You want a secret. I’m about to disappoint you.
Since I put those 2 photos side by side, the same question has been arriving in my comments, my inbox, and my Facebook messages, phrased about 40 different ways but always asking the same thing.
What did you do.
I know what people are hoping for. There’s a version of this post where I reveal one unexpected trick you can start on Monday and everything changes. There isn’t, but since I have no intention of turning this food blog into a weight loss blog, because we still have casseroles and cinnamon rolls to discuss, I thought I’d put the whole story in one place, answer the questions properly and finally tuck this subject into bed.
That post doesn’t exist. What I’ve got is a rash, a blood pressure cuff, and 14 months of doing unremarkable things over and over.
Let’s start with the rash.
The Rash That Saved My Life
In June of last year I broke out in a rash. All over. No idea why, no idea from what, and after a couple of days of it not improving I went to urgent care.
They never did figure out the rash.
What they did do was put a blood pressure cuff on me, which is standard, which nobody thinks about, and which is the reason I’m sitting here typing this.
The number was through the roof.
Not borderline. Not something to keep an eye on. Through the roof, in the way that changes the tone of a room.
So I went to my family doctor.
And he did not soften it. He also wasn’t unkind about it, and that’s the part I’d want you to know. There was no lecture, no disappointed sigh, none of the tone women my size have heard in a hundred exam rooms. He just gave it to me straight, the way you’d hand somebody any other test result. This is your blood pressure. This is where it goes. He told me I was at the age where this turns into heart attacks and strokes, that I desperately needed to lose weight, and he didn’t leave me any room to negotiate with it.
I’ve been overweight my entire adult life. I’ve had a lot of conversations with a lot of doctors. That one was different, because for the first time it wasn’t about how I looked or what size I wore. It was a list of things that were going to happen to me, on a timeline, with me in the room.
Then he told me about Mounjaro.
I didn’t think about it. I didn’t ask for time. I didn’t go home and research it for 3 weeks the way I research a stand mixer.
I said yes. Put me on it.
I was desperate, and I want that word in this post, because I think a lot of women reading this know exactly what it means and they’ve been made to feel embarrassed about it.
First, the Graveyard
Before I go further, you need to see what came before, because otherwise none of this makes sense.
Atkins. Weight Watchers, more than once. Low fat, back when we all believed in low fat. Low carb, when we changed our minds. Keto. Intermittent fasting. Every plan, every program, every reset. If it had a name and a book, I did it.
And here’s the thing nobody wants to hear about that list.
They worked.
Intermittent fasting worked so well that I lost 90 pounds on it. Ninety. That’s not a fluke or a week of water weight. That’s an entire person disappearing off my body over a long stretch of doing the thing correctly, every day, for a very long time.
Then I gained every single pound back.
Not because I stopped caring. Not because I forgot. Because I ran out of willpower, the way a car runs out of gas, and there was nothing left in the tank no matter how hard I pressed the pedal.
I’ve written about that part in more detail here, so I won’t go through all of it again. The short version is that I spent decades believing the problem was my character.
Yes, I’m on Mounjaro
I’m going to say this plainly because I’ve never hidden it and I’m not about to start now.
I’ve been on Mounjaro since June of last year, under my doctor’s supervision, and I’m on it today.
I’m not recommending it to you. I’m not a doctor, I’m not a dietitian, and I have no idea what’s happening in your body or your history. This is an account of what happened to one 54 year old woman, not a plan, and if you’re curious about any of it, that conversation belongs with your own doctor and not in my comments section.
What I will say is that I’m not ashamed of it. Not slightly. I’m grateful. I spent 30 years being told to try harder, and it turned out that what I actually needed was medical treatment for a medical condition, and I happen to be alive at the moment in history when that treatment exists.
I think that’s remarkable, and I’m not going to be quiet about it to make anybody comfortable.
And Then the Blood Work Came Back
When I started the medication they ran a full panel, which is standard.
That’s how I found out I was insulin resistant.
My doctor explained that this was part of why I’d always gained weight so easily, and why taking it off had always been so much harder for me than it seemed to be for other people. There was something happening in my body that I hadn’t known about, and it had been happening the whole time.
I sat with that one for a while.
Because I want you to understand what that meant, sitting in a doctor’s office at 53 years old. Every plan on that list up there. Every January. Every time I did everything right and watched the scale move slower than it was supposed to, or stop, or turn around. Every time I concluded the difference between me and the woman who lost weight easily was that she wanted it more.
There was a mechanism. Nobody had ever looked for it, and I had never known to ask, so I’d spent 3 decades filling in the blank with the only explanation anyone ever offered me, which was that I was weak.
I wasn’t weak. I was insulin resistant.
I’m not angry about it, or at least not most days. But if there’s one practical thing in this entire post, it’s this. If you have been trying and trying and it has never made sense to you why it isn’t working, go and get your blood work done. Ask questions about it. You may be carrying an explanation around in your body that nobody has bothered to look for.
What It Actually Did
Everyone assumes these medications work by making you unable to eat.
That’s not what it was like for me.
What it did was turn off the noise.
I stopped thinking about food. Not “resisted thinking about food,” which is what a diet is, and which takes up roughly 80 percent of your available brain. It simply stopped. The channel went quiet.
If you’ve never lived with that noise, this next part is going to sound insane.
I had to remember to eat.
Me. A woman who has cooked professionally for 15 years. I had to build eating into my day on purpose, because I’d look up in the afternoon and realize nothing had gone in and I still had protein to hit.
For my entire adult life, food was a negotiation I was losing all day long. Now I have to schedule it like a dentist appointment.
The Part Nobody Warns You About
For 9 months, I had no energy.
None. Not tired in a “could use a nap” way. Tired in a way where the walking I wanted to be doing simply wasn’t available to me. I’d manage my loop once or twice a week and that was the entire budget.
Nobody told me about that. Everybody wants to talk about appetite, and nobody mentions that you might spend the better part of a year running on fumes.
And then, around the 9 month mark, it was like somebody flipped a switch.
I don’t have a good explanation for it. I assume my body finally adjusted to the medication, but I genuinely don’t know and I’m not going to pretend I do. All I can tell you is that one week I was rationing my energy and the next week I had some, and it hasn’t left since.
That’s when everything else in this post became possible.
The Rest of the Side Effects, Since You Asked
This is the other question that fills my inbox, so let’s go through it properly.
The honest headline is that the side effects tracked my dose increases almost perfectly. Every time I went up, my body had opinions for a while, and then it settled. That pattern is worth knowing, because “rough for a couple of weeks after each increase” is a completely different proposition than “this is your life now.”
At the starting dose, I had almost nothing. Slight nausea the day after my injection, and slight is the right word. If I hadn’t been paying attention I might not have noticed it.
The first increase is when things got interesting.
I had diarrhea. I also had constipation. I would like somebody to explain to me how a person has both of those, because I still don’t understand it, and yet there I was, alternating between them like my digestive system was flipping a coin every morning.
And then there was the gas.
I’m going to be an adult about this because you asked and because everybody googles it at 11 at night and finds nothing but clinical language. The farting was substantial. The sulfur burps were worse, and if you don’t know what a sulfur burp is, count yourself lucky and know that the name is doing a lot of work.
I had a dentist appointment in the middle of that stretch and I dreaded it for a full week. Not the cleaning. The seating arrangement. I lay in that chair with my mouth open and a lovely woman leaning directly over me, running one continuous silent prayer, and I have never been so aware of my own throat in my life.
We got through it. I’m not going to tell you how close it was. Those were the single worst part of the whole experience, and I say that having also thrown up.
Which brings me to the max dose.
When I went up to the highest dose I had a couple of weeks where I threw up the day after my injection. Not all day, not repeatedly, just once and then done. Two weeks of that, and then it stopped.
And here’s the part I actually want you to take away.
After a couple of months at the max dose, all of it went away. The diarrhea, the constipation, the gas, the burps, the nausea. Gone. And the energy came back at around the 9 month mark. Whatever adjusting my body was doing, it finished.
There are 2 things that stayed.
I can’t eat fatty food. My stomach won’t have it. But I also don’t crave it anymore, which is either a very fair trade or a joke at my expense depending on the day.
And my hair thinned. I’ve written about that one already, and my honest guess is that it’s some combination of the weight loss, menopause, and the medication all arriving at once. I got extensions and I love them and I’ve stopped investigating.
Did I Ever Think About Stopping
No.
Not once. Not during the sulfur burps, not during the 9 months of no energy, not during the 2 weeks of throwing up.
I thank this medication every day.
I think it saved my life, and I don’t mean that as a figure of speech. I mean a doctor showed me a blood pressure reading and told me what was coming for me, and this is the thing that changed the direction I was going.
A few weeks of gas seems like a reasonable price.
One thing before we move on. Every dose change I made was my doctor’s call, not mine, and every side effect I’ve described here went through him first. If something’s happening in your body on one of these medications, that conversation belongs with your doctor and not with a woman on the internet who develops soup recipes for a living.
What I Actually Eat
Here’s the disappointing part.
I start around 9 with my protein coffee. Protein milk and collagen, roughly 20 grams before anything else happens in my day. I’m a coffee person, so building protein into the thing I was going to drink anyway is the only clever idea in this entire post.
Some days I have breakfast. Some days I don’t, because I’m simply not hungry. When I do, it’s high protein Greek yogurt with blueberries and half a serving of a protein cereal.
I dream about that yogurt sometimes. I’d like that noted.
Then I eat once more.
And that part isn’t new. Remo and I have been 2 meals a day people for years, long before any of this started, so nothing about my schedule changed. Only what’s on the plate.
Dinner is whatever we’re actually cooking, in a smaller portion, built around protein. Chicken or some kind of meat, vegetables, real food.
It wasn’t always like that. In the beginning I couldn’t handle anything fatty at all, and the air fryer became my closest friend. A great deal of plain air fryer chicken was eaten in this house in the summer of 2025.
Later in the day I’ll have a fruit and maybe another coffee.
And I have my Werther’s. Three a day, sometimes more, and there hasn’t been a single day of the last 14 months without them. That’s not a cheat or a slip. That’s a thing I like, and I’m 54, and I’m having them.
Everything else I drink is boring. I don’t like flavored things. It’s water, coffee, tea, and if I want something sweet, a Coke Zero.
Snacks, Since Somebody Will Ask
Quest protein chips. The occasional protein bar, and the marshmallow puff ones are the winner. Turkey deli. Hard boiled eggs. Korean BBQ Pork Jerky from Costco (my fave). Pressed cottage cheese, which has an absurd amount of protein in it and which nobody talks about (27 grams for half a cup). A simple salad with tomatoes and cucumbers.
Sometimes a chocolate popsicle. I found some at 45 calories and I’m unreasonably attached to them.
What you won’t find me drinking is a protein shake. I’ve tried. Repeatedly. They make me gag and I’ve made my peace with it.
The Thing About Cravings
I didn’t give anything up.
That’s the part people don’t believe. If I really want something, I have it. There’s no forbidden list on my fridge.
The difference is that I don’t want things anymore.
Remo will order a pizza, and it sits there, and it just doesn’t interest me. This is a woman who has been extremely interested in pizza her entire life. I don’t crave a burger. I don’t feel the pull toward anything the way I used to.
That’s not discipline. I want to be very clear about that, because I spent 30 years being told my problem was discipline. It’s the medication. Nothing about my character improved in June of last year.
But You Taste Test for a Living
Yes. And I still do.
I take a bite of everything. Every recipe that goes on those blogs gets tasted, because I’m not publishing something I haven’t put in my own mouth, I’m sure there’s a joke in there somewhere. I may not eat a full serving. But I taste it all.
Which leaves the obvious problem, which is that a pan of something is now sitting on my counter at 2 in the afternoon and there are 2 people in this house.
So I made friends with my neighbors.
I text them. They say yes. And then I deliver dinner in my golf cart, like the world’s most specific meal delivery service, run by one woman with a surplus problem.
Best system I’ve ever built.
Tracking, and the App That Does the Work
I track everything. Every morsel, and I mean that literally.
I use MyNetDiary. The reason I like it better than the others is that you can photograph a plate and it works out what’s on it and gives you the nutrition, which for someone eating homemade food constantly is the difference between tracking and quietly giving up on tracking.
Protein is the number I actually care about. Everything else follows from it.
Moving
The walking is recent. About 5 months, which surprises people who assume exercise is where you start.
I couldn’t. That’s the honest answer. For the first 9 months I didn’t have it in me. Once the energy came back I started walking every day instead of once or twice a week, and now I’m getting my 10,000 steps most days.
I also do the sauna, and some light weights.
Very light. We’re not going to build a whole story around the weights.
The Weeks Where Nothing Happens
There have been plenty. You eat the same, you walk the same, and the number sits there for a week or 2 doing absolutely nothing. Plateaus are normal and I’ve stopped taking them personally.
But here’s the one I still think about.
This past Christmas was the first Christmas of my adult life where I lost weight instead of gaining a few pounds. Every Christmas before that one had a January attached to it. That one didn’t.
I don’t have a joke for that. It just felt like a very quiet, very large thing.
What Falling Off Looks Like Now
I can’t really fall off, and not because I’ve become a disciplined person.
If I eat a little too much, I feel sick. My stomach hurts almost immediately. The medication slows down how fast your stomach empties, so when you go past the line, there’s nowhere for it to go and your body lets you know about it.
I learned that the way everybody learns things, which is by doing it once and never wanting to repeat it.
Although apparently I’m still learning it, because I sat down in front of the TV tonight with a bowl of peanuts and worked my way through considerably more of them than I usually would, and I’m typing this with my stomach genuinely unhappy with me.
Peanuts, it turns out, are about the worst possible choice for this particular experiment. Fatty things sit even longer.
So there’s your live demonstration. Fourteen months in, 150 pounds down, and I’m at my desk regretting a bowl of peanuts.
The guardrail isn’t willpower. It’s consequences, delivered promptly, by my own body, tonight, as it happens.
Fourteen Months
That’s how long this has been. Fourteen months, 150 pounds, and more to go.
No trick. No hack. A rash, a blood pressure reading, a doctor who didn’t sugarcoat it, a blood test that explained 30 years, a medication, a coffee with protein in it, a bag of Werther’s, and a walking loop around my own property.
That’s the whole thing. I told you it was boring.
If You’re About to Start Your Twenty Second Diet on Monday
I want to talk to you for a minute, because I was you for about 30 years.
You’ve got the plan picked out. You’ve decided Monday is the day. And underneath it, quietly, you’re already bracing for the part where you fail again, because you always do, and you’ve built an entire theory about yourself out of that.
Here’s what I need you to hear.
It isn’t your fault.
Obesity is a disease. Not a personality flaw, not a lack of moral fiber, not evidence that you’re weak or lazy or that you don’t love yourself enough. A disease, with biology underneath it, that responds to treatment the way other diseases do.
And I’ve been trying to out discipline mine since before I was old enough to vote.
The first time I lost a serious amount of weight I was 18. Sixty pounds in 3 months, on roughly 500 calories a day, which I want to name clearly because I’m not proud of it and I don’t want anyone reading this to take it as an idea. That isn’t a diet. That’s starving yourself with a schedule, and it’s the sort of thing a young girl in the 1990s could do without a single adult telling her to stop.
I gained all of it back.
Years later I lost 50, and gained that back too.
Then 90 on intermittent fasting, and I want you to sit with that number for a second. Ninety pounds. Does that sound like a woman with a discipline problem to you?
I gained back every one of them, because willpower is a finite resource, and I’d spent every bit of mine, and the biology was still down there waiting, exactly as strong as it had always been.
And it turns out there was a name for part of what was going on in my body, and it was sitting in a blood test that nobody had run.
The failure was never mine. The tool was wrong for the job, and nobody had looked under the hood.
So here’s what I’d actually say to you. Go talk to a doctor. Not to be weighed and lectured, but to have a real conversation about what’s happening in your body and what’s available now, in 2026, that wasn’t available to any of us for the previous 30 years of trying. Get the blood work. Ask what it says.
There is help now. Real help, that treats this as the medical thing it has been the entire time.
I don’t know if what I’m doing is what you should do. I know it’s what worked for me, and I know I only got here because a doctor took it seriously and then so did I.
And I know that I went in for a rash and came out with my life back, which is a sentence I never expected to write.
You’ve got this. Not because you’ll finally be strong enough.
Because you were never the problem.
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