 But natural GLP-1 only sticks around in your system for a few minutes and then it's washed away. What these drugs do is they inject you with an artificial copy of GLP-1 that instead of sticking around for a few minutes, sticks around for a whole week, which is why these drugs produce this incredible amount of weight loss. When Hari first learned about these drugs, he thought two things. First, that they could save his life. Obesity ran in his family and two close male relatives had died of heart attacks.