09/02/2026
I HAVE A NEW BOOK COMING!
For the past several months, I’ve been writing a book that I believe may be one of the most consequential projects of my career:
THE WEIGHT LOSS ILLUSION
Why the Weight-Loss Injection Craze May Not Be Everything It Seems to Be
Some of you may not know this about me, but when I was a little boy, I wanted to be a magician.
I was fascinated by magic. I watched David Copperfield. I bought tricks from Marshall Brodien’s magic shop at Old Chicago. I practiced illusions over and over in front of a mirror and eventually performed magic shows for family, friends and at cocktail parties.
I learned something very important from magic:
A successful illusion doesn’t require a foolish audience.
The magician simply gets you to focus your attention on what he wants you to see—while your attention is diverted away from something else.
More than 50 years later, the magician’s cape has been replaced by a laboratory coat.
And I find myself asking a very similar question about the extraordinary weight-loss revolution taking place around us:
What are we being encouraged to look at—and what might we not be looking at?
Let me be very clear.
The weight loss people are experiencing with medications such as Wegovy, Ozempic, Zepbound and Mounjaro is real.
The appetite suppression is real.
For many people, the health improvements are real.
But are we seeing the whole picture?
That question became the foundation for The Weight Loss Illusion and what I call The Seven Illusions.
One of those chapters asks a particularly important question:
ILLUSION #7
“Millions of People Are Taking These Drugs. Therefore, the Safety Questions Must Be Settled. Right?”
My answer is not that these medications are inherently bad.
My answer is that widespread use does not automatically mean that every long-term safety question has been answered.
There is a great deal we know.
There are things we don’t know.
And there are questions for which only time will provide satisfactory answers.
The chapter examines clinical trials, post-marketing surveillance, adverse-event reporting, the documented problem of underreporting adverse drug reactions, and what history can teach us about remaining appropriately vigilant when millions of people begin using a relatively new class of medications.
But there is another side of this book that is every bit as important to me.
The human side.
Scientific journal articles can tell us what happened to hundreds or thousands of research participants.
They cannot completely tell us what happened to you.
So as I prepare the final manuscript, I am looking for people willing to share their experiences.
If you have taken a weight-loss injection and experienced significant side effects, I would like to hear from you.
I would also like to hear from you if you successfully lost substantial weight while taking one of these medications, subsequently discontinued it, and then experienced significant hunger and/or weight regain.
Please send me a private direct message and briefly tell me your story.
I may contact a small number of people for a more extensive conversation about potentially being included as a human case study in The Weight Loss Illusion. Contacting me does not mean your story will be published, and nothing would be included in the book without your knowledge and appropriate permission.
I am not interested in attacking these medications.
I am interested in understanding them.
I am interested in the science.
I am interested in what happens after the weight comes off.
And after nearly 35 years of studying human nutrition, exercise physiology, metabolism, body composition and the psychology of weight loss, I believe we need to be willing to ask questions that extend far beyond:
“How much weight did you lose?”
Because losing weight and losing fat are not necessarily the same thing.
And seeing part of the picture is not the same thing as seeing the whole picture.
The little magician in me learned long ago that the most convincing illusion is the one you never think to question.
It’s time to pull back the curtain.
The Weight Loss Illusion
Coming soon.
David B. Plourdé, Ph.D.
Nutrition Scientist | Exercise Physiologist
Founder, The Plourdé Institute
