirectional. It's a web — not a straight line.
And when I dug deeper into the role of estrogen, things started to click. As estrogen declines, insulin resistance increases. Stress resilience weakens. Recovery slows. Sleep becomes lighter. Circadian rhythm begins to misfire. I wasn’t just dealing with postpartum blood sugar dysregulation. I was staring down the hormonal undercurrent that drives so much of what we see in midlife medicine.
It started with one prescription from a compounding pharmacy.
No red tape. No high price tag. No prior authorization. Just one patient, one thoughtful trial. Then I tried it on myself. Then, a few more patients. Slowly, the full picture started to reveal itself.
What I saw wasn’t just weight loss — it was women coming back to themselves.
The fog lifted. The cravings quieted. Their energy steadied. Blood sugar normalized — yes — but so did their mood, their cycles, even their pain.
And I couldn’t ignore it.
My curiosity, my frustration, and my training kicked into high gear.
A Closer Look at How These Medications Work
GLP-1 and GIP receptor agonists were originally designed to regulate blood sugar by mimicking naturally occurring gut hormones. In type 2 diabetes, they help promote and improve insulin secretion and suppress glucagon in a glucose-dependent way. But their effect goes far beyond the pancreas.
They decrease gluconeogenesis: the process by which the liver releases stored glucose to elevate circulating blood sugar, often in response to stress. This mechanism is especially evident and accelerated in stressed out women experiencing weight loss resistance.
Receptors for these hormones are found throughout the body: in the brain, gut, heart, liver, ovaries, kidneys, and immune cells. They slow gastric emptying, reduce inflammation, calm sympathetic overdrive, and impact reward signaling in the brain. They seem to improve endothelial function. They modulate the immune system. And they appear to play a role in how the body allocates energy—how it manages stress, repairs tissue, and responds to hormonal input.
In other words, these medications act on systems—not just symptoms. And that’s what makes them so interesting.
Research is ongoing, but it’s already clear that the benefits we’re seeing clinically aren’t solely the result of weight loss or glucose control. There are other mechanisms at play—mechanisms that may offer insight into what metabolic repair really looks like.
Why Blood Sugar Is So Much Bigger Than Weight
Blood sugar regulation sits at the center of nearly every hormonal and metabolic process in the body. When it's unstable—whether due to stress, inflammation, poor sleep, hormone shifts, or gut dysfunction—it doesn't just affect energy or cravings. It interferes with ovulation. It drives cortisol dysregulation. It amplifies perimenopausal symptoms. It makes autoimmunity harder to manage. It creates inflammation in places that don’t always show up in labs.
For many women, blood sugar dysregulation is the silent amplifier of everything else that’s not working.
In the context of hormone decline, it often becomes the tipping point—taking systems that were managing and pushing them into dysfunction. This is why weight loss resistance, cycle irregularity, mental fog, and pain syndromes often emerge in parallel. And it’s why a weight-loss-only lens fails to grasp what’s actually going wrong.
Medications that improve blood sugar regulation—especially in the face of estrogen decline—are doing more than suppressing appetite. They're giving the body a more stable foundation from which to heal.
It’s important to understand that the non-weight loss benefits of these medications are not just fringe medicine. They are real, and emerging. And it’s on you, the consumer, to understand the possibilities that exist in medicine and science beyond “standards of care.”
10 Non-Weight Loss Benefits You Should Know About
The research on GLP-1 and GIP medications is in an early phase, but important patterns are already taking shape. In study after study, benefits are emerging that extend beyond weight loss and blood sugar control. Here are ten that are worth paying attention to:
1. Cardiovascular Protection
A large clinical trial of 17,000+ adults with cardiovascular disease (but no diabetes) found that semaglutide reduced heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular death by 20%—and those benefits began showing up before appreciable weight loss occurred.
2. Liver Repair in NASH
NASH, or nonalcoholic steatohepatitis, is a progressive liver condition tied to metabolic dysfunction. In a 52-week trial, tirzepatide resolved NASH in 44–62% of participants—compared to only 10% on placebo—and improved liver scarring.
3. Improvements in Blood Pressure and Cholesterol
Across multiple trials, both semaglutide and tirzepatide lowered blood pressure by 7–10 mmHg and improved LDL and triglyceride levels—effects not solely tied to weight loss, but likely due to vascular and neurohormonal modulation.
4. Hormonal Reset in PCOS
In a randomized trial of women with PCOS, semaglutide improved insulin resistance, restored menstrual regularity, reduced androgens, and normalized fasting glucose—even in those who didn’t lose weight.
5. Possible Protection for the Brain
Ongoing Phase III trials are investigating whether GLP-1 agonists can reduce Alzheimer’s-related proteins and inflammation in the brain. Researchers are watching early biomarker data closely for signs of neuroprotection.
6. Reduced Cravings for Alcohol and Nicotine
In a small trial, semaglutide reduced alcohol cravings by ~40% and cut heavy drinking days in half. Some participants who smoked also reduced cigarette use—suggesting central effects on dopamine and reward regulation.
Study summary →
7. Potential Cancer Risk Reduction
A large population study of over 1.6 million adults found that GLP-1 use was linked to lower risk of several obesity-associated cancers, including colon, liver, pancreas, kidney, gallbladder, endometrial, and esophageal.
8. Stabilization in Mood and Mental Health
In a review of psychiatric data from weight loss trials, participants on semaglutide were significantly less likely to develop worsening depressive symptoms compared to placebo. This benefit appears independent of weight loss.
Study link →
9. Long-Term Blood Sugar Stability
Semaglutide has been shown to provide more durable improvements in HbA1c than other glucose-lowering therapies, with fewer blood sugar crashes. For non-diabetic women, this durability is key: it means more stable energy and fewer downstream spikes in cortisol and hunger.
10. Kidney Protection
In trials of patients at high risk for kidney disease, semaglutide reduced the onset of new kidney damage markers by 24%. The mechanism may involve improved endothelial function and reduced oxidative stress—potentially relevant even in early or subclinical cases.
The Limitations of Waiting for Guidelines to Catch Up
Clinical guidelines are built to serve the average patient. They’re designed for safety, scalability, and clarity in large populations. But for many women—especially those in complex or transitional phases of life—what’s standard isn’t always what’s optimal.
In the case of GLP-1 and GIP medications, the guidelines are still catching up to the data. Most prescribers are still thinking about these medications strictly through the lens of diabetes or weight loss. But the science is moving faster than the system. There’s already evidence to suggest these therapies can influence cardiovascular risk, liver disease, ovulation, mood, even memory—and that these effects often show up long before substantial weight loss occurs.
This is why I practice precision medicine. I care about data, but I care just as much about mechanism—how something works and why it helps. I look for the signal: in the research, in the physiology, and in real women’s lives. I don't wait for a drug to earn a new billing code before I consider its value. I wait for the science to make sense.
If we only act when protocols change, we miss the opportunity to prevent. And prevention—true repair—is almost never born from consensus. It’s born from careful observation, scientific fluency, and a willingness to think ahead.
A Smarter Way Forward
I founded Aurelia because women deserve more than algorithms and templates. They deserve care that’s driven by precision, not protocols—and rooted in the complexity of how their bodies actually work.
In my practice, every woman is her own N of 1 study. I emphasize safety first (of course), but I don’t let archaic governing bodies dictate the care I provide.
GLP-1 and GIP receptor agonists have been framed narrowly in public discourse—as weight loss tools, or diabetes drugs. But they are so much more. These compounds are acting on blood vessels, the brain, the ovaries, the liver. They’re shifting physiology in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
I use them when the case calls for it: in women whose blood sugar never fully recovered postpartum, in women with polycystic ovaries and an ovulatory silence no supplement could fix, in women in midlife whose metabolism changed so suddenly it felt like a betrayal.
But always with context. Always in a system that's already oriented toward repair: food, light, sleep, movement, hormones, regulation.
This kind of care isn’t the most convenient or the most conventional. Women are conditioned to be good patients, and to defer to their doctors for permission.
The future of medicine is consumer-focused. It listens. And it trusts a woman’s intuition. Engages it in thoughtful conversation.
If you’ve been GLP-curious, and discouraged - you’re not wrong. You’re just ahead.