When My Guts Finally Stopped Complaining
No fanfare, no milestone. Just a week where I realised I hadn't thought about my stomach once. Three months in, that felt like the real progress.
There was no fanfare.
No dramatic change on the scales. No suddenly fitting into trousers I couldn’t previously get my arse into. I just realised, for the first time since starting Mounjaro, that my stomach had stopped reminding me anything had changed.
I’d been taking it just over three months.
For most of that time, my digestive system had been running a quiet commentary. Nothing dramatic, most weeks. A twinge here. A bit of discomfort there. Occasionally worse. “Suffered” is too strong a word for it. “Been nagged by” feels about right.
Then, this week, I noticed it had stopped. I hadn’t been consciously waiting for it. I’d just gone several days without thinking about my stomach at all.
That’s not the whole story, though. I already wrote about the 5mg experiment and what it did to me — the sort of reaction that makes you reconsider every decision that led you to that particular bathroom. I dropped back to 2.5mg, and even that wasn’t trouble-free at first. It’s taken this long for it to properly settle.
Which is also why I’ve got no burning desire to go back up.
I already know what 5mg does to me, and I’m not keen on running that experiment twice. And there’s a second, less dramatic reason: higher doses don’t come with a loyalty discount. If 2.5mg is doing what I need — I’m eating less, thinking about food differently, the numbers are moving the right way — there’s not much of a case for poking the bear.
One thing hasn’t gone quiet, though. My stomach after eating is considerably more vocal than it used to be. Bubbling, gurgling, the odd noise that makes me wonder if something’s escaped from the kitchen. Not painful. Not uncomfortable. Just noisy.
I suspect that’s mostly arithmetic rather than anything sinister — fewer meals, smaller ones, less for the gut to process, working a bit differently than the one I was used to. Noisy isn’t the same as uncomfortable. After everything else, a bit of stomach percussion is hardly worth complaining about.
I’d expected Mounjaro to change my appetite. I hadn’t really appreciated it might take three months for my gut to settle into the new normal.
It doesn’t feel exactly like before. There are still noises. I’m eating differently, and less. But the background feeling that my guts were mildly inconvenienced by all of this has finally gone.
That’s not the sort of progress that shows up on the scales. You just notice, one day, that you’ve stopped noticing.