Why I built it
I kept seeing the same pattern. A friend would start a GLP-1, lose weight quickly, and then arrive at a clinic appointment with twelve weeks of WhatsApp screenshots and the kind of fatigue that comes from losing muscle along with the fat. Their prescriber would do their best with the data they had — but the data they had was a phone full of out-of-order notes, not a record.
The second pattern: every weight-loss app in 2025 treated the scale as the only measure of success. Nobody was leading with what the science had been saying for years — that 25 to 40 percent of weight lost on a GLP-1 can be lean muscle, and that the figure is largely under your control. Apps that were honest about this were not in the same product category as apps that just counted shots.
Muscle Guard is the app I wanted to put in those friends' hands. One number, the Muscle Guard Score, that captures whether the fat-loss-without-muscle-loss plan is working. A doctor-readable summary the prescriber can absorb in 60 seconds. A research library that names the studies the claims come from. That's the whole product.
Why Johannesburg
South Africa is where I work and where I see the GLP-1 reality without filters. Branded Ozempic runs R2,700 to R3,100 per month here. Medical aid rarely covers it for weight management. Compounded semaglutide and tirzepatide are mainstream, dispensed by registered compounding pharmacies, because the cost gap to branded is the difference between using a GLP-1 and not. Building from Joburg means compounded preparations are first-class citizens in the app, ZAR is the primary pricing display, and the regional context is not an afterthought.
It also means the privacy posture is real, not aspirational. The Protection of Personal Information Act has the same teeth as GDPR. POPIA-compliant by architecture is what we build to, not what we retrofit.
Why muscle preservation is the headline
The category does not have a category-of-one move. Shotsy, MeAgain, Weight Watchers Med+, MyNetDiary GLP-1 Companion — they all track injections and weight. None of them lead with the thing that actually distinguishes a good GLP-1 journey from a bad one: what you kept of yourself. Muscle preservation is the headline because it is the answer to the question that matters, and because nobody else is willing to put it on the front page.
What Muscle Guard will never be
- A medical device. The boundary statement is load-bearing, not decorative. Muscle Guard is a self-tracking companion and coach. It does not diagnose, prescribe, or replace your healthcare provider.
- A telehealth front-end. We will never become a route to a prescription, an affiliate of a compounder, or an advertiser for a manufacturer. The category is moving in that direction. We are not.
- A data broker. We don't sell your data. We don't share it with advertisers. We don't use it for anything other than running the app for you. Delete in one tap, and it is gone.
- A weight-loss cheerleader. The product respects the work. Milestones are tied to consistency, not to losing weight quickly.
Where to find me
Email is the contact channel. hello@muscleguardglp.com for anything; research@muscleguardglp.com if you want to flag something the Research Hub got wrong. I read everything.
The shorter version of all of the above: I built Muscle Guard because nobody else was building the GLP-1 app that puts the question "what are you keeping of yourself?" on the front page. That is the whole thing.