The Circular Economy of Mounjaro
It isn't cheap, and I've been worrying about what happens when I stop it. Then I did the maths and found what looks suspiciously like a loophole.
Mounjaro is not a cheap habit. I’ve made my peace with the injection, the burping, the occasional gut invoice the morning after. I haven’t made my peace with the price tag.
Which is how I ended up lying awake thinking about AM and PM.
Not morning and evening. After Mounjaro, and whatever comes next once I stop. I’ve been treating those as two entirely different eras, like there’s a hard line between them. Then it occurred to me that on any normal clock, AM turns into PM whether you’re ready for it or not. It’s not a question of if. It’s a question of what time it happens, and whether I’ve done anything useful with the AM bit first.
That felt like a genuine insight at 1am. It reads slightly less impressively written down at a reasonable hour.
Here’s the bit that actually kept me up, though. The honest fear isn’t the injection stopping. It’s what happens to the appetite once it does. Does the wanting come back the day the effect wears off, or has some of it actually been retrained in the meantime?
I don’t know yet. Nobody selling me the pen is going to volunteer an answer either.
So instead I did some genuinely stupid arithmetic, and I want to write it down before I talk myself out of how funny it is.
I buy Mounjaro. Mounjaro is expensive. Buying it regularly leaves less money for food. Less money for food means I eat less food. Eating less food is, as it happens, the entire goal of taking Mounjaro in the first place.
Which means if I keep this up for long enough, I will eventually arrive at a version of myself who no longer overeats, achieved entirely through the terror of what a leg of lamb now costs relative to my prescription. At which point the obvious question presents itself: what, precisely, am I still paying for?
It’s a beautifully closed loop. Buy the drug, can’t afford the shop, eat less by accident, lose the weight anyway, technically didn’t need the drug for that bit. I’m fairly sure this isn’t how the clinical trials described it.
I don’t actually believe that, to be clear. Being skint and being satisfied are not the same thing, and one of them is a considerably worse way to hit a calorie deficit than the other. Going hungry because I can’t afford dinner isn’t a diet plan, it’s just being poor with extra steps, and I’ve no interest in trading a weight problem for a money problem and calling it a win.
But underneath the joke there’s something that isn’t a joke. The actual answer to “will I keep it off” was never going to be the drug. It’s whatever I’ve quietly picked up while I’ve been on it. Leaving food on the plate. Noticing the difference between hungry and bored. Not finishing something just because it’s there and I’ve paid for it.
If that’s actually stuck, the injection was scaffolding, not the building. Scaffolding is meant to come down eventually. That’s the whole point of it.
If it hasn’t stuck, no amount of clever budgeting is going to save me, and I’ll find that out the expensive way, one way or another.
Either way, AM becomes PM. I’d just rather arrive there because I chose to leave the plate half full, not because I could no longer afford to fill it.