Why I co-founded GetLean

My weight has swung all my life. At my heaviest I was 93 kg. I got down to 73 kg, then slowly put 10 kg back on. After that I sat around 83 kg for a long time and couldn’t shift it.

I’m not a doctor. I studied at SMU and joined the Singapore government on the Management Associates Programme. I left to build a tech startup in the US, which failed. Then I came home, worked at Twitter, and co-founded TargetGuru with DK Tan. I’m married with two kids. None of it made my weight any easier to manage.

Eventually I started on GLP-1 medication, and two things became clear.

First, it’s a numbers game. The medication helps with willpower, but the arithmetic doesn’t change: you lose weight when you take in fewer calories than you use. I started paying far more attention to what went into my body.

Second, the habits are what hold. Whenever I stopped tracking what I ate, or stopped weighing in, the weight crept back up.

Dr Quek Keng Liang is a family friend, and he thinks about dose the way I’d come to. If you’re putting in the work and the weight is holding, there’s no reason to go up. Hold the dose, and when you can, bring it down. I asked him if he wanted to build a programme around that. GetLean is what we built.

I think most people want what I wanted: to reach a healthy weight with the medication’s help, then come off it. That takes habits, and habits take daily practice. So the programme includes daily coaching on WhatsApp. Each morning you get the day’s calorie, protein and walking targets. You send photos of your meals and your steps, and you see what’s left for the day. Over the weeks, you learn what a deficit actually looks like on your plate. When you reach your goal weight, the same habits carry you through: eating well, moving more, and knowing roughly what goes in and what gets used.

The most common misunderstanding I hear is that once you reach your goal, you can simply stop and keep the result. The medication helps with willpower while you’re on it. Come off it without having learnt to eat, move and read your own numbers, and the weight comes back easily.

We won’t hand you many months of medication at once. The goal is the lowest dose that does the job, and a plan to come off it, from day one. It’s all done online, because that’s convenient and private.

I built GetLean for people like me: people who want help reaching a healthy weight, and then want to stop the medication. Our first few patients were already there. They had taken GLP-1 medication before and came to us looking for a way off it.

GetLean is a GLP-1 programme designed to end. Lose the weight, build the habits, and keep them when the medication stops.

Lester Chee, co-founder, GetLean