Weight loss drugs are altering consumer behaviour, disrupting sectors from food retailing (smaller portions) to apparel (less fabric needed). We need to move fast to align with this new reality

I magine January arriving, with the New Year uplift in members failing to materialise.

This is the prospect we’ll be facing in January 2025, now weight loss drugs offer consumers an easy and viable alternative when it comes to shifting those unwanted post-festive kilos.

Although clearly this isn’t the only motivation for joining a health club, it applies to enough January recruits to be a variable that will suppress sales.

These game-changing drugs are arriving so fast it makes your head spin. They’re easy to access and already being widely adopted, with traction being driven by four things – the medical profession, human nature, easy online sales and consumers’ aspirations of wellness.

The fundamentals of medicine are drugs and surgery and doctors are clearing their lists of multiple cases with a simple GLP-1 or tirzepatide weight loss drug prescription.

This trend will be strengthened by recent research that found they have beneficial side-effects, including improved mental health, the resolution of some addictions and eating disorders and the prevention of neurodegeneration, making them the wonder drug of the moment.

Consumers see them as a way to fast-track their wellness journey and this plays to humans’ hard-wiring to take the line of least resistance – why sweat when you can simply take a shot to shift those unwanted kilos?

With this looming threat, the sector must swing into action now and tackle the challenge with new packages, marketing, lobbying, research and training.

People on these drugs need to exercise to maintain their new weight and avoid losing muscle mass. This point must be driven home to doctors and health services, so every weight loss drug prescription or online sale comes with an exercise prescription or guidelines.

At present, mentions of exercise at the time of prescription or sale are cursory and non-specific, so this train has left the station without us on board.

We need our trade associations to be lobbying globally to get exercise prescribed along with these drugs, while operators could consider directly prescribing them in a kind of reverse takeover.

Research and training are vital – we need to know how they impact the body when it comes to exercise, then qualifications must be developed, so our exercise professionals can deliver safe, effective support. There is much to do.

Some operators, such as Equinox, have a year’s head start, having launched specialist packages in 2023. Now it’s time for the whole sector to galvanise to ensure we turn this development into a positive.