Every wellness coach who has watched a client vanish onto a weekly injection has had the same quiet thought: what am I for now?

Here is a number.

Omada Health presented findings on October 20 at the World Obesity and Weight Management Congress in Boston from a 12-week study of 245 adults with obesity who had started a GLP-1 within the previous eight weeks; 151 joined Omada's GLP-1 Care Track and 94 received usual care. The program group lost an adjusted mean of 6.0% of baseline body weight against 3.3% in the control group, a between-group difference of 2.8% at p < 0.001.

Same drugs. Same twelve weeks. Nearly double the loss.

The part that matters more than the scale

The body composition numbers are the ones coaches should actually be quoting.

Body fat percentage fell 3.3% in the Omada group versus 1.6% for usual care, while muscle mass percentage rose 0.6% versus 0.2%. Depression and anxiety symptoms dropped by approximately 30% in the Omada group. Members also reported greater improvements in well-being, physical functioning, and confidence in their ability to lose weight.

Muscle loss is the open wound of the GLP-1 era. Omada says lean mass can account for 30% or more of the weight lost on these medications. That is the conversation every strength coach has been having in DMs for two years without a citation to point at.

Now there is one. The study was a quasi-experimental trial in which the intervention arm received a virtual GLP-1 lifestyle companion programme with personalised, strength-focused physical activity coaching. The track includes a health coach, peer support groups, digital tools for meal logging and behavior tracking, and AI-powered nutrition support.

Why the control group is the best part

Most vendor studies compare their product to nothing. This one didn't quite.

More than a quarter — 26% — of the usual care group reported using another lifestyle or wellness program during the study. So the 3.3% figure isn't bare medication. It includes people who were already doing something. The gap held anyway.

That detail is what makes this usable in a sales conversation. The comparison isn't coaching versus willpower. It's structured, strength-focused coaching versus whatever people cobble together on their own.

"GLP-1 care is about more than how much weight you lose," says Thomas Tsang, MD, MPH, chief medical officer at Omada Health.

Read the caveats before you put it in a deck

Omada is a publicly traded company (Nasdaq: OMDA) presenting research on its own product, and the framing in the release points explicitly at buyers: the company says the results point to increased value for employers and health plans.

It is also a 12-week study, and body composition was measured with at-home scales rather than clinical scans. The release doesn't say whether the gap holds at six months or a year, or whether people kept the muscle they gained, and the muscle difference itself is small — about 0.4 of a percentage point.

The paper — Stanton LA, Naqvi JB, Devaraj SM, et al., "Quality Plus Quantity" — ran in Diabetes, Obesity and Metabolism, doi:10.1111/dom.71152. Read it before you cite it. Then cite it.

The pharmaceutical industry just spent billions creating millions of people who are suddenly, urgently interested in protecting muscle, eating properly and moving with intent. The prescription doesn't come with any of that attached.