I want to put this gently because I’m still working it out myself. But there was a long stretch of years where I thought my body was broken. Or, more specifically, that I was broken — and my body was the evidence.
I ate too much. I knew I ate too much. I didn’t know how to not eat too much. The conclusion seemed obvious. It was a me problem.
Then, when I was looking into GLP-1 for the first time, I read something that changed how I thought about my whole life up to that point. GLP-1 isn’t a foreign substance. It’s a copy of a hormone the human body already makes, that does a specific job, that some bodies don’t do enough of, or don’t respond properly to. I had to put the phone down. Some bodies. Some bodies don’t do this on their own. Including, apparently, mine.
Turns out ‘full’ is a signal, not a virtue
Somewhere in the last couple of years I learned, properly learned, that there’s an actual hormone the body makes to tell you when you’re full. It’s not a moral thing. It’s not about being a person of restraint or someone who pushes the plate away because they were raised right.
It’s a chemical message. And if the message isn’t getting through, or the volume on it is low, or it shows up half an hour after your body needed it — well. You’d eat too much. You’d be confused about why. And then you’d blame yourself for being weak.
GLP-1 the medication is essentially a strengthened version of GLP-1 the hormone you already make. It’s not a stimulant. It’s not a foreign chemical. It’s a signal booster for a system your body was supposed to be running on its own. That framing alone is what made me, finally, willing to try it.
I’d been blaming the wrong thing the whole time
This part still makes me a little angry, honestly. Not at anyone in particular. Just at the general shape of how I was talked to about my own body for most of my life.
The message was always character. Try harder. Want it more. Have some discipline. Not once, in any of those conversations, did anyone explain to me that the wiring underneath the wanting might just be different from the wiring underneath someone else’s wanting.
I watched my husband eat half a brownie at a party once and put the other half back on the plate. I have, in my entire life, never put half a brownie back on a plate. I had assumed for forty years that this was because he was a better person than me. He’s not. He just has a fullness signal that arrives on time.
When the signal arrives on time, eating becomes… boring?
I don’t know how else to describe it. When my fullness signal started showing up when food was still on my plate, instead of an hour after I’d cleaned it, eating just got less interesting.
I’m not anti-food now. I love food. But the chase part of it — the part where I’d start a meal already thinking about the next one — that’s just kind of gone. Replaced by an actual conversation with my body about what’s enough.
The other night I went out for dinner and ordered an entree. I ate about two-thirds of it and pushed the rest away. I asked the waiter for the check. The whole interaction took maybe forty minutes. In my old life, I would have ordered an appetizer, finished the entree, considered dessert, and been at that table for an hour and a half. The eating-out experience itself has gotten faster. More efficient. Less, I don’t know — less like work.
What it feels like to not be starving
Every diet I’d ever tried left me feeling like I was in a war with my own body. White-knuckling through afternoons. Bargaining with myself in the kitchen at 9pm.
What I have now isn’t that. It doesn’t feel like restriction. It feels like the war is over and nobody is really sure who won, but everybody got to go home.
I think this is the part that’s hardest to convey to anyone who hasn’t lived it. There’s a difference between eating less because you’re forcing yourself to and eating less because you’re not hungry. The first one is a battle. The second one is just lunch. And the difference between those two experiences, day in and day out, is the entire difference between something I could do for six weeks and something I can imagine doing for the rest of my life.
The relief is the part I didn’t know to expect
I expected, I don’t know, weight loss maybe. Or some kind of progress. What I didn’t expect was the emotional thing — the deep, sit-down-on-the-bathroom-floor relief of realizing I wasn’t broken. I just didn’t have a working signal.
That’s not a moral failing. That’s just a body. And bodies can be helped along when they’re missing pieces. We do it for a hundred other things. We give insulin to diabetics. We give thyroid medication to people whose thyroids are sluggish. We don’t tell those people to try harder. It took me a long time to give myself permission to extend the same logic to my own situation.
If you’re hesitating on GLP-1 because it feels like cheating, please consider that the alternative is years of fighting a system your body wasn’t equipped to fight on its own. That’s not virtue. That’s just suffering with extra steps.
