What Are Trainers For in the GLP-1 Era? with Dr Eric Helms

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Episode Summary

Dr Eric Helms returns to Mikkipedia for an unscripted conversation about GLP-1 medications and what they mean for anyone working in nutrition and fitness. Eric is a coach, athlete, author and educator, part of the 3DMJ coaching team, co-founder of the MASS research review, and co-director of the Sports Performance Research Institute New Zealand (SPRINZ) at AUT, where he is also a senior research fellow. Mikki opens with a personal trainer who was accused of stepping outside her lane for talking about GLP-1s, and the two of them work outwards from there.

The conversation covers whether coaches and nutritionists are within their scope supporting people on these medications, what obesity medicine can miss when a patient's weight loss stalls, and why reduced everyday movement belongs under the heading of metabolic adaptation rather than being treated as a separate problem. Eric separates appetite into distinct drivers — energy signalling, hedonic food seeking and food noise — and explains why that distinction matters clinically. The second half turns to protein, where Eric makes the case that it is a minor player for most people's health outcomes unless intake is genuinely low, and that "which macronutrient is most satiating" is the wrong question in the first place. He is candid throughout about the limits of what is currently known, including several things he says he cannot answer. The episode closes on his argument that trainers have an opportunity to stop being weight loss coaches and get back to promoting health, fitness and movement.

Key Topics

Scope of practice. Eric argues the behavioural, lifestyle, nutrition and exercise side of GLP-1 use is squarely within a personal trainer's remit — while cautioning that nobody yet has the twenty years of practitioner experience we have with medications like exogenous insulin.Where the usual trainer skill set doesn't transfer. Most trainers are practised at helping clients restrain appetite. Clients on GLP-1s often have the opposite problem: struggling to eat enough, and needing nutrient quality raised on a low intake.What a stall actually signals. When someone stops tracking calories and their weight loss plateaus, Eric's first read is not under-fuelling — it is that tracking had become tedious and unsustainable, and no second skill set has replaced it. He treats the stall