Coming off a GLP-1 is not a diet problem. It's a calibration problem. For months your appetite has been doing the portion control for you, and the day it stops, nothing about your kitchen, your habits or your calorie needs has changed — only your hunger has. This is a guide to the weeks either side of that.
If you're still on the medication and thinking ahead, the companion piece — coming off a GLP-1 without undoing your progress — covers the taper itself. This one is about the plate.
Know your number before your last dose
The single most useful thing you can do is find out what you should be eating before you need to know.
While the medication is still suppressing appetite, you are almost certainly eating well under maintenance without counting. That's the whole mechanism. It also means you have no idea what maintenance actually is for the body you have now — and it isn't what it was, because you're lighter, and a lighter body burns less.
Rest days
1,829kcal
A gentle deficit for steady fat loss. Training adds about 315 kcal on the days you do it — so the two numbers differ, as they should.
Take that number as a starting estimate and, in your last month on the medication, start eating close to it deliberately rather than by accident. You will feel like you're eating a lot. You are not. You're eating what your body costs.
This does two things: it tells you what those portions look like while you still have appetite suppression as a safety net, and it means the return of hunger meets a plate you already recognise.
The first weeks off: protein and volume first
When appetite returns it tends to return unevenly — fine one day, sharp the next. Two levers do most of the work.
Protein. Aim for roughly 1.6–2.2 g per kilogram of body weight a day. It's the most satiating of the three macros, and it's what protects the muscle you're carrying, which matters more here than in an ordinary diet — fast weight loss on a GLP-1 tends to take a meaningful share of lean tissue with it, and what you have left is worth defending. In practice: a palm-sized protein source at every meal, and don't leave it to dinner to catch up.
Volume. Fibrous vegetables, fruit, potatoes, legumes, broth-based soups — foods that fill the stomach for few calories. Months of small portions have reset what "a normal amount of food" looks like to you, and a plate that looks full is doing psychological work as well as physical.
Between them, protein and volume let you eat at maintenance and feel fed, which is the only version of this that lasts.
Weight will move in the first fortnight. It isn't fat.
Eating more food — especially more carbohydrate — means more glycogen and more water in your muscles, and more actual food in your digestive tract. Two or three kilos can appear in a fortnight and none of it is fat. If you don't expect it, it reads as failure and people panic back into a crash diet. Expect it, and read the trend across weeks rather than the number on any morning.
What to keep, and what to let go
Some of what the medication taught you is worth keeping:
- Smaller, slower meals. Nausea made you eat slowly. Eating slowly is genuinely a good habit — keep it.
- Alcohol pushed to the edges. Many people drink far less on a GLP-1. That's calories you now get to spend on food.
- Protein-forward meals. If you learned to build a plate around protein because it was the only thing that sat well, you've already learned the most important habit in this article.
And some of it should go:
- Skipping meals. It worked when you weren't hungry. Off the medication it front-loads hunger into the evening, which is when it does the most damage.
- Very low intakes. Continuing to eat at 1,200 calories because that's what you got used to will make you miserable, cost you muscle, and end the way crash diets always end.
The thing that actually predicts regain
It isn't willpower and it isn't which foods you chose. It's whether anything is watching the trend.
Most weight comes back gradually — a few hundred calories a day, unnoticed, over months. At that rate the scale moves too slowly to alarm anyone on any given morning, and by the time it's obvious, a year has gone. The people who hold their loss are the ones who kept a signal running: a weekly average, a band they meant to stay inside, something that says "this is drifting" while the drift is still two kilos rather than twelve.
That's a maintenance skill, and it's the one the medication never taught you, because it never had to.
Where Sophia fits
This is the exact gap she was built for. She holds a maintenance target that's measured from your body rather than assumed from a formula, and re-measures it as your weight settles. She reads the weekly trend rather than the daily number, so the water weight of the first fortnight doesn't get mistaken for fat. And when the trend genuinely starts to drift upward, she says so early — while it's a small correction rather than a second diet.
You tell her what you ate, in a sentence. She keeps the count, watches the band, and tells you what's next.