Creator and Hosted By Nabela Noor star Nabela Noor has written a first-person account in Women's Health describing how she moved from oral diabetes medication to a GLP-1 after the birth of her second daughter in 2023, alongside Pilates and weight training. She writes that she has lost more than 60 pounds and that the goal was never to be smaller but to be stronger.

Noor says she was diagnosed with insulin resistance and polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS, formerly known as PCOS, in early adulthood, and that the insulin resistance progressed to pre-diabetes and then to type 2 diabetes in her early 30s. The escalation to a GLP-1 was a plan she says she made with her doctor, to better control the insulin resistance and, she hoped, help with PMOS symptoms.

What the essay does not name

The drug itself. Noor writes that she started "a GLP-1" and never names the molecule or the brand, which is worth flagging in a category where readers arrive looking for a specific product to search for.

That absence is also the most honest thing in the piece. There is no before-and-after arc built around a prescription, no dosing detail, and no claim that the medication produced the strength gains she spends most of the essay describing.

One tool, not the plan

Her doctor's framing, as she recalls it, was that the medication would require "a full lifestyle transformation" covering both eating and exercise, with a focus on strength training and flexibility. She says she signed up for Pilates and weight training in the same week she started the GLP-1.

The line that will travel is her own: the medication "didn't lift the weights for me, and it didn't do the Pilates for me." She also describes weekly private Pilates sessions, one or two weighted sessions with a trainer, a 10,000-step daily goal, and an "addition over subtraction" approach to food built around protein and fiber.

What this is and is not

This is one person's account of her own treatment, published as an essay, not a study. No trial, outcome data or clinician is cited in it, and Noor reports no figures beyond her own weight loss.

The open question

Noor says her focus now is building muscle and metabolic health rather than a number on a scale. What her account cannot answer, and does not try to, is how much of any of it generalizes past her.