Eating well on a GLP-1: the four things that go wrong
The medication handles appetite. It does not handle protein, muscle, micronutrients, or what happens if you stop — and nobody at the prescribing visit has time to.
Margo Ilesanmi
4 min read
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The practice
Margo Ilesanmi
Dietitian — GLP-1 & Behavioural Nutrition at Copperleaf.
GLP-1 nutrition and lean-mass preservationBehaviour change and habit designEating patterns and meal timingSelf-experiment design for clients
- 3
- 9 min
- BS, Nutritional Sciences — Cornell University
- Dietetic internship — Massachusetts General Hospital
- Certificate in Motivational Interviewing — MINT
Background
Margo joined in 2023, when roughly half of Copperleaf's intake calls had started mentioning semaglutide or tirzepatide and it became obvious that improvising around those medications was not good enough. She built the practice's GLP-1 nutrition line from scratch: protein floors, resistance training referrals, side-effect management, and — the part almost nobody plans for — what the eating pattern has to look like if the medication is ever stopped.
Her training is in behavioural counselling, and she is the person at Copperleaf most likely to tell you that the problem is not the food. Sleep, shift schedules, the fact that you skip lunch and then make every food decision of the day at 6:40pm in a state of physiological desperation — these are nutrition problems, and they do not respond to a meal plan.
She is trained in motivational interviewing, works in a weight-inclusive frame, and refers out to eating-disorder specialists early and without apology. She is also the practice's most rigorous experimenter: most of the self-tracking protocols we give clients started as something Margo ran on herself for a fortnight first.
Plays bass, badly and loudly, in a band composed entirely of healthcare workers who can only rehearse on Sunday afternoons.
What Margo actually delivers.
Author pages on Harbor route into the services their writing supports — which is how a reader who arrived from a search result ends up somewhere useful.
A twelve-week block built on your actual lab work, with a dietitian who reads it with you.
Eight weeks, eight people, one dietitian, and a kitchen session that is not optional.
The nutrition care that ought to come with the prescription, and generally does not.
Everything Margo has written.
Run the breakfast experiment: two weeks, one variable
You do not need to overhaul your diet to learn something useful about it. You need one changed variable, two weeks, and a willingness to be wrong.
Margo Ilesanmi
3 min read
Five breakfasts that hold you to lunch, ranked by how little you'll do
Thirty grams of protein before 9am changes the shape of the whole day. Here is the version for people who cook, and the version for people who will not.
Margo Ilesanmi
2 min read
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The other two
Naomi Okonjo-Bell
Founder of Copperleaf. Eight years in hospital diabetes education before deciding eleven minutes per patient was not enough.
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Elias Vondracek
Sports dietitian who got interested in the metabolic health of people who are not athletes, and stayed there.
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Work with Margo.
Say so in your enquiry and we will put you on Margo's list specifically. If the wait is longer than a fortnight we will tell you that up front rather than after you have booked.