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Barbell Medicine Podcast

Barbell Medicine Podcast

The Man Who Couldn’t Stop Gaining Weight | A Medical Mystery

Jul 31, 2026 · 1h 10m

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About this episode

A previously healthy 21-year-old shows up with seven months of headaches and 30-plus pounds of weight gain he can’t explain. He’s eating the same and training more, and the scale climbs anyway. We hand the case to Dr. Austin Baraki cold and work it in real time: the exam, the labs, the MRI, and two diagnoses that turn a headache workup into the clearest proof we’ve got that body weight is set by the brain, not by character. This is the capstone of our weight series (willpower, calories, protein), and it ends on the drug that, this year, did something for these patients that nothing had done before. Timestamps 00:00:00 Cold open: the man who couldn’t stop gaining weight 00:01:49 Meet the…