This is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer rather than encouragement. We are not the right people to make the decision — that is your prescriber’s job and yours — but we can lay out what waiting actually involves.

How long the wait would be

Every muscle-preserving drug discussed anywhere on this site is in Phase 2. That is the stage that establishes whether something works well enough to justify a large trial. What has to happen after it:

  • A Phase 3 programme, typically several thousand people over a year or more
  • Regulatory submission and review
  • Pricing, and then coverage decisions by insurers or health systems
  • Actual availability where you live

That sequence rarely takes less than three to five years from where these drugs currently sit, and a meaningful fraction of Phase 2 successes never complete it. Apitegromab, for instance, was turned down by the FDA in a different indication in September 2025 — a reminder that promising data and an approved medicine are not the same object.

So the honest framing is not “wait a while”. It is “wait several years, for something that may not arrive”.

What waiting costs

This is the part usually left out of the plan.

Delaying treatment means delaying the benefits of the weight loss itself, which in the trials were substantial and are not limited to the number on the scale — blood glucose, blood pressure, inflammatory markers and, for many people, how they feel day to day. Obesity is a condition with consequences that accumulate while you wait.

There is also a practical problem. If your reason for waiting is muscle, waiting does nothing for your muscle. Nobody holds lean mass better by not starting. The tissue you are protecting by waiting is simply not being asked to do anything either way.

What the drugs would not replace

Here is the detail that makes the waiting argument weaker than it looks.

In BELIEVE, bimagrumab given on its own increased lean mass by 2.5%. That is roughly what resistance training does for someone who starts doing it — and it is available now, free, with no approval process attached.

The combination trials are not testing “drug instead of training”. They are testing a drug in populations who are largely doing what they were already doing. Nothing in this pipeline suggests protein and resistance training stop mattering once these exist. They would sit underneath the drug, exactly as they sit underneath the GLP-1 today.

Which means if you wait, and the drug arrives, you will still need the two things you could have been doing throughout.

A more useful version of the plan

If muscle is your concern — and it is a legitimate one — the version of this that actually addresses it is:

  1. Start the treatment your prescriber recommends, on their timeline rather than a pipeline’s.
  2. Take a body-composition baseline now if you can get one, even a smart scale. This is the single most common regret people express later, and it cannot be taken retrospectively.
  3. Get protein to your target from the beginning, while appetite suppression is still mild and it is easy.
  4. Start resistance training in the first month, for the same reason. Two sessions a week.
  5. Watch the split rather than the scale. The muscle check estimates it; two readings in the body composition calculator measure it.

That plan captures the benefit now and does the muscle work now, which is strictly better than doing neither for several years.

When waiting might be reasonable

There are situations where delay is a sensible clinical decision — existing muscle loss or frailty, an eating disorder history, another condition that needs treating first, or simply a prescriber who wants to sequence things differently.

Those are all real. None of them is “a Phase 2 trial published a good result”. If you are weighing this up, take the actual reasons to your prescriber and let them weigh them with you. A pipeline announcement is not a treatment plan.