Evidence updated: October 1, 2026.
Ask about the side effects, benefits, downsides, long-term risks, follow-up cadence, contact route, and exit plan before you commit. In Daymion Alvarez's words: make sure you understand what GLP-1s do, what being on the plan looks like, and what it would look like if you wanted to come off.
Daymion is the founder of Concordia Men's Health, not a clinician. This page is general education from his approved recorded answer. Your prescribing clinician should answer questions about your exact medication, health history, risks, monitoring, and any decision to continue, stop, or change treatment.
The situation behind the question
Hypothetical situation from the recorded Q&A: “My physical is in two weeks, and my wife made me promise I'd bring them up. I don't want to walk in there and just nod along.”
What should the conversation cover?
Start with three areas:
- Benefits, risks, and side effects: What should you expect from the exact medication being discussed? Which side effects are common, which are serious, and what should you do if one occurs?
- Follow-up and contact: When will the plan be reviewed? How do you reach the prescribing team if something changes or you have a question?
- Long-term plan: What would make the clinician recommend continuing, stopping, or changing treatment? What follow-up would be needed if treatment stops?
The FDA advises people to ask about side effects and what to do if they occur, and to use the medication's patient labeling as a source of drug-specific information. NIDDK says the length of weight-management medication use is an individual decision with a health care professional, based in part on benefit and serious side effects. NIDDK also notes that some weight regain is likely after stopping weight-management medication. Those general points do not predict what will happen to one person or answer whether a specific treatment is appropriate.
If you want a broader way to organize an ongoing care conversation, use the weight-management follow-up questions. For general background on the medication category and provider-review boundary, see GLP-1s for men.
Daymion's full cleaned answer
It's a really good question. If you've been considering GLP-1 care and are ready to ask your doctor about it, you should be asking a couple of important questions just to make sure you guys are on the same page before you ever commit to something like this.
So you want to ask, what are the side effects that you've seen? What are the positives, benefits, and the negatives of all the patients that you're seeing treating GLP-1 care? What can I expect, and what are the risks associated with long-term care? He should have personal answers for you, not just this Google ChatGPT stuff that I'm sure you're familiar with. But if he's actually treating patients, he should have answers for you.
You should also ask him what the cadence for follow-up looks like. When do we check in? How do I get in contact with you if something goes wrong, if things are going right? What does that look like?
And also, what does it look like if I ever want to come off? Do we have an exit plan for that? Do we have some type of situation where we can get off cleanly, I can stop my payments? Like, what does all that look like?
You want to make sure that you understand what GLP-1s are and what they actually do, and have your doctor specifically walk you through that. You want to make sure you know what it looks like when you're on these GLP-1s, and you want to make sure what it looks like when you want to come off.
If you don't have all three of those things, I wouldn't go with that doctor quite yet. Don't pull the trigger until you know the answers to all of those questions.
Sources and scope
- NIDDK: Prescription Medications to Treat Overweight & Obesity
- FDA: Finding and Learning about Side Effects
- FDA: Frequently Asked Questions about CDER
This is general education, not medical advice. It does not diagnose a condition, determine eligibility, recommend a medication, compare products, provide dosing or interaction guidance, interpret symptoms, set a monitoring schedule, or tell anyone to start, continue, stop, restart, or change treatment. Individual decisions stay with a licensed clinician who can review the person's complete information and the exact product labeling.