What Happens When You Stop GLP-1s? How Calocurb Helps Silence “Food Noise”
Research shows weight regain is common after stopping GLP-1 medications. A new study examines whether a hops-derived supplement can help regulate hunger, but important questions remain.
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For a lot of people on a GLP-1 medication, the hardest part comes after the last shot, when the hunger they’d been happy to lose starts creeping back.
Cost and side effects make long-term treatment with drugs like Wegovy or Zepbound hard to sustain, and once people stop, appetite often returns along with the weight. On a recent episode of the Live + Well podcast, host Melissa Magsaysay asked Sarah Kennedy, founder and CEO of Calocurb, what happens to hunger after stopping a GLP-1, and whether a supplement designed to trigger the body’s own fullness hormones could help.
While someone is on the medication, hunger stays turned down. When treatment ends, though, the effect wears off and the body’s response to weight loss pushes appetite back up. For some patients, that means the return of “food noise,” the running commentary about food that had gone quiet on the drug.
Kennedy’s company markets Calocurb partly to people coming off the medications. “You’ve taken all of this time and money to lose this weight,” she said. “You don’t want to put it back on.”
How Calocurb is supposed to work
Bitter taste receptors line the digestive tract as well as the tongue. When certain ones in the gut are activated, they trigger the release of appetite hormones, including GLP-1, cholecystokinin (CCK), and peptide YY (PYY).
Kennedy traces the idea back to evolution. “Bitter meant poisonous,” she said. In her telling, when something bitter reaches the gut, those hormones tell the brain to stop eating. According to Kennedy, researchers screened more than a thousand extracts before settling on hops.
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Calocurb’s active ingredient, Amarasate, comes from a hops cultivar developed by New Zealand’s Bioeconomy Science Institute and is a delayed-release capsule that carries the extract past the stomach and to the small intestine.
Semaglutide acts directly on GLP-1 receptors for days at a time, while the hops extract is meant to prompt the body’s own hormone release. Kennedy doesn’t pitch Calocurb as a replacement for changing how you eat but calls it “a tool in the toolkit.”
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Not a willpower problem
Kennedy started dieting at 11 and spent years in a push and pull with food. “I loved it, but I hated it,” she said. Today, she says she’s at peace with food, and she talks about hunger as wiring rather than weakness.
“We’ve got a primitive brain in a modern world,” she said. As Kennedy explained it, the brain’s appetite center evolved to drive people to seek out food when it was scarce. That same drive can intensify when people cut calories, and stress or a poor night’s sleep can make hunger harder to manage.
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For women who grew up surrounded by the diet culture of the 1990s, Melissa explains, the conversation around hunger carries another layer, recalling friends in their 40s and 50s describing the relief they felt after starting GLP-1 medications. Even those who experienced side effects often said the same thing...the constant thoughts about food had finally quieted. “I’m no longer overthinking food,” she recalled them saying.
That relief also raises a question about what happens when the medication stops working or is discontinued, and those thoughts about food return. Magsaysay called the idea of willpower “actually a myth,” with which Kennedy agreed, saying that hunger itself isn’t in fact a character flaw. “It’s not your fault that you want to eat,” Kennedy said. “It is your fault in what you choose.”
Listen to the full episode of the Live + Well podcast on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.
