This Is My Journey | The GLP-1 Podcast
Marc McKee | My Journey with Marc™ 27 episodes Nov 10, 2026
This Is My Journey is a health and wellness podcast hosted by Marc McKee, creator of My Journey with Marc. It features honest, evidence-led conversations with health professionals and people with lived experience about weight and GLP-1 journeys, food, sleep, mental health, confidence, and life after transformation. The show avoids gurus, shortcuts, and shame, aiming for straight answers and practical insight. New episodes are released every Tuesday at 6am UK time, and it has been a UK Top 10 Apple Podcasts health show listened to in over 100 countries.
Episodes
Reached Your Goal Weight? What a GP Wants You to Check Next (with Dr Gareth Patterson)
In the UK, a man born today can expect to live to seventy-nine, but only to stay in good health until around sixty-one. For women it's eighty-three, with good health also ending at around sixty-one. That's nearly two decades at the end of a life spent unwell, and according to the Office for National Statistics, healthy life expectancy has just fallen to its lowest level since records began.
So man
Silencing the Food Noise: Psychology of Appetite, Addiction and Control (with Dr David McLaughlan)
Nine point one per cent of adults in England now screen positive for a possible eating disorder. That's around four point two million people, up from six point four per cent in 2007, and among sixteen to twenty-four year olds it's one in five. Separately, a BMJ analysis pooling 281 studies across 36 countries found that around fourteen per cent of adults show signs of ultra-processed food addictio
Hair Shedding After Rapid Weight Loss: A Dermatologist Explains (with Dr Aamna Adel)
Last October researchers presented one of the largest studies ever done on this. Nearly 548,000 matched pairs, comparing people on GLP-1 medication against people who were not. At twelve months, the GLP-1 group had 76 per cent higher odds of telogen effluvium, the shedding kind of hair loss, and 40 per cent higher odds of non-scarring hair loss overall.
The telling detail is what happened at six m
Aesthetics After Weight Loss: Who to Trust With Your Face (with Olivia Falcon)
A whole generation of people are coming off GLP-1 medications, looking in the mirror and wondering what to do about what they see.
In this episode I'm joined by Olivia Falcon, an award-winning journalist and the founder of The Editor's List, the UK's leading cosmetic concierge. Olivia is the former health and beauty director of Tatler, where she edited thirteen of the Tatler Cosmetic Surgery Guide
Relationships on Mounjaro: When One of You Changes (with Jonathan Van Viegen)
When you change on a GLP-1, everyone asks how you are doing. Nobody asks your partner.
In 2023 there were 102,678 divorces in England and Wales, and the marriages that ended had lasted a median of twelve point seven years. These were not whirlwind mistakes. They were long marriages, with mortgages and children and shared history, that came apart anyway. And here is the thing nobody has measured. W
Telling People You're on Mounjaro: Dating and Identity (with Dr Treena Orchard)
Ninety-one per cent of people who have actually taken these medications would recommend them to a friend who was struggling with their weight. Now ask those same people whether they've told their friends they're on it.
That figure comes from a survey of nearly thirteen hundred UK adults published in BMJ Public Health. The same study found people who had taken these drugs were around seven times mo
Muscle Loss on Mounjaro: How to Protect It (with Dr Ash Bowden)
Sport England's Active Lives survey puts it starkly: 11.8 million adults in England, nearly one in four of us, are classed as inactive. That means less than thirty minutes of moderate movement in an entire week.
Now put that next to what happens on GLP-1 medication. In the STEP 1 trial of semaglutide, roughly 39% of the weight people lost was lean mass. Not fat. Muscle and bone. The scaffolding yo
Loose Skin and Ozempic Face After Weight Loss (with Dr Frank Agullo)
The volume goes. The skin envelope stays. And there is a line somewhere between what a good skincare routine can do and what only an operating theatre can do, a line almost nobody in the beauty industry has any commercial interest in drawing clearly for you.
Here's something that might surprise you. Everyone assumes the weight-loss injections have triggered a tummy-tuck boom. But BAAPS's own audit
HRT, Mounjaro and the Heart in Midlife (with Dr Komal Patil-Sisodia)
Coronary heart disease kills more than twice as many women in the UK as breast cancer. More than 800,000 UK women are living with it right now. And if you asked most women in midlife what they should be most worried about, I don't think heart disease is the answer you'd get.
Menopause changes where a woman stores fat, how she processes sugar, what her cholesterol does and what her blood pressure d
Hair Loss on Mounjaro: What Actually Helps (with Nyrah Saleem)
It's not the nausea people find hardest. It's the hair.
A systematic review published in April 2026 pulled together twenty-four studies and found hair loss occurred at six cases per thousand patient-years on GLP-1 medication, against zero point eight on placebo. More than a three-fold increase. And when you're eating a fraction of what you used to, the nutrients have to come from somewhere: one st
The Weight Loss Drug After Mounjaro: Retatrutide (with Dr Fatima Cody Stanford)
A billion people worldwide are living with obesity. The medications finally work. And fewer than one in ten of the people who could benefit will get them by 2030.
In this episode I'm joined by Dr Fatima Cody Stanford, obesity medicine physician-scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. One of the first fellowship-trained obesity medicine physici
Mounjaro and Your Gut: What GLP-1s Really Do (with Dr Karan Rajan)
Three quarters of people in the semaglutide trials had a gastrointestinal side effect. Only four per cent of UK adults were eating enough fibre before any of this started. So we've put millions of people on a medication that slows the gut down, in a country that was already barely eating any fibre, and then wondered why everyone feels awful.
In this episode I'm joined by Dr Karan Rajan, an NHS sur
Pancreatitis and Gallstones on Mounjaro: One Woman's Story (with Anna Cadman)
Anna normally refuses to go to hospital. The night the pain moved from her side to her chest and she could not stop being sick, she called one. Five days later she was still on a surgical ward.
Gallstones, an infected gallbladder, jaundice, and pancreatitis from a blocked duct. In the episode we both put that down to the speed of her weight loss rather than the medicine. I have to be straight: the
When Friends Change Towards You After Weight Loss (with Emma Cottey & Rue Ndabalime)
Two members of staff had to shove a roller coaster seat shut around Emma while her five year old sat beside her. The bruise she got climbing out is what made her act.
Support is not a soft extra. A UCL study followed 182 bariatric surgery candidates. Those who saw between one and five friends a month ended up with total weight loss 9.23 percentage points higher at two years than those who saw none
Skin Removal Surgery After Weight Loss: When Is It the Right Call? (with Dr Gediminas Samulėnas)
You wake up from the surgery, you look down, and there is no way back. Nobody prepares you for that part.
I lost 126lbs in about ten months on a GLP-1, and nobody warns you about what the skin does afterwards. Skin does not contract. In the UK an abdominoplasty is regarded as cosmetic surgery and is not usually available on the NHS, it takes about six weeks to fully recover, and needs four to six
Loose Skin After Losing 126lbs: What Skincare Can and Can't Do
I spent months rubbing creams into my stomach, braced for the loose skin to show up there. It was my face and my neck that changed.
An estimated 1.6 million adults in Great Britain used a GLP-1 for weight loss in the year to early 2025, and almost none of them are told what happens to their skin. The published literature on removing excess skin after major weight loss is surgical literature. Cream
8 Stone Down and Pre-Diabetes Reversed on Mounjaro (with James Taylor)
He managed a clothes shop and could no longer buy clothes in one. Everything came from the internet. 5XL, 52 inch waist.
In the Diabetes Prevention Program, people at high risk who lost an average of five point six kilos through diet and activity cut their chance of developing type 2 diabetes by fifty eight percent. That is the best evidence we have that losing weight changes the odds. What it doe
Is Obesity a Disease or a Choice? A Doctor Who Lived It (with Dr Sachin Khunti)
Three chocolate bars from the school vending machine, then the chicken shop on the way home. He says it never felt deliberate. It was just normal.
England’s National Child Measurement Programme measures over a million children a year. In 2023 to 2024 it found nine point six percent living with obesity in their reception year, rising to twenty two point one percent by year six. The pattern is set e
The Most Common Mounjaro Mistakes and How to Avoid Them (with Dr Mike Herring)
Your first injection is not meant to make you lose weight. It is there to find out whether you can tolerate the drug at all.
Most mistakes on a GLP-1 start with a misunderstanding of what the medication is for. In the STEP 1 trial extension, people who had lost an average of seventeen point three percent of their body weight on semaglutide regained around two thirds of it in the year after they st
Black Market Mounjaro: The Real Risks of Unregulated Jabs (with Hira Malik, Oushk Pharmacy)
Nobody would spoon an unlabelled bottle into their child and call it Calpol. Plenty of people will inject an unlabelled vial and call it Mounjaro.
Take retatrutide. Eli Lilly, which is developing it, says it is investigational, not approved by any regulatory agency in the world, and that no one can legally sell it for human use. It is still in phase 3 trials. Open TikTok or Facebook Marketplace an
After the Mounjaro Prescription: The Support Nobody Gives You (with Aja Beckett, Shotsy)
Getting the medication is the part everybody fights for. Then the box is in your hands, the pharmacy wishes you luck, and that is where the help stops.
A Cleveland Clinic study of 7,881 adults on semaglutide or tirzepatide, published in Obesity in June 2025, found 20.4 per cent stopped inside three months and 32.0 per cent by twelve, so more than half were off it within a year. At one year those w
Supplements and Nutrition on Mounjaro: What You Actually Need (with Dr Adam Jameson)
For the first year all I cared about was the number on the scales going down. Nobody warned me the thinning hair and the flat, foggy days might be a nutrition problem rather than a medication one.
A retrospective study published in Obesity Pillars in June 2025 found 22.4 per cent of adults newly prescribed a GLP-1 had a nutritional deficiency or a related complication inside twelve months, vitamin
Gallstones on Mounjaro: Does the Medication Cause Them? (with Amie Moore)
Three hours on her hands and knees, screaming. Then the drive to hospital.
Amie was told twice it was gastritis and sent home with antibiotics. On the third visit she told them what she thought it was, and the scan agreed. Her gallbladder came out as an emergency. We recorded this days later. By then she was nearly seven stone down, from over twenty stone in April to just over thirteen, highest do
Cold Therapy and Recovery on a Weight Loss Journey: Does It Help? (with Nathan Hindle, Brysk)
Minus 87 degrees Celsius. That is what I stepped into in a Manchester studio, and the red light, hyperbaric oxygen and compression boots came after.
Does any of it help someone losing the pounds on a GLP-1? Nathan’s answer is that the body goes into protection mode at minus 87, blood vessels constricting, circulation prioritised to the core, the liver releasing cold shock proteins, muscle activati
Maintenance After Losing 126lbs: What Nobody Tells You (with Rue Ndabalime & Emma Cottey)
My doctor told me I might not make forty.
Fifteen months later I was a hundred and twenty six pounds down, fifty seven kilograms, from twenty three point four stone to fourteen point seven stone. That is the part people clap for. Here is the part nobody films. In the SURMOUNT-4 withdrawal trial, eighty two per cent of the people who came off tirzepatide regained more than a quarter of what they ha
Life After Losing 50kg: Fear of Regain and a Body That Feels New (with Brandon Gee)
If you cycled from Edinburgh to London and fell off halfway, you would not go back to Edinburgh to start again.
Brandon Gee lost eight stone, three of them in his first two months. Then he switched medication, fell out of routine and put a stone and a half back on. He has lost half a stone of it again since switching back, and he is blunt about why. It was not clinical. What he was doing worked, a
Exercise on Mounjaro: Where to Start When You Have No Energy (with Mitch O'Callaghan)
“I’ll start exercising once I lose the weight.” I spent years saying it. Mitch O’Callaghan’s answer: if you did nothing last week, zero is an easy number to beat.
Mitch says the medication is not what costs you muscle. It does not make you lose muscle, or fat. It makes it easier to eat less and the deficit does the rest. The risk, he says, is eating so little there is no energy to train, which lea
Mounjaro as a Parent: Family Meals, Guilt and Finding Time (with Emma Cottey)
It took two staff to push the restraint down and click it shut. Emma Cottey spent the whole ride terrified it would spring open, with her young daughter in the seat beside her.
That was a theme park in May 2024. Emma had spent years treating her weight as hers to manage, and on that ride she realised it was about to become her children’s problem too. That week she Googled Mounjaro. She had around
Getting Mounjaro in the UK vs the US: What's Actually Different (with Dr Dean Jones)
Same molecule. Two countries. Two very different answers to whether you qualify.
In England the NHS funds tirzepatide for weight loss only at a BMI of 40 or over, with four of five listed conditions. That is the funding bar, not the licence. The UK licence, granted by the MHRA in November 2023, starts at a BMI of 30, or 27 with a weight related condition. You can sit well inside the licence and no
Mounjaro After Bariatric Surgery: Can You Take Both? (with Kirsty Ginger)
Kirsty told everyone she was too unwell for the Christmas market. The truth was she could not walk into town.
Surgery is not always the end of the story. In a study of 112,858 people in the United States who had bariatric surgery, fourteen per cent went on to start a GLP-1. Kirsty is one of them. Her doctor referred her to tier three, she met the criteria for tier four, she had surgery at almost 2
The Psychology of Weight Loss Medication: Shame, Identity and Secret Jabbing (with Dr Lucy Harvey)
The body moves faster than the mind. The clothes get smaller, the stairs get easier, and your head is still catching up.
Sixty four per cent of adults in England are overweight or living with obesity. Almost all of the conversation around that figure is about bodies, appetite, doses and the scales. Almost none of it is about what happens in the head. Nobody hands you a leaflet for reaching the goa
Being Told I Wouldn't Reach 40: Why I Started Weight Loss Medication
“If you keep going the way you are, you might not make 40.”
I heard that in a doctor’s office and it hit me like a brick. Obesity is officially recognised in the UK as a chronic health condition, and the House of Commons Library puts around twenty-eight per cent of adults in England in that group. It is shaped by genetics, environment, mental health and social pressures, not simply by eating too m
Starting Mounjaro Safely: What to Check Before You Begin (with Hira Malik, Oushk Pharmacy)
Buying Mounjaro online is easy. Buying it safely is not.
Between December 2024 and May 2025 the MHRA seized 7.7 million doses of unlicensed and falsified medicines worth 17.2 million pounds. Go back to late 2023 and the same regulator pulled 369 potentially falsified weight loss pens out of the UK supply chain, and people ended up in hospital after using them. Those are the ones that got caught. W
Weight Loss and Food Culture: When Family Meals Are the Hardest Part (with Rue Ndabalime)
Rue was told she could wait three years for weight loss surgery, or go private and sort it herself. She sorted it herself.
Seventy six pounds later, she still cooks the food she grew up on.
In England, seventy point eight per cent of Black adults are in the BMI range for excess weight, the highest of any ethnic group, against thirty three point one per cent of Chinese adults. Almost nobody talks a
