Weight-loss drugs aren’t just slimming waists. They’re shifting the economy.

Chicago trial attorney John Drews, like many well-employed Americans, has always given himself a generous discretionary spending budget. As a divorced empty-nester, his purchase priorities, in no particular order, included Scotch, chocolates, pretzels, eating out and beach resorts.

Then, in May 2022, following reports by celebrities and influencers about blockbuster weight-loss drugs, he decided to go on one himself, and everything changed.

He lost 25 pounds the first year, then 75 pounds more the following year. Afterward, Drews says, he didn’t just feel like a different person. He basically was one— with food, clothing, workout and vacation habits that have almost completely overridden everything he used to spend his money on, to the tune of more than $100,000 annually.

“It’s a whole new life,” Drews said.

He is just one consumer. But multiply his experience by the roughly 16 million people—that’s 6 percent of American adults—taking GLP-1 weight-loss drugs, and their collective purchasing power has the potential to profoundly reshape the economy in the coming years.

There’s evidence that the demographic of people on the drugs overlaps with those who like to spend, a group some analysts have dubbed “over consumers.” Cutting their daily calorie counts in half—or more—is resulting in all sorts of interesting consequences still coming to light.

Ozempic, and its GLP-1 cousins Wegovy and Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly and Co.’s Mounjaro and Zepbound, may not be the lightbulb, jet airplane or internet, but their impact is expected to be so significant that Jan Hatzius, chief economist at Goldman Sachs, predicts that if 60 million people take the medications by 2028, GDP would be boosted by 1 percent—or several trillion dollars. Hatzius’s analysis was based primarily on the idea that healthier people mean a healthier workforce and, in turn, lower health-care costs.

But there’s a lot more to it.

“When we think about how the drugs work, it directly changes the purchase of foods. But then there are spillover effects on a lot of sectors,” said Aljoscha Janssen, an assistant professor of economics at Singapore Management University who is studying spending by U.S. consumers who are diabetic or overweight.

A study by Cornell University and Numerator shows that GLP-1 users are spending less at coffee shops and fast-food chains. PricewaterhouseCoopers sees upsides in fitness in this group—35 percent of weight-loss drug users PwC surveyed said they are exercising for the first time or more than before, and 16 percent hired a personal trainer for the first time or are having those sessions more than before. There’s “major opportunity” in supporting GLP-1 users “through this transformational period and capture the value from enabling their new behaviors,” the authors wrote.

Companies are already reporting tremors and adjusting their product lines and marketing to match.

Walmart’s CEO has talked about seeing a “slight pullback in the overall basket” for food purchases among some shoppers. Rent the Runway, a high-end online clothing rental shop, has reported that customers are choosing smaller sizes and in more body-hugging styles. Life Time Inc.—which is where a decent chunk of Drews’s money is going these days—has launched a “performance and longevity” subscription program that includes doctors inside its fitness clubs that can prescribe GLP-1 drugs when appropriate, metabolic blood testing, meetings with a dietitian and access to personal trainers. It focuses the importance of a long-term, 360-degree view of health and wellness that begins for many people when losing weight on the medications.

Winners and losers

A Midwesterner born and raised, Drews taught himself computer programming and worked for manufacturing companies in the steel industry before pivoting to law school. He had a lot of success in his new career, but the high-stress job working 16-hour days six days a week did not leave a lot of room to focus on his health.

At 63 and standing 5-foot-11, he hit 287 pounds and was told by his doctor that he was “pre,” or borderline, for a lot of health conditions, including hypertension and diabetes. He had also become frustrated he was missing out on hiking and other activities with his four grown kids, who were then 27 to 34, because he became tired and out of breath so quickly.

Drews’s transformation began pretty quickly after he started on a GLP-1 drug. He lost the first two dozen pounds on Ozempic (he later switched to Mounjaro, which is considered more potent because it targets two hormones rather than one) without much effort, mostly due to being less hungry, and what he describes as sporadic exercise.

At his annual checkup a year later, Drews’s doctor reiterated concerns about muscle loss and lectured him about increasing his fitness activity. This time, Drews was all in. A lot of the money he saved on food went into paying for a personal trainer—at $140 an hour, twice a week—who put together a comprehensive plan that included a strength coach, cardio coach, Pilates class for stability, pool time and more. These days, he’s up at 4:30 a.m. and at the Life Time in Burr Ridge, Illinois, near his home shortly afterward.

His eating habits completely changed, too. It wasn’t exactly a decision, he says. It was almost instinctive. He had zero interest in food and often forgot to eat, a common experience among GLP-1 users who have reported on social media and to doctors that what they call “food noise” is gone, with some saying they even feel ill at the thought of eating Hostess cupcakes, Doritos or other ultra-processed food.

“I’d eat a handful of peanut M&M’s at night for no good reason. Now, I can’t imagine doing that. It’s hard for me to even remember what I was eating it’s been that long,” he said.

Drews’s eating became more deliberate and about putting the right kinds of calories into his body rather than enjoyment or whimsy. A typical breakfast is three eggs, a half-cup of egg whites along with overnight oats and blueberries and half a banana. For lunch, ground venison or ground bison and vegetables. Dinner: salmon, sweet potatoes, Brussels sprouts and broccoli. Snacks are a combo of yogurt, raspberries, cacao nibs, and honey or walnuts, peanuts and macadamia nuts; and for drinks: exclusively water, coffee and matcha. He mostly eats at home despite his family teasing him that he’s become “an antisocial eater.”

He has heard that some food companies have created new products optimized for GLP-1, but he has not tried them and does not intend to for now. Nestlé is betting on meal and nutrient replacements for those eating less. CookUnity and Daily Harvest, meal-delivery companies, have created GLP-1 “companion” lines focused on smaller but calorie- and protein-rich foods.

Drews is what consumer marketers might describe as a “premium purchaser” who might reallocate the money spent on total consumption to higher-quality foods.

“Why not buy filet mignon when you only have the appetite for a few ounces of steak?” KPMG’s Andrew Lindsay, the company’s top consumer and retail strategy analyst, wrote in a recent report about GLP-1.

An analysis by research firm Grocery Doppio shows plenty of ups as well as downs in online food spending nationally, with sales of lean meats increasing 27 percent in the first half of 2024 compared with the same period in 2023, while sales of whole fruits and vegetables were up 13 percent. Sales of snacks and confectionary purchases, which include chocolate, candy and sugar-coated treats, were down 52 percent, while prepared baked good sales tumbled 47 percent.

Gaurav Pant, chief insights officer for Grocery Doppio, said that while the company initially saw grocery basket sizes fall, they jumped back up as shoppers shifted toward higher-quality foods—such as organic produce and premium protein.

“We believe that a decent portion of GLP-1 users may actually increase their grocery food spending over time,” Pant said.

Drews calculates his spending on food is more than it was in the past. His biggest-ticket items are venison and bison, high-protein, lean red meat he is having flown in from Hawaii following a recommendation from a friend. “It’s super high in nutrients, raised on grass grown on lava from Maui,” he said. It runs $31 a pound vs. about $5 a pound for ground beef at a grocery store. He eats it every day of the week.

By June 1, 2023, he had 14.5 percent body fat. (He’s now at 10.5 percent.) The average American man has 28.1 percent. He was thrilled with the results and went into maintenance mode.

“I’ve been heavy my whole life,” he said. “I’ve never had six pack abs before. I can’t have enough mirrors in my house. How vain is that?”

The changes in his weight led to changes in his clothing. When he began to work out every day, he noticed that the baggy T-shirts and shorts from Dick’s Sporting Goods weren’t cutting it and, during a trip to the mall, walked into Lululemon for the first time. With the frequency of his workouts, he said, and “in all honesty, emerging muscles,” he wanted clothes that were more durable, fitted and stylish. He dropped hundreds of dollars on workout-wear basics and kept coming back.

While his taste in dress shirts and suits for court didn’t change—he still favored Nordstrom’s selection—he needed to buy the same or similar clothes in new sizes three times as his body shrank, losing 2-½ inches in his neck and 8 inches in his waist. He went from XXL down to XL, then large and, most recently, medium, which he says is as small as he will go.

Recently, Drews was reading a lot of books—such as Herman Pontzer’s “Burn”—about health, activity, longevity and modern medicine.

Pontzer is an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University and, for about 15 years, has been measuring metabolisms of all kinds of people: ultra-athletes, office workers, members of the Hadza tribe in Tanzania, who still hunt and gather their food. Pontzer found that despite how active the Hadza are, they burn the same amount of calories as more sedentary people in industrialized countries, meaning that efforts to “boost” metabolism in the past through being more active were probably in vain. Drews is intrigued by “the thought of the GLP-1 drugs changing the course of our evolutionary predispositions.”

On a vacation with one of his sons in September, the two went to the U.S. Southwest. In the past, he probably would have argued for an all-inclusive resort in Mexico, the Dominican Republic or Florida, where the farthest he might walk is from his hotel room to the water and “doing what all the people do there, which is misbehave.” Or maybe some place in Europe where the focus would be on eating and drinking.

This time, he agreed to an adventure through national parks: Grand Canyon, Bryce, Zion. They hiked 77 miles in eight days.

“I was leading the march. I was beating him up the mountain,” Drews said. “Incredible.”