I can’t remember the last time I wasn’t on a diet
As documented here previously, I’ve been on some diet or other since I first joined Weight Watchers at the age of 14. I remember that first meeting, in Scoil Chrónáin in Rathcoole, in the very room I sat in for my very first year of primary school.
Since that first, fateful foray into the diet industrial complex, I’ve tried Slimming World and keto, Atkins and intermittent fasting. I’ve done 90-minute-long morning Bikram yoga sessions; I’ve walked (fast, uphill) on a treadmill while wearing, ostensibly, a wetsuit with vacuum hoses attached to it.
I’ve gone to five-star fat camp (planning a look back at that next month, the 10-year anniversary of my time in Ibiza with No1 Bootcamp) and lifted weights five times a week and eaten clean and counted calories and points and syns and, and, and, and…
And all of it took root in my brain, embedded deep in my psyche and left me with an attitude to food, hunger and eating that was – and I’m being kind here – problematic, at best.
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Once you learn the “points” (Weight Watchers) in an almond croissant, it’s hard to go back to enjoying it, unencumbered by that knowledge. Similarly, once you start viewing your body as wrong and your appetite as a problem, it’s almost impossible to just let yourself eat without feeling guilt (because you know you shouldn’t) and shame (because why can’t you just not).
These past seven months on a GLP1 have, honestly, reset all of those broken settings in my brain; I can, for the first time since I can remember, eat – when I’m hungry, and whatever I feel like – without second guessing why or what or how much or if I should at all.
And look: I know that this is only because I am losing weight. I feel as though I can trust my hunger cues and my appetite and my desires because I know trusting them won’t result in my putting on weight. Without this drug slowing my digestion and suppressing my appetite, I wouldn’t have this (for want of a less romantic word for it) freedom. And yet I do have it. It feels revelatory.
For me, the “food noise” isn’t so much to do with constant thoughts of food – what to eat next, what would be delicious, what to eat after that – it’s more related to the negative self-talk, the constant critical voice I had in my head telling me that I was greedy and gluttonous and lazy and out of control, simply because I was hungry, and wasn’t succeeding in fighting that hunger.
Now it feels like I don’t have to fight any more – with the voice, or with the hunger itself. If you’ve never experienced any of this, you won’t know how life-changing this is. But it is life-changing.
The side effects have started
I am incredibly lucky that the first few months of taking a GLP1 – I take Mounjaro in its compounded form, prescribed through Midi online, and it costs me about $260 every six weeks (in case you’ve missed previous updates) – I experienced almost no side effects.
Yes, I would feel full very quickly, and I might feel slightly nauseous if I ate past that feeling of fullness, but the nausea, the vomiting, the diarrhea and constipation I’d read about other people experiencing? They didn’t affect me at all.
It’s only in the last few weeks, as I increased my dose to 5mg, administered weekly, that I’ve started seeing some of those negative side effects. Or, rather, one of those side effects, in the form of diarrhea.
One week, late last month, I had diarrhea for five days running (if you’ll excuse the pun). And I won’t sugarcoat things: it was grim.
But at no point did I think, this is too much or even, maybe this drug isn’t for me. Is that fucked up?! It feels fucked up. And yet, the freedom (see above) this drug has allowed me is hard to overstate.
And, once that first bout of diarrhea was done with (it did feel like it lasted about a year, mind you, and having diarrhea while parenting a 15-month-old is not for the faint of heart), I quickly started to figure out that, as long as I watch what I’m eating, I can pretty much keep it at bay.
And when I say “watch what I’m eating”, I mean, try to eat a relatively balanced diet. Protein, fibre, green vegetables. I’m still eating ice-cream, every other evening after dinner; I’m still eating white bread with Kerrygold butter. I had a chicken tikka masala last week, and while I’ll admit it no longer hits the spot like it once did (food just doesn’t spark joy any more), it was still good. (I ate one-third of it, and spread the rest over two further meals, which felt ridiculous, honestly.)
I don’t know that I could be someone who experiences extreme side effects –diarrhea, or any of the other gastro stuff – on a very regular basis and would be happy for that to be my life. But then again… like I said, it feels really fucked up.
Is there any cost I’d deem too high for the privilege of (relative) thinness? (Again, it all feels very fucked up.)
I still worry I’ve become part of the problem
I remember reading an essay by Roxane Gay in which she discussed having weight loss surgery; she wrote about how she was tired of waiting for the world to be kinder to fat people, and that she’d accepted that if she had to live in this world (I’m paraphrasing here), this might be a way to make her existence easier.
I spent a lot of time trying to reprogramme my brain out of the fatphobia I couldn’t help but internalise (for blame, see: 1990s teenage girls’ magazines, America’s Next Top Model, Bridget Jones’s Diary, heroin chic, The Swan), but no matter how much I agree with everything Aubrey Gordon writes; no matter how invested I am in the fat positivity movement; no matter how fervently I believed (and still believe) that fat people can be beautiful and healthy (and don’t have to be either of those if they don’t want to be!) and deserve clothes that fit and airplane seats that accommodate and healthcare that truly sees them and love and respect and not to be discriminated against at every turn… I still struggled with my own fat body and my feelings about it.
So when there appeared a “solution” to this “problem” (in inverted commas, because fatness is not a problem, not really, and if it’s not a problem then GLP1s can’t be the solution), I thought, why not? But also, I thought, am I a traitor to the cause? Am I selling out? Can I be fat positive and pursue intentional weight loss?
I don’t know the answers to any of the above questions, and it’s all a conflict that still rages within me. I’m not sure it’ll ever stop.
Ideally, I want to live in a world that doesn’t judge human beings by the size or shape of their bodies; I want fat people to be allowed to just exist in their fat bodies, and experience love and joy and respect and all of those great human experiences, without being told they’d be more loved, and happier, and more worthy of respect, if they weren’t fat.
And I worry that, as more and more of us give in to the lure of the GLP1, give in to the lure of thinness, a goal that has never before been actually attainable to fat people (the exceptions proving this rule), fat people will be further and more actively marginalised and judged and disrespected, because don’t they know they can just take a GLP1?!
Say it with me now… it’s all really fucked up.
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