In recent years, GLP-1–based medicines (like liraglutide and semaglutide) have shown something important: their effect is not only about slower gastric emptying and stronger fullness signals.
Clinical and brain-imaging studies report a clear behavioural component of GLP-1 therapy:
l fewer intrusive thoughts about food,
l less urgent “must-have-it-now” craving,
l easier stopping at “I’ve had enough”,
l measurable changes in brain regions involved in reward, salience and self-control when people see or imagine food (for example in fMRI studies of GLP-1 receptor agonists: van Bloemendaal et al., 2014, Farr et al., 2016).
In other words, part of the effect comes from how the brain filters food-related signals and turns them into decisions, not only from gut physiology and hormones.
Qufit Stick does not contain GLP-1, does not act on GLP-1 receptors and is not a medicine. We refer to GLP-1 therapies only as a scientific example that changing eating behaviour and food impulses is a real, measurable layer of change – not “just psychology on top”, but part of the mechanism.
It’s not just “weak willpower”
Long-term follow-up studies of people after weight loss show that the body and brain actively defend the previous, higher weight: hormones of hunger and satiety remain shifted for many months in a way that pushes appetite and weight back up, and subjective hunger stays higher than before the diet (Sumithran et al., 2011; Rosenbaum & Leibel, 2010). Energy expenditure also drops more than you would expect from the new, lower body mass – the body becomes more efficient at saving energy (Rosenbaum & Leibel, 2010).
At the same time, neuroimaging work shows that, in many people, reward areas respond more strongly to food cues, while control areas have to work harder to keep behaviour on track (Rosenbaum & Leibel, 2010; Stice et al., 2008). Fast “see → reach → eat” loops often fire before the morning decision can even enter the process.
So the pattern many people know — “I wanted to eat normally, but in the evening I just gave in again” — is not simply a story about weak willpower. It is how a defended weight and a noisy decision system behave under real-life load.
Our question — and our answer
Seeing this, we asked a simple question:
If GLP-1 therapies show that part of the effect comes from behaviour and brain processing of food signals, can we support that layer — quieter cravings, clearer satiety, easier stopping — for people who will never use injections, and do it without suppressing appetite or touching hormones?
Qufit Stick is our answer to this question. It uses correlation-based sensory engineering to work on the behavioural layer of eating — through a physical, tactile marker on the skin — instead of pharmacology.
How exactly this works in terms of skin receptors, Aβ-fibres, S1/S2, insula and prefrontal networks, we describe in the next section:
