5 Weight Loss Mistakes You're Probably Making

中文摘要在文末

Same caveat as always: this isn't a lecture.

Almost everyone I meet with a weight problem has been trying for years, usually harder than the people advising them. And I'm not writing from a comfortable distance — if I stop paying attention for a few weeks, I gain a few kilos too. I've been round the gain-lose cycle plenty of times myself.

So these are traps, not accusations.

1. Buying peptides online

This is the one that worries me most, and it's growing fast.

There's a substantial market on social media and messaging apps selling weight loss peptides — sometimes custom-compounded, sometimes in combinations you can't get through a clinic, occasionally endorsed by people with genuine professional credentials.

Let me give you my honest assessment, including the part that isn't the answer you'd expect.

Will they work? Probably, yes. Quite possibly some of them work better than what I can prescribe. They're using varied combinations and concentrations, and some will compound something to your specific request. I'm not going to pretend they're all inert.

And I'd still strongly advise against them. Here's why.

These medications are fairly new to the market, and the regulation hasn't caught up. There's no proper framework yet governing who compounds these, at what concentration, with what purity, or with what accountability if something goes wrong.

Which means: there's no clear research or data behind those particular combinations. And that isn't an academic complaint. It's a safety problem.

When I prescribe, I'm using medication that's been through proper research, is proven for the indication, comes from a legitimate manufacturer with proper quality control, and where the side effect profile is documented well enough that I know what to watch for and when to act.

When someone injects a custom peptide blend from a Telegram seller, none of that exists.

Nobody knows the interaction profile. Nobody knows the long-term effects. And if you develop something unexpected, there is no data to interpret it against — including for the doctor who ends up treating you.

"It'll probably work" is not the same as "it's safe." Those are separate questions, and the market conflates them deliberately.

What to do instead: if cost is what's pushing you towards this — and often it is — come and say so. That's a conversation worth having openly rather than solving with an unregulated product.

2. Expecting the medication to do everything

The medication is the engine. It's genuinely powerful, and I don't undersell it.

But an engine bolted to nothing doesn't fly. You need the wings — nutrition, activity, sleep, supplements — and you need the landing gear, which is everything that lets you come off it safely.

What "expecting the medication to do everything" looks like in practice: injecting weekly, changing nothing else, watching the weight drop for three months, then plateauing and concluding it's stopped working.

It hasn't stopped working. It has done the part it can do. The appetite suppression got you to a point where the other levers matter more — and if none of those levers have been touched, there's nothing left to pull.

This is also why people who get medication alone from elsewhere so often arrive at my clinic sluggish, low on energy and stalled. The engine is running. Nothing else was ever attached to it.

3. Skipping the protein and the resistance training

The most legitimate criticism of this class of medication is muscle loss, and it's real.

If you lose twenty kilograms and a meaningful share of it is muscle, you've achieved a lower number on the scale and a worse metabolic position than you started with. Muscle is metabolically active — it's part of what determines how much you can eat without gaining. Lose it, and maintaining afterwards becomes harder than it was before you started.

That's how people end up worse off after a "successful" weight loss.

Two things prevent it: protein, adjusted to your needs rather than a fixed scoop, from both supplements and ordinary food; and resistance training, starting in the burning phase.

And the training doesn't mean joining a gym. That's not snobbery — a gym membership taken by someone who wasn't already in the habit doesn't survive month three, and then nothing happens at all. Squats and lunges at home, three times a week, adjusted to your capability, because the lower limbs carry the largest muscle mass in your body. Push-ups if and when you can.

The other half of this mistake is reading the scale as the only instrument. You'll have weeks where weight doesn't move while body fat drops and muscle rises. That's a good week. People quit during good weeks because nobody showed them the right measurement.

4. Stopping abruptly

Someone finishes their supply, or the cost bites, or they hit their target and simply stop.

No taper, no plan, no reinforcement of habits, no follow-up.

The de-escalation phase exists specifically to prevent this. We reduce the dose deliberately over one to two months so your body acclimatises, and we spend that time reinforcing everything built along the way — the eating patterns, the protein, the training, the sleep, and the ability to tell hunger from the other things that feel like hunger.

Stop abruptly instead and you go from suppressed appetite to full appetite overnight, with none of that consolidation. It's the difference between landing a plane and switching the engine off mid-flight.

Expect one to two kilograms back regardless — that's water, that's normal. What we're preventing is the rest of it.

5. Treating this as a course rather than a condition

The deepest one, and the mistake underneath most of the others.

People approach weight the way you'd approach an infection: take the treatment, complete the course, be finished. There's a start date and an end date and then you return to normal life.

But "normal life" is what produced the original weight. If you return to it unchanged, you get the original result. That isn't a moral failing — it's arithmetic.

Which is why I frame the programme the way I do: the six months isn't the treatment. The six months is the training.You're using a window of suppressed appetite to build things that are extremely difficult to build while you're constantly hungry.

Come out with a lower number and no new habits, and you've had a temporary result. Come out with the habits, and the weight is a side effect of something that lasts.

I know this from the inside, not just from the literature. Losing weight isn't the hard part — plenty of things will do that. Not gaining it back is the hard part, and almost nothing on the market is built for it.

And one that isn't a mistake

A quick word on something people beat themselves up about that they shouldn't.

Having previously lost weight and regained it is not evidence that you can't do this. It's evidence that whatever you did before was missing the part that makes it stick — usually because constant hunger makes new habits nearly impossible to establish, so nothing had a chance to consolidate.

That's a solvable problem, and it's more or less what the medication is for: creating conditions where change is actually achievable.

The version of this that genuinely does harm is the conclusion people draw — that they've proven something about themselves. You haven't. You've proven something about the method.

If you want to talk any of this through, come in. Klinik Dr Tan, Lot 27, Ground Floor, Block D, Lintas Square, Kota Kinabalu. WhatsApp 017-234 7328. Appointments preferred.

And if you're currently on medication from elsewhere, bring the details — what it is, what dose, how long, what's happened. I won't lecture you. It's information I need.

Book a consultation with Dr. Tan — Book Online or WhatsApp 017-234 7328.

简要说明

我是陈医生，亚庇 Lintas Square 的 Klinik Dr Tan。这是陷阱清单，不是指责——我自己几个星期不留意也会胖几公斤，那个循环我也走过很多次。

1. 网购肽类药物（peptides）

社交媒体和通讯软件上有大量在卖减重肽的，有些是特别调配的，有些是诊所拿不到的组合，偶尔还有具备专业资格的人背书。

有效吗？ 很可能有效，甚至可能比我能开的更有效——他们用各种组合和浓度，有些还能按你的要求调配。我不会假装那些都是没作用的。

但我仍然强烈不建议。 因为这类药物上市还相当新，法规还没跟上——目前没有完善的框架规范谁来调配、浓度多少、纯度如何、出事了谁负责。这表示那些特定组合背后没有明确的研究或数据。这不是学术上的挑剔，这是安全问题。

我开的药经过正规研究、有适应症实证、来自有品质管制的合法药厂，副作用轮廓有充分记录，所以我知道该留意什么、什么时候该处理。打来路不明的调配肽，这些全都不存在——没有人知道交互作用，没有人知道长期影响，而且如果你出现意外状况，连接手治疗你的医生都没有数据可以对照。

「应该会有效」和「安全」是两个不同的问题，这个市场刻意把两者混为一谈。如果是费用问题让你考虑这条路，请直接跟我说，这值得公开讨论。

2. 期待药物做完所有事

药物是引擎，确实强大。但引擎接不上机身就飞不起来——你需要机翼（营养、活动、睡眠、补充剂）和起落架。实际的样子是：每周打针、其他什么都不改、掉了三个月、然后停滞，结论是「药失效了」。药没有失效，它已经做完它能做的部分。食欲抑制把你带到一个位置，在那里其他杠杆更重要——如果那些杠杆从来没被碰过，就没有东西可拉了。

3. 略过蛋白质和阻力训练

这是对这类药物最合理的批评。如果你减了二十公斤，其中相当一部分是肌肉，你换来的是更低的数字和比开始时更差的代谢状态。肌肉是代谢活跃组织，流失之后维持体重比你开始前更难——这就是有些人在「成功减重」后反而处境更糟的原因。

预防方式：蛋白质（依需求调整，不是固定一勺，来自补充剂和一般食物）；阻力训练（燃烧期开始，在家做、一周三次、依能力调整，深蹲和弓箭步优先因为下肢肌群最大，有能力再加伏地挺身）。

另一半错误是只看磅秤。体重不动但体脂下降、肌肉上升的星期是好的一周——很多人正是在好的一周放弃，因为没有人给他们看对的指标。

4. 突然停药

药用完了、费用吃紧、或达到目标就直接停：没有减量、没有计划、没有巩固习惯、没有追踪。

减量期就是为了防止这件事——用一到两个月刻意降低剂量让身体适应，同时强化所有已建立的习惯。突然停药等于从食欲被抑制直接跳到完全恢复，中间没有任何巩固。那是「降落飞机」和「飞到一半关掉引擎」的差别。

不管怎样都会回升1–2公斤（水分，正常），我们要防的是其余的部分。

5. 把这件事当成「一个疗程」而不是长期状况

这是最根本的，也是其他错误底下的那一个。

很多人用对待感染的方式对待体重：吃完药、完成疗程、结束，然后回到正常生活。但**「正常生活」正是当初造成体重的东西**。原封不动地回去，就会得到原本的结果。这不是道德问题，是算术。

所以我这样定义：六个月不是治疗，六个月是训练。 你在利用一段食欲被抑制的窗口，建立那些在持续饥饿下几乎不可能建立的东西。带着较低的数字但没有新习惯出来，是暂时的结果；带着习惯出来，体重是更持久的东西的副产品。

减重不难，不复胖才难，而市面上几乎没有东西是为后者设计的。

最后，一件不算错误的事

以前减了又胖回去，不代表你做不到。 那代表你之前的方法缺了让它固定下来的部分——通常是因为持续的饥饿让新习惯几乎无法建立。这是可以解决的问题，而这大致上就是药物的用途：创造出改变真正可行的条件。

真正造成伤害的是人们从中得出的结论：以为自己证明了关于自己的某件事。你没有。你证明的是关于那个方法的事。

Klinik Dr Tan，Lot 27, Ground Floor, Block D, Lintas Square, Kota Kinabalu。WhatsApp：017-234 7328。如果你目前在别处用药，请把细节带来——用什么、剂量、多久、发生了什么。我不会说教，这些是我需要的资讯。

预约陈医生 — 在线预约 或通过 WhatsApp 联系 017-234 7328