Prince Mario-Max Schaumburg-Lippe: Heidi Skolnik Answers the Questions Your Doctor Skipped

The prescription gets handed over in minutes. The real questions take months to surface: What do I eat when nothing sounds good? Why am I losing strength along with the weight? Who tells me about the side effects I wasn’t warned about? Heidi Skolnik’s new book wants to be the answer to all of that — and this week, she celebrated its arrival with a party.

Skolnik, a nutritionist and exercise physiologist whose career spans Olympians, pro sports teams and some of the country’s most demanding performing artists, launched Your GLP-1 Game Plan: What Your Doctor Didn’t Tell You About How to Eat, Move, and Thrive on Weight Loss Medication with a reception at One Art Space in Tribeca. Hosted by Michael Glantz, the night combined an author talk and book signing with bubbles and bites — staged on the final evening of artist Hunt Slonem’s exhibition Through the Looking Glass, whose rabbits, butterflies and birds watched from the walls.

The gap the book fills

The premise is blunt. GLP-1 medications have moved into the mainstream at speed, but the guidance around them hasn’t kept up. Patients routinely leave the pharmacy with a prescription and little else — no plan for the nausea, no strategy for eating enough protein when appetite vanishes, no roadmap for keeping muscle while the scale drops. Research now suggests people who pair the medication with solid nutrition, exercise and mental-health habits get better, longer-lasting results. Skolnik’s book is built to hand them that plan.

Published by Little, Brown Spark and released September 22, the guide walks through meal timing, a system she calls the “Balanced GLP-1 Plate,” ways to ease the most common side effects, supplements, and the emotional tangle of food and body image. It also covers movement and fitness for people eating far less than they used to — and includes 50 recipes designed to pack real nutrition into small appetites. It is the kind of practical help that pairs well with other community gatherings bringing New Yorkers together this season.

Instant bestseller

The timing could not be better for the author: the book debuted at No. 7 on the New York Times bestseller list in the Advice, How-To & Miscellaneous category, and her publisher is calling it an instant bestseller. Hardcover, ebook and an audio edition narrated by Skolnik herself are all out now.

That debut rests on a long track record. Skolnik co-wrote the earlier New York Times bestseller The Whole Body Reset, oversees performance nutrition programs at the Juilliard School and the School of American Ballet, has served as team nutritionist for the New York Giants, Mets, Knicks and Liberty, and has spent more than two decades at the Women’s Sports Medicine Center at Hospital for Special Surgery. Television audiences know her from Today, Good Morning America and The View, and she is a Fellow of the American College of Sports Medicine.

An evening to remember

The Tribeca crowd brought together health, media and art in one room. Alongside Skolnik and her husband Brad Skolnik were host Michael Glantz, Wolf Blitzer and Lynn Blitzer, Eric Hall, Sam Brock, Savanah Sellers, Joy Bauer, artist Hunt Slonem, One Art Space co-owner and exhibition curator MaryAnn Giella McCulloh, Dr. Marci Goolsby, Dr. Ashley Austin and Dr. Ellen Casey, Dr. Jordan Metzel and Esther Newberg.

There was a neat symmetry to the setting: a book about thriving — not just shrinking — launched in a gallery full of art about curiosity and imagination. The message of the night, between the toasts and the book signings, was that eating well on these medications is not about denial. It is about intention. For millions of people navigating the prescription on their own, that is a game plan worth having.