Balancing the Scales Between Stoic Discipline and GLP-1s:A Conversation with a Leeds Obesity Scientist

Epictetus said, “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.” I think about that line every time I see another ad for a weight-loss shot promising to erase a want you’ve carried your whole life.

I’m not here to tell you GLP-1s are good or bad. I’m here to tell you they’re powerful — and power without discipline has never once gone well for anybody, in any era, with any tool.

To have this conversation right, I didn’t want a hot take. I wanted the science. So I sat down with Professor Graham Finlayson, Chair in Psychobiology at the University of Leeds, where he leads the Appetite Control & Energy Balance Research group. This man has spent over fifteen years studying the psychology of appetite and food reward, with stints at Columbia University’s Obesity and Nutrition Research Centre and the Nestlé Research Centre in Lausanne before building his research home at Leeds. He built the Leeds Food Preference Questionnaire, now used in 14 languages across major research worldwide. And here’s the part that matters most for today — Professor Finlayson was involved in the first human demonstration that GLP-1 drugs work through food reward mechanisms in the brain. Before Ozempic was a household word, he was in the lab doing the actual science. You can read his full research profile here: medicinehealth.leeds.ac.uk/psychology/staff/331/professor-graham-finlayson.

Millions of men, a lot of them middle-aged, a lot of them carrying weight they’ve fought for years without traction, are turning to drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy and finally seeing the number on the scale move. That’s real. That’s not nothing. But talking with Professor Finlayson pushed this conversation past “does it work” into something bigger.

Because here’s what we don’t talk about enough. Clinical research shows GLP-1 users can lose close to 14% of their lean muscle mass during treatment — that’s real strength, real function, gone alongside the fat, if you’re not fighting for it with resistance training and real protein intake. There’s “Ozempic face” — the skin aging some patients see when weight drops fast and the underlying support structures don’t keep up. There’s nutritional deficiency risk when appetite drops so low you stop eating enough to fuel a body that still needs to move, lift, and recover. None of that means don’t use the tool. It means don’t use it carelessly.

That’s where Stoic discipline comes back in. A GLP-1 doesn’t build your character. It doesn’t get you in the gym. It doesn’t decide whether you eat real protein or skip meals because the drug killed your appetite and skipping felt easy. The tool creates space — it quiets the noise long enough for you to make a different decision. What you do with that space is still entirely yours.

So today we’re getting into it with Professor Finlayson himself. What these drugs actually do at the level of the brain. What the real risks are, from a man who’s studied appetite science for two decades. And how a middle-aged man can use a tool like this — powerful, new, still not fully understood long-term — without losing the very discipline that’s supposed to define him while he’s using it.

Marcus Aurelius wrote, “You have power over your mind, not outside events.” A drug can change your appetite. It cannot change your character. That’s still built the same way it’s always been built — one disciplined choice, repeated, every single day.