Your Friday Five: Top Tips for Month One on Zepbound

This week’s Your Friday Five is a little different — I’m answering a fan mail question about what to expect during the first month on Zepbound (tirzepatide). If you’re just starting your GLP-1 journey, this episode is packed with quick, practical advice.

In this episode, I cover:

1. Why hydration is non-negotiable — and what to look for beyond just ounces.
2. Protein goals and how to get your grams in even when your appetite drops.
3. The role of fiber and how to ease your way in.
4. Why experimenting with food textures, combinations, and timing is key early on.
5. What to avoid to prevent nausea and other common side effects.

Bonus insight: The first 2–3 months are a learning curve. Be patient with your body as it adjusts to the medication.

Want a step-by-step, deeper dive? Check out my Mini Course: “Top 5 Mistakes People Make On a GLP-1” — complete with quick videos, live Q&As, bonus resources, and a supportive community. Get access HERE.

And if you send in a fan mail question, make sure to include your email so we can follow up with more resources just for you.

All of the information on this podcast is for general informational purposes only. Please talk to your physician and medical team about what is right for you. No medical advice is being on this podcast.

If you live in Indiana or Illinois and want to work with doctor Matthea Rentea, you can find out more on www.RenteaClinic.com

✨ Season 2 of Behind the Curtain is officially live! ✨ You can join the season on its own or take it a step further by opting into the live 21-Day Challenge with Dr. Rentea, running December 1–21—the perfect way to finish the year strong and head into the holidays with momentum.👉 JOIN HERE — spots are limited for the live challenge!

Transcript

0:28

Welcome back to another Your Friday five. Normally I have this little nice microphone that goes right into my charging port on the iPhone, and I record on that. But I got a new phone and I realized the charge report is different yay to technology changing 24 7. So if you hear a bunch of breath sounds and weird sounds, that's because I need a new microphone. So I wanted today to do, actually, I normally don't do this on the Friday, your Friday five, but I got a fan mail question and the person put no way for me to get back to them. So sometimes I'm gonna get at you with a quick, your Friday five, because it's a. A quicker way to get at you. So this person asked the question. They say they're 55 years old. They're a female on hormone replacement therapy. They're about 200 pounds. They said since June, they've been maintaining about 1400 to 1600 calories. They're using a hundred ounces of water, a minimum of a hundred grams of protein per day, 20 grams of fiber. They're doing exercise cardio resistance training three times a week. First of all, congratulations.'cause that is phenomenal so the question here that the person asks is, I was just approved by my insurance to start taking Zep Bound. So anyone listening, Zep bound is Tirzepatide. That's the same as Manjaro. Can you provide a few insights or advice regarding the first month of starting a GLP one? I'm gonna do. The three second crash course version, but I wanna say that I have a mini course that's the top five mistakes that people make when starting a GLP one. And I go through all of this quick five, 10 minute videos where I go through all this, you have access to a lot of resources where I go over a lot of stuff on nutrition. I link to things. There's a monthly live q and a. You have access to all the replays. There's tons of bonuses in it. It's an amazing course. This is what it's for, but here's the crash course version of it. Number one, hydrate. And that's what you're doing with this water. Amazing. Now, something you're gonna notice when you go on a GLP one, as you go up on the dose, your thirst is gonna go down. Not only desire for food and hunger levels, things like that go down, but thirst drive goes down, you're gonna continue to hydrate. Don't be discouraged if you can't get in a hundred ounces of water. The thing that's actually the best is to look at the color of your urine, and if it's super concentrated, like really dark yellow, things like that, you know you need some more fluid. Most people, on average need at least 64 ounces or more per day. Usually people feel better the more they hydrate. Again, not taking it to crazy land, but if you could keep up with a hundred ounce is amazing, but don't be discouraged. If you're at 80 or 70 or even 64, you're still doing amazing. Okay, that's number one. Hydration. Why does hydration matter? Because your nausea's gonna be down when you do that. Also, we wanna prevent kidney injury because a lot of the time when you're getting less fluids in, sometimes some of you have progression of kidney disease anyway with getting older. And so that can cause an effect. And if you have any amount of nausea or vomiting or other things happening, it can just escalate really quickly. Hydration is number one. I also just see people lose more fat on the medication. When they're properly hydrated, your hunger signals work correctly. Number two is the protein. You're doing phenomenal. If you're getting a hundred grams, again, you might notice with protein and fiber that it becomes increasingly hard to get these numbers, and so point number four is going to address that, but. Yes to continuing protein. The amount that you're getting. Again, within my core site, I have a chart for what protein goal could be if you wanna maintain your muscle versus if you're trying to gain muscle. So you're gonna have different legs to this journey, but around a hundred grams is on average for the average person, pretty darn good for a woman, about 30 grams three times a day for a man, 34 times a day.'cause men have higher skeletal muscle mass. So again, you're doing great with this. What you might notice is that. How you get your protein might change a little bit. So if you're very volume restricted means you can't eat as much, you might notice, okay, I do good with a protein drink in the morning. And then you find ways to get more protein in a smaller amount. I'll give you an example. For lunch right now, I had Greek yogurt. I put a scoop of the devotion protein powder. I did wild blueberry, mixed that up. The Greek yogurt has a lot of protein in it. Devotion is 20 grams extra of it, so there's about 37 grams of protein in there. And then I put on top some strawberries that have fiber in it and some new trail nut granola and all of that great amount of fiber berries of a good amount of fiber. Good fiber, good fats, good protein. That gets me my protein, but the volume's not very high. Step three, you're gonna make sure you're getting the fiber. Again, you're doing a great job with 20 grams. On average, the goal for a woman is gonna be 25 grams or more per day. For a man, it's gonna be 38 grams or more. Again, fiber is gonna be really hard to get in right when you start. If. You are very restricted on it, so you just have to see how you're gonna feel on it. The most important thing that I'm gonna go through here today is gonna be number four. You have to experiment the first few months on what foods and what combinations and what fibers and proteins feel good now that you're on the medication so your eating will change. Most people are not. Eating in the same way when they get on the medications verse before, and I know some of you're like, oh, that's captain obvious. No. What I mean is your taste preferences might change how full you are changes. There's so much that changes even though you've come into this doing a lot of work. You wanna know that. You're gonna relearn your body and how it responds to food and how things are on this medication. It's a whole new learning curve, have some patience for that. It's not gonna be figured out in a week or two. I usually see people about 2, 3, 4 months before they really have their nutrition locked away, stay patient with it. All right. The last thing I wanna come back to, just from a protein, fiber, from a nutrition standpoint, I want you to keep in mind with food. To prevent nausea or diarrhea. Number one, we're going to not wanna have too many greasy foods. It's not that you can't eat fast food or pizza or burgers, things like that. But if there's a lot of greasy food, like if you have cheese curds from Culver's, okay, you do things like that, a lot of times people will get diarrhea. Just start to have a relationship to, what did I do? Maybe the half day before or the day before that has maybe led to how I'm feeling. You're gonna start to notice some relationships. The other thing is, if you have a ton of carbohydrates at once, let's say that you have a bag of candy and. You suddenly are just, you really feel nauseous, you don't feel good, all carbohydrates with nothing to balance it out, doesn't feel good. Tons of fat in the diet does not feel good. Again, what I see is it's a lot of forced learning really quickly, it's not fun, but. This is what I see as a crash course. This is literally just the two second version, but I dive deep on all these things. If you can get it right in the first few months of being on a medication, you will have much better results long term. Just trust me when I say that. So I really think that this is phenomenal, that you found this podcast, that you're listening to this, that you're investigating this. This is going to help you so much. So I'll make sure that we have down right underneath where you're listening here, the link to that mini course, if you ever wanna check that out. That's something where for six months you have access to that program. You can ask those questions monthly, you can watch the replays, and then a lot of people will actually, at the six month mark, they'll join for another year. Just to be able to stay in the community, stay motivated, to continue to have access to a really supportive community. That's just something to think about. Alright, so I'm gonna leave it here today. I know this is different, but reminder, if you are gonna submit a fan mail question, give me. An email so that I can get back to you. Otherwise, my team, if we had just gotten this and we'd had an email to get back to, we would've been able to say, Hey, these episodes would be really helpful for you. But that was hard to do'cause we have no way to contact this person.'cause otherwise it comes in anonymously. Alright, I hope that you guys are having a great rest of the day. Reminder, if you're wanting to do 30, 30, we literally have a few spots left for the January round. If you're wanting to do that. Get in there sooner than later. I am not making this a big group. We really just can't exceed a certain size. Otherwise it's not small group anymore. If you're wanting to do that, I'm gonna a hundred percent guarantee you we will not be enrolling. Right at the end of December leading into it. And we also need time to be able to ship you the, the workbook planner reference, all that, and just, I can't remember if I've announced this yet or not. In the January round, we're gonna lean a little bit more into genetics and how that influences what could be better or not for us. This is something if you wanted to do a genome mind mental health map. Again, I'll give you guys the link to that. I'm actually gonna send this out to the January group. Probably in October, November. Because if you wanna get it done, I want you to have your results well ahead of time.'cause we'll go over how you could interpret some of that. And so some of you might really be into that. And then remember, we're not doing another April round, so it's gonna be a January start for 30. 30 this next year as well as in September. All right. I hope you have a great rest of the day and we'll talk soon.