Creatine For Healthy Aging

Everybody wants to lose weight, but almost nobody asks the question that changes everything: what am I losing? If the scale drops fast and a meaningful chunk of that is muscle, you may end up weaker, less mobile, and less resilient even while you look “lighter.” We walk through why skeletal muscle is not vanity tissue, it’s independence tissue tied to strength, glucose control, metabolism, and healthy aging. 

We also touch the new era of GLP-1 weight loss drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Zepbound. Appetite drops, food intake drops, and protein intake can drop right along with it, which makes muscle preservation a real priority during rapid weight loss. That’s why we keep coming back to the unsexy fundamentals: adequate protein, resistance training, sleep, and tracking body composition and strength, not just the number on the scale. 

Then we get practical about creatine monohydrate, one of the most studied and affordable supplements available. We explain ATP and phosphocreatine in plain language, why creatine helps you get more high-quality work in the gym, and why it doesn’t “magically” build muscle without training. We also cover the shifting research on brain energy, mental fatigue, and the growing interest in women’s health across perimenopause and menopause, plus simple myth busting around water weight and kidney safety for healthy people. 

If you want to stay capable for decades, start measuring strength like it matters and use supplements as support, not shortcuts. Subscribe, share this with someone chasing the scale, and leave a review so more people learn how to protect their muscle while improving their health.

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Transcript

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What Are You Really Losing

SPEAKER_00 0:23

Everybody wants to lose weight, but almost nobody asks the more important question what am I losing? Because if the scale drops 30 pounds, but a significant amount of that is muscle, are we actually healthier? And today we're talking about muscle, aging, GLP ones, and the one of the most cheapest and most studied supplements on the planet creatine. Welcome to Living a Full Life Podcast. I'm Dr. Enrico Dolchgori. Thanks for joining us each and every week on health tips for you and your family to live healthier, happier lives. This week's topic is creatine. You may have heard it, you may actually take it, but I'm going to go through some of the research and some of the benefits of creatine and why it actually works and why it's such a wonderful supplement to be taking. One of the stereotypes behind creatine is that creatine isn't a bodybuilding supplement. Creatine is an energy compound your body already makes and uses. And skeletal muscle isn't just something that makes you look fit, it's intimately connected to strength, mobility, glucose disposal, physical independence, and resilience as we age. So the big question is what if preserving muscle is actually more important than simply losing weight? And I have been teaching this for a long time. And that's what it's all about. Lean muscle mass, maintaining that for as long as we possibly can in our life is the fundamental building blocks to strength, independence, metabolism, everything that we could possibly talk about. That's what it's all about. So here's why muscle matters weight, BMI, calories, weight loss, it's not about that. It's about strength, muscle, function, metabolic health, and longevity. That's how we should look at all this when we look at this stuff. The BMI, the weight on the scale. It really doesn't matter when we look at this correctly. I'll weigh a little more if it means I have a little bit more skeletal muscle. That is that is fantastic.

Muscle As Independence Tissue

SPEAKER_00 2:43

Sarcopenia, we have two podcasts on sarcopenia. Sarcopenia is the condition of muscle wasting, and progressive loss of muscle mass over time, strength, and physical performance is associated with aging. It's the it's the defining characteristic of aging. So we have our birthday, which we can't change, and the chronic chronological age of ourselves, which is just happens over time. Each year that goes by, we age. And then we have a biological age, and that's the one we can influence. So we can be 55 years old and have a biological age of 40. We can do that, and that's all with skeletal muscle. A 30-year-old losing a little muscle doesn't necessarily notice it. At 50, it starts affecting performance. At 65, it can affect getting off the floor. And at 75, it can affect whether you live independently or not. The same amount of muscle mass. That five pounds for the 30-year-old may not notice the skeletal muscle change. That five pounds for a 75-year-old, it's the difference between being mobile and independent and going on a cruise ship and living in a nursing home. So muscle isn't vanity tissue, it's independence tissue.

GLP-1 Weight Loss And Muscle Risk

SPEAKER_00 3:58

GLP ones, we'll just touch on this really quick. We've entered an entirely new era of weight loss, a completely different way of losing weight. Ozempic, Wagovi, Zetbound, uh, Trazepatide, all the GLP ones. These drugs can produce substantial weight loss because they affect something different: appetite, food, protein intake. But weight loss isn't exclusively fat loss. A review addressing muscle preservation during incretin-based obesity treatment warned that substantial weight reduction can include meaningful skeletal muscle loss and emphasized adequate protein, micronutrients, and resistance training. Doing this, and this is through a PebMut a PubMed article from 2025. The important thing to talk about is that it's not that Ozempic destroys muscle, it's that rapid weight loss creates an environment where preserving lean muscle tissue becomes extremely important. Even more so than before. Because before we had Jenny Craig, Weight Watchers, Paleo, Whole Food, Whole 30, Carnivore, Atkins, Keto. Can you tell I've done this stuff? Mediterranean diet, all that's out there. And before GLP1s, that's what we had were the diets. What's the next best diet? The nice thing about diet is you controlled food and protein intake to maintain, hopefully, as much muscle mass as possible. Now we don't have, we throw all the diet books out the window. Now we have injections. This is the issue. So if somebody loses 50 pounds on Ozempic or whatever it may be, what percentage was fat? What percentage was lean tissue? And what are they doing to protect the latter? So people who are using weight loss medications, I'm not against them. You just shouldn't ignore adequate nutrition and protein, resistance training and monitoring strength and body composition, not just the scale. Body composition becomes even more important with GLP1. So you should be using a biometric scale, measuring your hydration, free muscle mass, uh, free fat, visceral fat, and total BMI on that and measuring those and not just the scale, because the scale will just show you total weight loss.

Creatine 101 ATP Energy System

SPEAKER_00 6:24

Creatine. Creatine. I had to put that stuff at the beginning because now we're going to talk about creatine, what it does. What is creatine, first of all? Your cells use ATP, adrenosine adrenosine triphosphate, as an immediate energy currency. It's a money exchange in the body. It's an energy exchange that happens every second in every cell. During high energy demands, ATP gets depleted rapidly. Phosphocreatine helps regenerate ATP. So creatine, once taken as a supplement, turns into phosphocreatine in the body. It helps generate ATP and it supports rapid cellular energy demands. Energy. Taking it doesn't make you bigger. Taking it doesn't make you smarter. Taking it, well, it might make you smarter, doesn't make you anything. It's an energy source. You're adding the baseline to help create phosphocreatine, which helps stimulate ATP production to have more output. By taking creatine in layman's terms, you'll be able to complete workouts better and more efficiently. Your body makes creatine on its own. You also obtain some through food, particularly meat and fish, other animals that have creatine. Supplementation increases available creatine stores in the body. So you just create more storage, like oil reservoirs. You just create more oil storage. So for energy later. Creatine is not a steroid, it is not testosterone, it is not a stimulant, it is not a fat burner, and it is not a hormone. It's naturally occurring compound involved in energy metabolism. That's it. Lifters in the gym have made it popular forever. I'm thinking we're, I think we're getting close to 100 years here, 80 years. Uh, creatine has been popular. It's been talked about strength, power, training capacity, lean mass, recovering, tissue volume. But creatine works best with resistance training. So everyone in the gym got pop made this popular because they were taking it like, dude, I feel better. I feel I feel stronger. I feel like I can do more in the gym when they were right. They actually could. They were depleting their stores. They had more stores that would last longer and deplete the depletion would take longer. So it's great. It's more oil reserves. It's like having a bigger fuel tank on your car or a bigger battery on your electric car. You'll have a longer range. That's what we're doing with this. This isn't take creatine and the and magically grow muscle. This is, you know, give the muscle better energy availability and then give the muscle a reason to adapt. So you have to lift, you have to do resistance training. That's the whole point. Otherwise, creatine has some other fascinating things to it as well. But that's the primary reason we would put this into our diet. I take it every day, five to 10 grams, milligrams per day. Sorry, five to ten grams per day of creatine every single day, seven days a week. Um, just because of its benefits. Keeps the energy stores there for physical activity.

Brain Energy And Women’s Research

SPEAKER_00 9:47

So, what organ in your body uses a tremendous amount of energy? Let's talk about this. Think about it for a second. Your brain. Your brain uses the most amount of energy in the human body. Creatine's role in cellular energy metabolism isn't limited to your biceps. Research is increasingly examining creatine for cognition, memory, mental fatigue, sleep deprivation, mood, and aging brains. The current research is on the aging brain. It's fascinating stuff. It's actually very good. A 2026 systematic review examining creatine during acute sleep deprivation found encouraging trends for cognition, psychomotor performance, and mood, but only five studies met its criteria so far. So this is promising research, but not a reason to claim that creatine cures brain fog. Again, this is from PubMed. The most interesting future for creatine might not be bigger muscles, it might be better cellular energy. Women may be the most interesting population on this right now. When I'm crossing the studies, it's very cool stuff, specifically for women's health. For years, creatine was marketed like big dude plus a shaker bottle plus gym. You saw it at GNC, you saw it everywhere in big containers of creatine and beside the way powder, right? That's changing. A 2025 study review significantly examined creatine throughout women's life stages and found evidence supporting exercise performance and strength while cognitive, mood, pregnancy, and menopausal applications remain active areas of research, and it's very promising on the outcomes. Perimenopause leads to menopause. Menopause can cause muscle loss. Muscle loss affects strength, bone health, then it's brain fog and fatigue. One small 2025 study of 15 peri- and postmenopausal women combined creatine with twice weekly strength training, found improvements in some measures of lower body strength. And the perimenopausal group reported improved sleep quality. It's interesting, but the sample was tiny, so we're just going to talk about it. And I love the promising stuff because it usually leads to bigger stuff, which is great. So creatine is now very popular. Creatine may ultimately become more associated with healthy aging than with bodybuilding later on. And it's already the tide is already shifting. Women are talking about it. It's not a bodybuilding thing anymore. It is a longevity thing, it's a health thing, it's an energy thing. So we're shifting the discussion of creatine. And that's why I have this podcast. I really like it. I it's overall health, right? We're not chasing vanities, which is great. I love that. We got to change a lot of things that we've been trained to think about because it's mainly vanity, looks, abs, muscles. This is not what we're going

Myth Busting Water Weight Kidneys

SPEAKER_00 12:54

for. Um, let's do some myth busting. You know I love that stuff. Creatine makes you fat. I've read that before. I thought that before because it retains water. No, creatine can increase body weight, particularly because of changes in water associated with muscle creatine storage. So as you create more oil tankers in the body that can store more energy, well, it's going to be water retention and it can increase the scale weight. That's why we want to be doing our body composition. Scale weight and body fat are not the same thing. You'll see your weight go up a couple pounds, but your body fat percentage may stay the same or actually go lower. Creatine makes you bloated. It actually has very little to do with your gut. Some people experience changes in water weight, particularly with aggressive loading strategies, but don't equate intracellular water throughout your body as and in your muscle as gaining weight or abdominal bloating. Creatine is bad for your kidneys. I remember this when I was early in the gym as a 19-year-old. Uh, be careful on how much you take, could be bad for your kidneys. For healthy people using recommended amounts, the five grams, creatine has a strong safety record. People with kidney disease or other relevant medical issues should discuss implementation with their healthcare team. If you have a nephrologist, you probably want to discuss this with them. If you don't have a nephrologist, you don't have kidney disease. So you're you're pretty much safe to take this. Creatine is basically a steroid. I love that one. No, it's not. It's completely different. It's not a hormone, it's not anything to do with any of that. It's a derivative of creatine. Or sorry, creatine is a derivative of phosphocreatine. Creatine is only for men. Well, we broke that myth two minutes ago. Creatine is only for athletes. Not true. Why? Increasingly difficult to argue given the research into aging, women, and brain health. It is not just for athletes.

Buy Creatine Monohydrate Save Money

SPEAKER_00 14:42

Now, what kind should you buy? Uh be careful. We have everything at our fingertips with these phones and online marketing and online shopping. Uh this is where I can save you some money. Walk into any supplement store and you're going to see creatine HCL, buffered creatine, micronized creatine, gummies, proprietary super creatines. But just go back to the basics. Creatine monohydrate is all you need. It's the form with the massive research history behind it. If you're buying anything else, you're wasting your money. You don't need the $70 bottle with flames printed all over it. Um, third-party testing is important too, because supplement quality matters. So Mayo similarly recommends choosing products following good manufacture practices. I would buy American-based ones, first of all, because the fillers from overseas are filled, which you don't know what you're getting. It could be heavy metals. So be careful with where we're getting the products from. Make sure American company based, you're pretty much safe because the FDA does regulate some things, believe it or not, and heavy metals is one of them, and fillers. So be careful with that.

How Much To Take And When

SPEAKER_00 15:52

Now, how much? How much? Three to five grams per day is the dosage. Some protocols use loading phases for approximately 20 grams a day, divided into several doses for five to seven days during the loading phase. These are your teenage and college age, usually boys now, girls are doing it. Uh, gym. Getting into the gym, they read something, it's trending on TikTok. They want to do for the rest of us, you don't even need the loading phase because creatine is going to become a supplement for you forever, I hope, on daily. So it's going to load and build over time, anyways. So following a maintenance dose, three to five grams. I do five every day. Uh, you don't need to turn taking creatine into calculus. Follow the recommendation. It's usually one little scoop. The scooper comes in there, put in some water, drink it, you're good to go. Take it in the morning or take it during a workout or right after. There could be some benefits to that too. Um, consistency matters with creatine more than anything else. It's it's a longevity supplement, like your omega-3, your vitamin D. Now you can add creatine to that too. Or maybe your nightly magnesium, too. There you go. Those are things you probably take forever. I would take it forever. I am. I'm in my 40s and I take it forever. Just had a birthday yesterday. 27. Consistency matters more than obsessing over whether it was taken at 8.03 a.m. or immediately after your final set at the gym. People with kidney disease, again, pregnancy, uh, significant medical conditions or questions about medication interactions should actually discuss this with health professionals first. There's very little on that list that it acts with. However, nephrology, pregnancy, OBG, YN, and um endocrinologists. If you're if you got any of those, I would bring that to them, be like, what do you think of creatine? Can I take it with what I'm doing? And most of the time you're going to get a yes. But always ask them uh creatine isn't going to save you in any way, shape, or form. I would take this with no um no ties to the outcome. Just I would take it just because you trust me and you want more power and you want more energy, but don't uh equate it to anything else. If you're sleeping uh five hours, eating poorly, barely consuming protein, uh sitting at your job for 12 hours a day, never lifting any weights, and taking creatine, we've missed the point. You're not going to notice anything. Creatine is the supporting actor on the supporting cast to the main movie. Uh, the stars are of the show when we're talking about this resistance training, adequate protein intake, movement, sleep, adequate nutrition overall, and consistency. That's where creatine can supplement a great movie production for you in your life.

Ask Strength Questions Not Scale

SPEAKER_00 18:40

America needs to get stronger. They don't need more creatine. So we've been talking about exercise all year and protein and diet. How much do you weigh? That's a question we ask all the time. But really, the the right questions we should ask is how strong are you? Can you carry groceries? Can you pick something heavy off the floor? Can you get yourself off the ground? This one's legitimate. I'm a chiropractor. I help people over 50 all the time, and I give them stretches. And for some of them, I'm like, don't get on the floor. I want you to do this in a chair. And I want you to, you know, bring one leg up, lean over, stretch the stretch the glutes this way, or sit or stand up in the corner of the room where you have two walls beside you where you can lean up, bring your knee up, how to stretch, you know, psoas, glute, glutes, hamstrings. I'll show them safety ways because I know if I tell them to get on the floor, the toughest thing is not the stretchings, that they're they're wondering how they're going to get up off the floor. These are questions we need to ask. Can you get up off the ground? Can you climb stairs? Can you maintain muscle while losing fat? Can you still do those things at 70? That's the question. Buying a house with no stairs and not getting on the floor and adapting to the things you can't do doesn't make you stronger, it actually makes you weaker. So the goal isn't to weigh less, the goal is to remain capable for as long as possible, whatever that number may be, whatever that is. For some people, making it to 70 is a huge win. Uh, for others, making it to 90 is a huge win with their strength. That's what living a full life is all about. So creatine isn't magic. GLP1 drugs aren't magic, protein isn't magic, and there's no supplement that's going to replace using your body. But we've spent decades worrying about getting smaller, smaller waste, smaller numbers on the scale, smaller BMI. Maybe we're asking the wrong questions now that it's easier than ever to get smaller with an injection, GLP1s. I've 30% of Americans have experimented with GLP1s. It's a third of the population, adult Americans. They're making one for kids. Of course they are. It's always the next demographic to put drugs to. Don't just ask how much weight you're losing, ask how much strength you're keeping. Shift the questions. Good questions in, good answers out. Bad questions in, garbage question, garbage answers out. Muscle independence, muscle is resilience. Muscle is your ability to keep doing the things you love. And that's why living a full life is actually about that.

Wrap Up Resources And Next Steps

SPEAKER_00 21:20

I hope this was a good podcast. Go get some creatine. If you need any help, we have some great resources as well that we use. We use clean with the K K-L-E-A-N. That's a clean one, small jar, 30, 30 bucks. It lasts me over a month. I think it's got uh maybe 60 servings in it or 90. Maybe it's a three-month supply. Um, not bad. 10, 15 bucks a month for creatine. That's fairly affordable. So if you're buying these $70 things, I don't know what you're doing, but uh just clean, just something clean, uh manufactured in the United States is probably your best bet because then it'll be FDA cleared. Avoid Amazon because the distribution of it could be somewhere else. Uh, those are my tips there. And if you have any questions, info at fulllifetampa.com. We're more than happy to answer them for you. Stay well, stay healthy, take care.