We're on Different Medication
My wife's stomach says yes and her head says no. Mine is the other way round. Same drug, different doses, almost opposite experience — and it explains why she can leave food on a plate and I can't.
I was talking to my wife about her Mounjaro experience yesterday. She’s been on it a lot longer than me, lost a lot of weight, and is clearly happier for it. But when she described what it actually feels like, it was almost the opposite of mine.
She still gets physically hungry. Her stomach says eat. It’s her head that says no. The desire just isn’t there.
Mine’s the other way round. My stomach’s usually fine. It’s my head doing the inventory — there’s cheese in the fridge, there’s a bit of something left over, I wonder if there’s chocolate.
She’s on 5mg. I’m still on 2.5mg. So it’s not even a fair comparison, dose for dose. But if anything that makes it more confusing, not less — hers is the higher dose, and she’s the one still getting proper physical hunger signals. Same drug. Different doses. Practically opposite experience.
I found that genuinely hard to get my head round at first. If you’re hungry, how does “no” even work?
But hunger and wanting food apparently aren’t the same signal, they just normally turn up together so reliably that it feels like one thing. Hers have come apart one way. Mine have come apart the other. Her body says eat, and the part of her brain that goes “ooh, there’s something nice in the fridge” just doesn’t chime in. Mine’s the reverse: body’s not bothered, brain’s already halfway to the kitchen.
It explains something that’s genuinely confused me for a while: how she can cook too much food and still not overeat. For her, “I’m full” is apparently enough on its own. The food being there doesn’t add anything to the argument. For me, “I’m full, but it’s there, and I like it, and I’m not wasting it” is a completely different sentence, with a completely different ending.
It also explains why there’s too much on my plate in the first place, which I hadn’t properly joined up until now. She makes too much, realises it, and puts the extra on mine rather than binning it. I don’t want to waste it, so I eat it. Except it’s not really about waste. It’s that leaving it can feel like rejecting the effort she put in, and I can’t do that to her cooking.
Because I have an actual weakness for her cooking specifically. Moussaka. Shepherd’s pie. Sunday dinner. Even a cheese salad sandwich, which by any reasonable description shouldn’t be a big deal, and somehow is. I couldn’t tell you the trick to it. No dressing swimming everything, nothing exotic in it. It’s just properly good, and I’ve no idea how.
So it was never really a hunger problem with her food. It’s appreciation, habit, and not wanting to disrespect the effort, all arriving at once, stacked on top of whatever hunger was or wasn’t actually there.
What I’m taking from her side of this isn’t her appetite. I can’t just borrow that. It’s the permission to stop.
Eating the extra doesn’t retroactively make her cooking better. She already made something brilliant whether I finish it or not. Leftovers aren’t waste. They’re just tomorrow’s lunch.
I don’t think the answer is caring less about her cooking. I still bloody love it, moussaka especially. I think the answer is learning to say “that was fantastic, I’m done” and meaning both halves of the sentence, the way she seems to manage without even trying.