Two Different Engines
She's tried every diet going, and only Mounjaro has ever worked for her. I never needed her to change. What I hadn't understood, until I started taking it myself, was how differently the two of us actually experience food.
My wife has been on Mounjaro for a while now.
She’s tried just about every diet there is over the years. I watched most of them happen. This is the first one that’s actually worked, and I don’t think I ever properly understood what that meant from her side of it until I started taking it myself.
I want to be clear about something first.
I’ve always thought she was beautiful. Her size was never something I needed her to change, at any point, in any of those years. Whatever she weighed was her own business, not a problem I was quietly waiting for her to fix.
So my motivation for losing weight isn’t hers. Hers is years of searching for something that finally worked. Mine is that I want to stand up from a chair without sounding like I’m being exhumed.
The thing that’s always fascinated me about her is the energy.
She’s just up. Doing things. Cooking, moving, getting on with the day, while I’m sitting there doing the mental arithmetic on whether standing up is worth the effort right now. It’s not a small difference. It’s a completely different relationship with her own body than the one I’ve got with mine.
I only recently worked out that the two things are connected.
She can eat a doughnut.
Properly eat it, no negotiation, no internal spreadsheet. I sit there doing the maths — I’ve already eaten this today, that’s roughly this many calories, do I actually want to spend some of it on a doughnut — and she just has the fucking doughnut.
For a long time I read that as some kind of willpower gap. I don’t think it is one, not really. I think it’s that her daily energy expenditure and mine aren’t in the same universe. She burns through what she eats doing the sheer amount of moving around she does all day. I’m not doing anywhere near as much of that, so the same doughnut means something different arriving in each of us.
It was never really a fair comparison. I just hadn’t noticed I was making one.
So that’s the actual answer to why I’m doing this.
Not to look different. Not to end up a smaller version of the same photo. I want to get some of that back — the getting up without noise, the moving through a day without doing sums first.
I’m not trying to become her. I’m trying to become a version of me that can keep up with her.
Maybe one day she’ll put a doughnut down next to me and I’ll just eat it, the way she does, without immediately working out how many flights of stairs I’m going to owe for it afterwards.