About

Who writes this, and how

This is a health site, so you are entitled to know who is behind it, how the guides are produced, what we are not qualified to tell you, and how we get paid. All four are below.

Who we are

Ellie is a product of Metellus Productions, an independent software company. We are a small consumer app team, not a clinic, not a telehealth provider, and not a pharmaceutical company. Nobody here prescribes anything, and we have no relationship with Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, any compounding pharmacy, or any telehealth platform.

The company builds and runs its own apps. Ellie is one of them, and this website is where its research lives.

Why Ellie exists

Because there is a gap in the middle of a very large story. Millions of people started a GLP-1 medication, and most of them will stop at some point, whether from cost, side effects, supply, reaching a goal, or a coverage decision made for them. What happens next is where the literature goes quiet.

The 2026 case-series literature says it plainly: no evidence-based protocols currently guide GLP-1 de-escalation, and patients report improvising on their own. Meanwhile the trials show that stopping without support returns most of the lost weight within a year, and real-world data shows nearly half of people who stop hold their result. That gap between the two numbers is behaviour and support, and nobody was building for it.

So Ellie is a plan for the weeks after your last dose, and this site is the free, public version of the research behind it.

How we research and write these guides

The process for every page here, stated so you can hold us to it:

  1. We start from primary sources. Trial publications, extension studies, and FDA-approved prescribing information, not secondary summaries or press coverage.
  2. We grade every claim. Each assertion gets sorted into established, emerging, plausible but unproven, or contested, and we label it in the text. When a claim rests on one case series with no randomized trial behind it, the page says so.
  3. We say when the research is silent. Several things people badly want to know are simply unstudied, such as how quickly non-food effects return after stopping. We state the gap rather than filling it with a confident guess.
  4. We link what can be linked. Citations point to PubMed or DailyMed, both run by the US National Institutes of Health, so you can read the source yourself for free. Every link is checked before publication. Where a claim comes from reporting we could not resolve to a stable public record, it is listed without a link rather than pointed at an approximation.
  5. We write in the words people actually use. Food noise, the water jump, microdosing, the climb. Clinical synonyms are used where they add precision, not to sound more authoritative.
  6. We never give dose advice. No page here recommends a dose, an interval, or a taper schedule, and none ever will. Where those questions come up we describe what exists in the literature and route the decision to your prescriber.

What we are not

Being direct about this, because health sites are often vague about it:

  • This is not medical advice and not medical care. It is educational information plus self-tracking tools. It does not replace a prescriber, a dietitian, or a therapist.
  • We are not anti-medication. These drugs work, and staying on one is a perfectly good outcome. Ellie is for holding your result on the medication, on less of it, or off it. We are against the stop-panic-restart cycle, not against the drugs.
  • We do not sell, supply, or source medication, and we publish nothing about where to obtain it.

How we make money

Ellie is a paid subscription app. This website exists partly to be genuinely useful and partly to introduce people to that app, and we would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

What that means in practice: the tools and guides here are free, complete, and not gated. We take no pharmaceutical funding, run no advertising, and earn no affiliate commission on medication, supplements, or anything else we mention. When we say berberine has thin evidence behind it, nobody loses a commission over it.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to know and we will fix it. Email support@metellusproductions.com with the page and what is inaccurate. Substantive corrections get noted on the page itself rather than quietly edited. This is a fast-moving field and some of what is accurate today will not be in a year.

Getting in touch

The contact page covers what we can and cannot help with. Short version: email us about the site, the app, a correction, or press. We cannot answer questions about your own dose or treatment, because that is your prescriber's job and we are not qualified to do it.