Feb. 19, 2026
Why Weight Loss Shots Like Ozempic Are Working But Still Failing Men and More Q&A - 72
This episode is for the business owner, entrepreneur, or driven professional who is serious about their health but keeps running into the same walls.
You fall off for a day, you spiral. You work out hard but the scale does not move. You hear about weight loss shots and wonder if that is the missing piece.
Coach Brian answers four of the most common questions he gets from men focused on fat loss, energy, and long-term performance.
In this episode:
- How to bounce back after a bad day of eating without extreme measures or detox gimmicks
- What weight loss shots actually do to your muscle mass and why most men are using them wrong
- How to get into a calorie deficit when you have no idea how much you are actually eating
- Why busy men who work out consistently are still not losing weight, and how daily movement fixes it
If your energy is inconsistent, your focus is slipping, and your fitness keeps getting pushed to the back burner behind work and family, this episode gives you practical tools you can use this week.
Fat loss for men over 40 does not require perfection. It requires a system that fits real life. That is what this episode is built around.
The Man’s Ultimate 5 Power Breakfast Recipes is a simple, printable guide built for busy men over 40 who want to lose fat, protect muscle, and keep blood sugar steady.
Inside you’ll find 5 real-life breakfasts that each deliver about 40 grams of protein, plus macros and a shopping list so mornings stay easy.
Download it, pick one breakfast, and run it for 7 days.
Listen to it on Episode 70 of "Driven For Health" Podcast
https://brianparana.short.gy/proteinbreakfasts
Want to be a guest on Driven For Health?
Send Brian Parana a message on PodMatch, here:
https://www.podmatch.com/hostdetailpreview/brianparana
Want help applying this to your own health, weight, energy, or lab numbers?
Coach Brian Parana offers Health Hot Seat coaching segments for men who want a clear next step with nutrition, fitness, weight loss, blood pressure, cholesterol, A1C, or daily consistency.
Learn more about The Call To Rise, a 100-day coaching program for driven men over 40 who want to lose weight, improve their health, and rebuild confidence:
To connect with Coach Brian:
brian@brianparana.com
Disclaimer: This podcast is for education and coaching support only. It is not medical advice. Always work with your physician before changing medication, treatment, or medical care.
- If you've ever looked at a weight loss shot, Zmpic, Mangaro, Wong goi, any of those and thought maybe that's what I need, stay with me. There is something you need to hear before you make that decision. Welcome to Driven for Health podcast, episode 72. This is a Q&A episode. I pulled some of the most common questions I've been getting from men on Instagram, Substack, Tik Tok, LinkedIn, Facebook, all those, and I'm going to answer them straight to you right now.
- We're going to be covering four topics today. How to bounce back after falling off, getting back on track, that one. What I actually think about the weight loss shots. how to structure calorie deficits that will actually burn fat and not just lose weight or muscle and how to hit 10,000 steps when you feel like you have no time in your day. Let's get into it.
- What is here? Here here it is. Here's what most men actually mean when they say they fell off. They had one bad day, maybe one bad meal or one bad snack choice. They skipped breakfast. They skipped a workout. Something came up. They had an argument with someone in their house or at work. They just ate whatever was in the house because they're exhausted and had no willpower or motivation to care.
- And in that one moment became two days, 5 days, 7 weeks, a month or longer. And if you're listening this, you might know the pattern. I talked to today with someone who has lost almost 500 lb. They had lost uh 90 to 100 pounds three different times at his lowest body weight that he's been since high school now.
- So he's worked an incredibly hard amount of effort and time and he actually wants to learn nutrition. He doesn't have five hours at 37 years old. He doesn't have five hours to work out at the gym anymore. He needs to get his nutrition dialed in. The problem isn't that you made a bad choice. you're going to, you're human.
- The problem is what happened right after. Most of the guys that I ever talk with and they they don't have a weight loss problem. They have a weight maintenance problem. They they can lose weight, but they can't keep it off because they keep tripping, falling, and they can't get back up. And they cut calories super low.
- They add in the extra cardio. They're at the workouts eight days a week. They're seven-day detox or 30-day challenges. and they go extreme. But here's the thing about detoxes, especially that one. You you do not need to do one. Okay? What are you detoxing? If you don't even know what you're detoxing and you're just using that as a blanket statement, you're already off base.
- You're already off not on the right track because you don't know what your body needs to cleanse or don't cleanse. And if you haven't had a blood test or a stool analysis or something like that, then again, you drinking some overpriced liquid juice thing, I don't think is the appropriate choice for you. The real answer about bouncing back is simple.
- You just go right back to the plan. Okay? Literally, the next meal, you try and balance it out. I call it middle gear mentality. something that I personally live and die by and I have my clients live and die by it as well. This is incredibly important so that you make sure that you can be long-term successful with this.
- All right? Literally, you don't have to punish yourself. We don't have to go super hard the next day to balance it. If you had a little you could do a little bit of balancing act that way, but it can't be this all extreme type thing. When you try to make up for the lost ground with extreme measures, you're setting yourself for yet again falling off. It's just the real thing.
- There is also something else going on here for a lot of guys. It's they're not just reacting to one choice or a bad day. They might be carrying something on their mind on in their body, a fight, a stressful month, not hitting the numbers that their boss put on them. There's a deadline that they're coming up against.
- There's disappointment that they see in the mirror when they look, whether it could be from their body or their current life. There's a lot that could be weighing on you. And food is usually the first thing to fall off track. And this is what I call living as a victim to your own. We're humans. We're going to do these things. I do it too. All right.
- I am victim of living in the past and bringing some of that with me. But we only have right now. The present is something that is here now. And it's okay to acknowledge that something may have happened to you in the past, but now you're using it as a reason that you cannot move forward. And that's where you falter. That's where you get off track.
- And not everything that happens to you is your fault. That is very true. And we're humans. Again, things come up and they challenge us. And life is always going to throw curve balls. But how do you respond is the ultimate your own responsibility. There are two different things that you can do here.
- What does that look like in real practice? I like to keep one rule for myself. I do not allow one bad day to turn into three bad days in a row. I have to take some sort of responsibility, some action to counterbalance it, to get back in control over whatever is happening. So, if I miss a workout, usually I don't go three days without it.
- At the very least, I'll try to get 10k steps in and keep moving. If I went off the plan with food, the next meal, I can just double up on vegetables to balance it out. We don't have to be dramatic or punish yourself or anything like that. We just have to get back to the plan. The boring repetitive day in and dayout plan that works like gang busters.
- That's the strategy. Now, consistency does consistency does not mean being perfect every time. It means your recovery is short. You can have a five minute pity party, not a fiveday pity party. The guys that I work with who see results long term are the ones who, yeah, they slip up, they falter, but they take responsibility, admit their failure, and get back to it.
- It's like that burpee. When life knocks you down, you do a burpee to get back up. And this is where we get the 8020 rule. If you're living your life 80% of the time in the direction of your health, your fitness, your nutrition, then you're going to be all right. You'll be okay. You have 20% opportunity to mess up, to fall off, to not be perfect.
- One more thing on failure. I do not like to define failure as making a mistake. I define failure as quitting. As long as you're still in the game, you have not failed. You just have to learn the lesson at hand and improve your abilities, your capacity to manage it for the next time that it shows up so that you stay in control.
- Number two, hopefully that answered that first one. Number two, what do I think about the weight loss shots, the Olympics and goi and all that? This one's coming up a huge amount in the last 12 months. Honest take on it and working with people who have done it, aren't doing it, who have had success, who are using and not seeing any success at all.
- Yes, that is a reality for certain people. Overall, the weight loss shots are net positive. Yes, they work. The main mechanism is that they suppress hunger. Food noise, challenging times in the day, stressful situations don't always end up in a food binge. They end up in you just managing other ways.
- And I do have clients use them and not necessarily the impetus of this. They've already made that decision in that. But here's what most people are not talking about. All right, you have to think about the whole piece of this. There's been a lot more studies showing up. And if you're in a really bad situation, high A1C with diabetes, you're 100 pounds, 80 lbs, 50 plus pounds overweight, and it's really deterring your quality of life, then that can help you get back to a little bit more normalized life, which then you can then start living. and then
- getting personal trainers and getting nutritionists to help maintain a lifestyle and learn the skill sets and abilities that you need to maintain it long term. A recent study found that approximately 40% of the weight people lost on some of the medications came from lean muscle mass. So if someone loses 20 pounds, roughly eight pounds of that came from muscle.
- And that's significant people. You have to really pay attention. Any extreme low calorie diet will pull muscle off your body, leaving you with higher percentage of body fat. Ultimately, when you get to your goal destination and a lower amount of metabolism, muscle is your metabolically active tissue and you need it to stay to keep the engine going, to burn calories.
- When you lose it, your metabolism slows down. You lose muscle, it slows down. Your body will become less efficient at burning calories and more efficient at storing them. And when you come off the medication, your hunger levels can return rather quickly. The gentleman I talked to that I referenced had lost nearly 500 lb in the course of the last 20 years.
- He talked about coming off toppide and having ravenous levels of hunger. Whereas when he's on it, he doesn't think about it so much. And that will get weight back on significantly fast. Especially if you're in a calorie deficit and you have been low calories. Say for guys, say you're at 13,400 calories and then you start eating 2,000 calories.
- Well, you're in a 500 plus calorie surplus from what you're used to. And that's going to cause you a lot of challenges and problems here. Think of muscle like a furnace in the house. The bigger the furnace, the more fuel it burns. lose the furnace, the house gets cold fast and it's really hard to heat it. And unfortunately, it's really hard to build the furnace back up.
- Putting muscle mass on your body takes a long time. So, here's the real issue. Most people are using the weight loss shots the wrong way. They're taking the medication, they eat less, they lose weight, hit the goals, come off the medication before they ever fix the underlying issues.
- And that's the relationship with food, the understanding of nutrition, how it applies to you in your day-to-day life, your movement patterns, how you manage stress, how you manage your daily schedule, how you manage your other relationships outside of food, your lifestyle. Losing weight is the easy part. America doesn't have a weight loss problem.
- They have a weight maintenance problem. So many people lose weight, but they can't keep it off. And that's the biggest challenge we face. If you're considering a weight loss shot, my advice is talk to your doctor. Look at the risks and the rewards. Have conversations. Look at other people's experiences as well.
- You can certainly find a lot of say even YouTube reviews or experiences of people using them. And you have to really weigh and measure that. Just like if you were to do a beriatric surgery and cut your stomach in half or have the lap band in or any of that when you especially if you remove half your stomach you are altering the is the the body anatomy and causing other issues.
- So, you fixed the hunger issue, but the malnutrition issue is going to show up here in a couple months, and now you can't put a lot of food in your stomach without throwing up because that's what happens when you over stuff it. And then you can't absorb enough nutrition. And you slowly get malnut nuturish. And I've heard I remember working with this one lady every hour she had to either drink water or eat food because she couldn't do both at the same time and couldn't do it all in an hour either.
- I thought that she was didn't want to think about food the rest of her life and now she has to think about it five times more. The other thing is you have to make sure you're doing a strength training program. Absolutely. Even if you don't do this, you need a strength training program to maintain muscle mass on your body.
- Our lives are more sedendary than ever. Without strength training, you will lose muscle regardless because you're sedendary, especially in comparison to living life a 100 years ago, 500 years, a thousand years ago. Our ancestors were significantly more active and didn't have to lift weights in a gym with metal to stay in shape. I hope that cleared that up for you and gave you a little bit more basis around how to best manage some of those.
- Certainly, you can email me brianbrianpiran.com. I'll be more than happy to give you more conversation. I even have the health hot seat for this podcast as well that you could jump on and give you a live free coaching session. I do that regularly. So, you just have to reach out and say, "Hey, I'd like to be in the health hot seat and have a conversation with you.
- " You'll get free coaching on a podcast episode. We'll do it live and you all you need to do is tell me your information and then I will give you the feedback on our session. We'll schedule a call and just run it. All right, moving to section number three, calorie deficit and the bulking question. Someone asked, they bulked up, gained weight, now they cannot lose the stomach, and summer is starting to come, right? We're already midFebruary.
- Should they go into a calorie deficit? Yes, absolutely they should. A simple framework. Go back to episode five is the calorie that is on calories and it's the nutrition pyramid. And you could definitely jump in on how many calories should you be eating. And episode number two is how fast can you lose fat.
- Again, we want to make sure that we're in a realistic calorie deficit. Generally about 500 calories between food and movement does the job. But here are some phases. You go through a gain phase. Usually in the winter time, October, November, December, January, February, then Marchish maybe. But by April, we probably want to start moving out if you're just like anyone and you want to just look and feel good with the shirt off come June, July, August.
- And so we have the gain phase, we have a maintenance phase, and a fat loss phase. Now, most people spend way too much time jumping between them randomly with no structure. One week they're gaining, the other week they feel flabby and they're cutting. And ultimately what this does is waffles you.
- It doesn't give you any actual real results. If you put on size and now you want to cut, you need to go in a calorie deficit. And that is what needs to happen. Typically, I like to see for my guys stay in a fat loss phase for 12 to 20 weeks before adjusting into more of a maintenance approach for a couple weeks. Yes, guys, you do need to have a diet break.
- You can't just endlessly diet as you go there. All right. Typically, during the goal, the phase is to lose roughly 10 to 20% of your overall body weight. So, if you have say 200 lb, we could lose 20 pounds in a sense. If you were bigger or even say you need you had 250 lbs, we could lose 25 pounds there to 35 pounds. All right, before you have to switch gears.
- Now, on calories, this is where men are completely in the dark. They have no idea how many calories you're eating. And unfortunately, the average American consumes 3500 calories. So many people underestimate how many calories they eat and it it's an actual real big issue for you to to do that. So pay attention because you need to track on some level.
- We have to have some awareness around calories and we generally going to eat three to four meals in a day of about 500 to 600 calories roughly around that range or 400 to 600 honestly if you're having four to five three to four meals. And we do need to watch out where your calories coming from. Most of the time they're eating too many calories in a single serving.
- a Starbucks drink, a handful of nuts, a decent size restaurant salad with all the toppings, the cheese, the nuts, the dressings, bagels, fast food, all these things add up. They multiply calories. Now, compared to high volume foods, egg whites, Greek yogurts, cottage cheese, berries, potatoes, broccoli, lots of salad with greens and vegetables, hey, low calorie dressing, rice cakes.
- You can eat a lot of these things. And that's a it's a volume game. When you understand what you're doing, when you understand nutrition, you can fill your gullet in a sense. and be just fine with feeling really full and satiated and not wanting to crash at 900 p.m. or later. It's not about eating less.
- It's about eating a different quality of calories when you do eat it. Weighing and measuring your food is going to be the highest return on your investment in your activities when it comes to this. It's secondly, measuring it with a measuring cup is going to be the second biggest return because you Oh, wow. That's a tablespoon of peanut butter.
- Hm. You usually ate two and 1/2 tablespoons and thought it was 100 calories. That's 250 calories actually. A cup of rice more like 2 and a half as well. And instead of having 200 calories, you have 400 plus calories in that amount. Well, when you know exactly what's in the food, you understand the calories, the portions, the macros to them, the protein, the carbs, the fats, that's when the scale moves and your awareness and education goes up and you don't have to guess anymore.
- And it's a long-term strategy for you to have years from now. So, ask yourself, what are you pretending you do not know about how much you are actually eating or not? And if you believe tracking is too hard or you don't have enough time or you have a sweet tooth, you just it's too hard. I don't want to do it.
- Those are the reasons why you're stuck. You have to shift your belief and sh reshape your actions. And your actions will then reshape your results. And that's the equation that doesn't care about your excuses, your time, this that or the other. It usually takes about two weeks for people to actually learn how to track doing it properly.
- If anyone ever tracks with me, then they learn in about two weeks because they are highly aware of what they're eating and why they're eating and how it's going. The last one, 4,000. So, sorry. The last one is their 10k steps when you're busy. How do I do 10,000? It takes so much time. And sometimes it does. If you sit for 12 hours at work, it's going to take it's going to feel like it takes a lot of time and you're going to have to break it up.
- You're going to have to chunk it up into small little chunks here and there. I've started doing this. I unfortunately hurt my glute playing with my kids in the snow. I guess I'm just getting old. I can't run and it's actually sad. It's 50° outside and I tried running for I got about a mile in. I said, "This isn't a good idea." So, I turned around and stopped when I was running six miles beforehand.
- I've been getting on the bike, the air dye, and I've been squeezing in time here and there to get 30 to 40 minutes into the day, and I just sneak it in one way or another. That's how you're going to do it is you're going to be very strategic about the timing of how you do it, when you do it, why you're doing it, and not try and do it in one long block.
- You're going to bring in friends or your wife or walk the dog or go play with your kids or this is how it's going to do for you. Now, it will take a couple hours a week, but again, if you're strategic and maybe you load the weekend up, you will do so much better. All right, what to track this week? To keep it simple, here's a couple things we have to do.
- We have to pay attention to your weight trend. Weigh in daily and look at the 7day average, not just a single day. Look at the average number of steps that you took in. Look at the amount of protein that you're hitting, guys. 140 is a bare minimum. Most are going to be 150 to 175 on a typical. And if you're a bigger guy or love protein, it might be 180, 190 grams in a day.
- You need to get 7 hours of sleep and we need to maybe check your waist measurement as well. Those are the scoreboard for the week and that's what's going to help you manage this. Now, here's some practical takeaways of what it is. If you fell off, stop trying to compensate. Just get back to the plan.
- No detoxing, crazy weird diets, just not eating for a day. You're still going to end up overeating. Number two, don't allow one day to turn into two to four. However many days you're off is about however many days it takes to get back on. That is truth. That is the reality that I live and coach people on every single day.
- Number three, if you're on or considering a weight loss shot, really make sure you go out of your way to protect your muscle. String train and make sure that you are eating enough protein. You have to do that, all right? Or you will lose muscle and metabolism and you will gain the weight back.
- That's something that we haven't seen yet is a a lot of weight gain coming back from coming off of these weight loss drugs. So, that's something to pay attention to. Number four is track your food for next seven days. step on the scale and you will start to really learn what is making progress or not. Number five, break your steps into short actionable time frames that you can actually get out, walk fast, burn some calories, get some blood moving in your body.
- And number six is eat high volume foods, high protein, lowfat foods, lots of vegetables, and you're going to do wonders for yourself. So, I hope all of these things help. Now, before I wrap up, I want to tell you about a free resource that I just put together in episode 70. This is the man's ultimate five power breakfast recipes.
- It's a simple guide that is built for guys in their 40s that are juggling everyday life. Go listen to episode 70. I I outline five unique scenarios that a lot of guys come about in about in five different powerful ways, protein heavy ways to create and make sure that you start your day off strong. All right, there's weekday options. There are weekend options.
- There's things to do with your kids. And this protein forward breakfast is going to really help lower calories throughout the rest of the day, lower hunger cravings, and again, start the day off right, building enough muscle in there. Click the link in the description for a free, no email needed download that you'll click straight to the guide. people who enjoy that.
- So I have already been having people reply to me about it and they loving it. Number three is seem to be the most. Now this is a wrap of my Q&A today and I just keep those Instagram questions coming and all the other social its real answers. and hope that they give you what you need. The action I already told you what to need to do.
- Download the breakfast guide and let's get to it. And if you need more support, you know you're ready to actually make a change. That's what the 100day fat loss challenge is. The call torise.com. Check that out. That's my premier flagship program for men over 40s that want to thrive and lose fat, 20 plus pounds in 100 days and get their bodies back.
- All right, catch you in episode 7 makes a show. All right, gang. Enjoyed it.
