Before writing a single line of marketing, we wanted to know what people on GLP-1 medications actually talk about when nobody is selling them anything. So we looked at short videos.
The method
- Source: TikTok videos from GLP-1 hashtags, in English, from individual creators.
- Pool: 468 videos, sorted by views.
- Deep dive: the 17 most viewed relevant ones, broken down one by one: hook, structure, format, what people said in the comments, and why we think it worked.
This is not a scientific study. It is a snapshot of what reached the most people in September 2026.
Finding 1: food noise is the topic
Of the 16 videos that were not ads, 9 were directly about food noise. The most viewed video of the whole set, a list of the all-or-nothing thoughts people have around food, had over 14 million views. Some of the food noise ones:
- A 5-second video of someone spraying cookies with disinfectant, captioned “when the food noise is too loud”: 7.6 million views, from an account with about 2,000 followers.
- A lip-sync of a monologue describing constant food thoughts: over a million views.
- A voice-over of a whole day of non-stop food thoughts: over 400,000 views, from another account with about 2,000 followers. One of the top comments asked, in capitals, whether this was not normal.
The comments told the same story: people were relieved to have a name for it, and many described it coming back at specific moments.
Finding 2: recognition beats information
The videos that spread most were not the ones with the most facts. They were the ones where viewers thought “that’s me”. Lists of familiar thoughts, a single relatable gesture, a question to the community. Saves were very high on these: people kept them to come back to.
The exception proves the point: a simple two-minute explanation of how these medications work had 4.4 million views and tens of thousands of saves, because it answered a question everyone had.
Finding 3: the audience spots ads instantly
One video in our list was a disguised ad: a professional introduction, a warning, then a product. It had over 250,000 views but a like rate under 1%, and the comments mostly mocked the product. The people in this community are sharp, and they have been sold to a lot.
What it changed for us
- Food noise is front and center. Embera has a 2-second daily food noise check-in, free, and the patterns across your shot week in Pro. The food noise guides on this site came directly from this research.
- Explain, do not sell. Our content explains things like why day 6 feels different. If the app helps, it is the next step, not the pitch.
- Never fake experience. We build the app. We will never post as a patient or invent a testimonial. Real stories belong to the people living them.