"Until recently, the very notion of prescribing any form of weight loss whatsoever to an elderly patient—i.e., someone 65 or older—was considered suspect, even dangerous."

"'Advising weight loss in obese older adults is still shunned in the medical community,' the geriatric endocrinologist Dennis Villareal and his co-authors wrote in a 2013 'review of the controversy' for a medical journal. More than a decade later, clinicians are still struggling to reach consensus on safety, Villareal told me.... When a person addresses their obesity through dieting alone, as much as 25 percent of the weight they lose derives from loss of muscle, bone, and other fat-free tissue. For seniors who, through natural aging, are already near the threshold of developing a functional impairment, a sudden drop like this could be enfeebling...."

From "Older Americans Are About to Lose a Lot of Weight/People over 65 make up a sizable portion of Americans on GLP-1 drugs. That might be trouble" (The Atlantic).