Pills, Hope, and Habits
The Long Run Mindset - For a Life Worth Living #19
There’s a conversation happening everywhere right now. In gyms, in GP surgeries, in the comments section of every health and wellness account on the internet.
It goes something like this.
Have you tried the new injection? My cousin lost three stone. My colleague is down two dress sizes. My neighbour hasn’t touched a biscuit in six months.
And look — I understand the appeal. I genuinely do. If you’ve spent years fighting your weight, feeling out of control around food, trying and failing and trying again — the idea that a weekly injection can quiet all of that noise must feel like a miracle.
But I’ve spent thirty years living inside a broken digestive system. A year on a liquid diet. A surgery that removed a metre of my intestines. And what that experience taught me — slowly, painfully, irreversibly — is that there is no pill, no injection, no procedure that fixes the thing underneath.
It only ever fixes the symptom.
The Perfect Business Model
Let’s be honest about what GLP-1 drugs are from a commercial perspective.
You take them, they work, you stop taking them, the weight comes back. So you take them again. For the rest of your life, in many cases.
I’m not suggesting that’s a conspiracy. I’m suggesting that’s just how appetite suppression works when nothing else has changed. The drug doesn’t retrain your relationship with food. It doesn’t fix the dopamine loop that sends you to the fridge at 10pm. It doesn’t address why you eat what you eat, when you eat it, or what eating means to you emotionally.
It turns down the volume. It doesn’t change the station.
And when you stop taking it, the volume comes back up.
From a business model perspective, it’s close to perfect. A chronic condition requiring a lifelong solution. Recurring revenue. Enormous market. I’ll leave you to decide how you feel about that.
The Sticking Plaster Argument
Here’s what bothers me most.
We have a food system problem. We have a culture problem. We have an environment in which ultra-processed food is cheaper, more convenient, more heavily marketed, and more immediately rewarding than the alternative. We’ve built a world that makes it genuinely hard to eat well — especially if you’re time-poor, money-poor, or both.
And our answer to that is a £200-a-month injection.
I eat a pescatarian, whole food plant-based diet. Not perfectly — I want to be clear about that. I’m not standing here with a halo on. But I made that shift after reading about athletes who were performing at extraordinary levels on plants, and I’ve never looked back.
What changed wasn’t willpower. What changed was information, then habit, then identity. In that order. Over years, not weeks.
If we redirected even a fraction of the money flowing into weight loss drugs toward making fresh fruit and vegetables genuinely accessible — affordable, available, normal — we’d move the dial in a way that no injection ever could.
But that doesn’t generate quarterly returns. And it doesn’t generate tax revenue from pharmaceutical profit. So we don’t talk about it seriously.
What I’ll Concede
I’m not here to tell anyone what to do with their own body. That’s not my place.
And I’ll concede this: for some people, GLP-1 drugs genuinely do serve as a bridge. The weight comes off, they start moving, they start feeling better, they start making different choices. The drug kicks the door open and they walk through it into something sustainable.
That’s real. That happens. And if that’s you, I’m not dismissing it.
But a bridge only works if you’re heading somewhere. If the destination is still processed food, sedentary living, and the same relationship with eating you had before — the bridge just brings you back to the same place.
A pill can suppress your appetite.
It cannot build your habits.
It cannot earn you the identity of someone who lives differently.
That part only comes one way. Slowly. Repeatedly. Over more time than anyone wants to hear about.
The Longer Game
I’ve been running for about fifteen years now. More than eighty marathons and ultras. I run every day — not because a streak demands it, I got past that — because it’s who I am now.
Nobody handed me that. No injection, no supplement, no thirty-day programme gave it to me.
I built it the only way you can build anything real — one unremarkable day at a time, across years I wasn’t counting, toward a version of myself I couldn’t fully picture yet.
That’s available to everyone.
It just doesn’t come in a box.
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