The Bit Mounjaro Can't Do For Me
Not hungry, three hours after dinner, stomach still growling, and yet stood at the fridge wanting something I couldn't name. That's when it stopped being obvious where the medication ends and I begin.
There’s something slightly disconcerting about feeling better.
Now that my guts have finally settled, I noticed something odd: it made me think about increasing the dose. Not because 2.5mg has stopped working. Because some part of me assumes that’s just what happens next — you get used to it, it stops being noticeable, so you go up. I’m not sure I like that logic.
Take tonight.
I’d eaten dinner. Three hours later my stomach was still occasionally growling, but I wasn’t physically hungry. And yet I wanted to eat.
Not even a specific thing. No KitKat calling my name, nothing I fancied. Just a want with nothing attached to it, the sort that sends you to the fridge even though you already know exactly what’s in there. Open it. Close it. Open it again a few minutes later, in case something’s changed.
It hadn’t.
I think I’ve been giving Mounjaro more credit than it deserves, or myself less. Look back at the last few weeks and there’s been a lot more conscious restraint in there than I gave myself credit for. The KitKat sitting on my desk for days is the obvious one. That wasn’t the medication physically stopping me. That was me, deciding.
Mounjaro’s changed the circumstances the decision gets made in. It’s made the physical hunger quieter, made eating feel less necessary. But there’s still someone sitting here doing the actual deciding, and some nights he has to win an argument with himself to do it.
Which brings me to the question I find harder to sit with.
What if this isn’t really about losing the weight? What if it’s about not putting it back on, which is a different problem entirely? Losing it is one fight. Keeping it off might be a completely separate one, running every evening, indefinitely.
So the frightening thought isn’t “what if this stops working.” It’s “what if I eventually have to do this without it.”
Maybe the medication hasn’t removed the battle. Maybe it’s just changed the terms of it. It seems to turn “I’m hungry, so I need to eat” into “I’m not hungry, but I’d quite like to.” That second sentence is one I can actually argue with. The first one never really was.
Tonight I didn’t raid the fridge. Not because I couldn’t. Because I decided I didn’t need to.
That’s a small thing. But maybe the small things, repeated enough times, are what the new normal actually turns out to be made of.