AI, GLP-1s, and Me
Some notes on technologies of interiority
I’ve been running an experiment on myself. Every Sunday, my endlessly patient wife sticks me in the stomach with 2.5 mg of Zepbound. Every few days, I ask Claude to analyze my sleep, workouts, and nutrition data.
I’m calling it Operation Dad Bod, and it’s working better than any health intervention I’ve ever tried.
This is possible because of two recent shifts: Claude and ChatGPT launched Apple Health integrations, so the chatbots can now ingest your health data for analysis. Meanwhile, GLP-1 prescriptions hit record numbers—nearly one in five U.S. adults has now used a GLP-1 drug, with 12% currently taking one.
I’ve always had an interest in health and fitness, and have done many cuts over the years to achieve weight goals. So I’m capable of dieting and consistent exercise. Still, you can’t knowledge your way out of being hungry. You can’t willpower your way into continuous self-monitoring when your attention is already maxed out. AI plus GLPs fix both of those for about 300 bucks a month.
You should pair these two trends because both are technologies of interiority. They aim to modify those inner currents—appetite, attention, motivation—that govern your own behavior.
The bottleneck was my interior self. Between a toddler, scaling a business, and deep analytical work, my inner state (hunger, fatigue, financial pressures, fragmented attention) made “eat less, move more” a cognitive trade that was irrational. I would rather be a successful writer with some heft around my middle than have abs and be back to laboring in the B2B SaaS mines. However, by pairing GLPs with a doctor in my pocket (Claude) that trade-off suddenly shifted in my favor.
While I am early to living like this, I believe this combination will be the future, and it will, by extension, reshape society. I’d like to tell you how to achieve similar benefits, explain how this type of magic alters what we will expect out of companies like Apple, and discuss what this means for the future of technology markets.
But to do that, first we need to understand the mechanics of how both AI and GLPs change our thoughts.
GLP-1s Are Drugs That Change What You Want
Tirzepatide (Zepbound) doesn’t provide information or require willpower or suddenly give you the metabolism of a 21-year-old. The goal is to change your subjective experience of hunger.
Tirzepatide is a “dual agonist,” meaning it activates two different hormone receptors at once. The first is GLP-1, which slows gastric emptying (food stays in your stomach longer, so you feel full) and acts on appetite-regulating neurons in the hypothalamus—the brain’s hunger control center. These neurons, called POMC neurons, are what tell your brain “stop eating.” The second receptor is GIP, which appears to amplify the satiety signal and improve how your body metabolizes fat.
The combination is more effective than either pathway alone. In clinical trials, participants lost an average of 20.9% of their body weight on the highest dose. This is the most effective intervention we have seen in clinical trials. (Though there are drugs on the horizon that are even more powerful).
Every other cut I’ve done put me in a low-level, constant state of grump. Pissed off that I’m hungry. Pissed off that I’m being distracted by being pissed off. Now, I don’t even receive hunger cues till it’s mealtime again. I use RescueTime to track my personal computer use, and ever since I’ve started the drug, I take significantly fewer breaks and have longer, more focused working sessions. It is unclear to me how much of that is hunger dampening versus happy side-benefits, but regardless, it is happening.
(To be clear, please go to a doctor before deciding to take this stuff. It isn’t for everyone, and don’t, for any reason, read through this analysis and guide to Chinese peptides I wrote.)
In the back of my mind though, there sits a gaunt, French philosophy professor reprimanding me: ‘If you need a drug to align appetite with goals, whose goals are they?’ He mumbles this over a mouthful of cigarette, baguette, and socialism. Despite this somewhat grotesque caricature of a French person my subconscious conjured, I spent some time thinking about this question.
The reality is that your appetites were already modified—just by food companies rather than drug companies.
Ultra-processed foods have been engineered to maximize consumption. Big Food (oh lord, they are playing RFK Jr. ‘s theme music now) has optimized their products, through decades of R&D, to override your natural satiety signals. One NIH study demonstrated this directly. Researchers housed participants in a clinical ward and gave them either an ultra-processed or unprocessed diet for two weeks, then switched. The diets were matched for presented calories, sugar, fat, and fiber. People eating ultra-processed foods spontaneously consumed 500 extra calories per day and gained weight, while those on unprocessed foods lost weight. The overconsumption was automatic.
The choice you are actually making is between the “you shaped by food industry optimization for consumption” and “you shaped by pharmaceutical optimization for satiety.” Which is the kinda horrible, late-stage capitalism nonsense we have to deal with now, but at least one of these options can help you bench 225.
AI Integration Solves Attention
The Claude and ChatGPT health launches matter because they solve the other half of the problem: attention.
Even with appetite controlled, health optimization is continuous work. It is exhausting to be forced to think hard about every food taken, every workout performed. And research shows that when cognitive resources are depleted, food choices suffer. In one study, exposure to food advertising caused people to choose 28% more unhealthy snacks, but only when they were also under high cognitive load. When participants weren’t cognitively taxed, advertising had no significant effect.
When your cognitive resources are allocated elsewhere, eating defaults to whatever is easiest. Whenever I have a deadline, my prefrontal cortex, the portion of my brain responsible for self-control, simply decides to go on vacation until I hit publish, and in that void, my stomach signaled it was time to consume Nerds Gummy Clusters by the bucket. Our brains are constantly competing in attention marketplaces and they’ll typically lose in battles with environmental cues when it’s already overloaded.
Honestly, when I first heard about these AI health products, I wasn’t expecting that much. That all changed within my first conversation. Claude:
Pulled my workout patterns and identified the alternating cardio structure I’d built across three different apps.
Spotted a protein intake gap (I need 200 g for muscle preservation at my training volume; I was hitting 150 g).
Integrated my bloodwork from a PDF I shared and reframed the goal of this cut to focus on lipid counts versus the number on the scale.
Flagged my resting heart rate as a leading indicator to watch
Could I have done this analysis myself? Technically yes. Would I have? No. My attention is allocated to being a great dad and a great steward of The Leverage. Health optimization has always lost the focus battle. The value comes in AI’s ability to synthesize across many sources of data, then make that analysis easy to understand/chat with. This was a 10x better experience than what my doctor can provide, simply with how their time is allocated.
This is why the Claude/ChatGPT launches matter more than they might seem. If it were just a “chat with your health feature” it wouldn’t be that useful. What’s magical is that Apple Health has consolidated data from many places in my life, and then I can chat with that data in partnership with a genius in a datacenter. It isn’t perfect! I found a few integration/analysis errors, but that stuff will get smoothed out over time.
For paying subscribers, I’ll now go over,
My exact stack of applications, training regime, and diet that have made it stupid simple to lose weight.
Why good technologies of interiority enhance autonomy, while bad technologies hijack it.
How this changed how I thought about Apple Health and the centralizing role of chatbots on consumer devices.
