So this is how normal people feel about food?!

[thatsginthough]

Two days into my second week on Mounjaro 2.5.
Not once, since the day after my first jab have I actively thought about food. Mealtimes can come and go without it even triggering a thought in my head. I’ve already lost 5kg which is 15% of my target loss.
DH makes dinners so it miraculously appears. I enjoy it but after about a third of what I’d normally eat I’ve had enough. I then don’t think about snacks for the rest of the night.
Compared to before when food consumed my thoughts all day this is an absolute revelation.
I used to wonder how people could pace themselves at a buffet, not eat their entire plate in one go or sit with an open packet of biscuits on their desk. This must be how they feel. It’s amazing.

I think it’s just because the op mistakenly thinks all slim people never ever think about food. Of course most people do, it’s bizarre to even suggest it. Op thinks being completely disinterested in food is normal- it’s not. It’s a harmful attitude. It’s totally normal to have food noise. I am
nor remotely against WLI’s, nor would I be jealous of anyone on them. I understand some people struggle much more than others with food issues. But it isn’t the case that all slim people never ever get food noise and are never interested in food at all.

Your post is very balanced. Lots on here aren’t - I do agree with the pp, it’s resentment. One of the people I work with has lost 6 stone -much healthier and she looks amazing. I wouldn’t dream of being judgy - I’m delighted for her. But then I don’t feel superior about being slim.

Well said.

I imagine people with a healthy relationship with food experience both.
I'm not a big breakfast person and I'm under a lot of stress atm. I'll get to midday, not feel hungry yet know I need to eat something because I'm lacking focus or just know that it's not great to go hours w/o eating especially if I'm planning a run later i.e. indifference but fuelling my body
Tomorrow we're going to a BBQ and I am very much looking forward to eating some really delicious food. I will probably eat more than I would normally eat for a dinner, but I am going for a long run on Sunday so 1) I'll have the energy and 2) I know I'll maintain my weight.
We're also going grocery shopping and I look forward to getting some nice things to eat.

I love all sorts of cuisines, all sorts of desserts, love a good meal out. I eat three times a day, and stick to the same sorts of items for breakfast and lunch, with dinner the only meal that's going to vary significantly.

I do not think about food between meals, and I think that's what you were getting at, @thatsginthough? I don't think overweight people "think" about food either, though - I wonder if the open pack of biscuits on the desk is eaten mindlessly/ as a habit? I'm just very busy at my job, and on weekends I throw myself into weekend things.

I have breakfast around 7:30 am and don't eat again until 2 (this is a job related schedule, but I do the same at weekends, maybe eating lunch around 1:30). I feel genuinely hungry at that point.

This. It’s exactly how I feel. Being told that you don’t think about food is infuriating! I do all the time, but apparently people on here know better.
Thats the issue. I have no problem at all with people using jabs, totally good for them.
Just don’t tell me how I feel, how I struggle and what I think about.

Can’t you see the resentment and fury in that, the op simply mused if this is how people who can restrain themselves feel. She’s so delighted to have the pressure off. To be infuriated, lash out, decide it’s personal, is so over the top. All you and your fellow furious posters, could simply say, yes for some people it is like that, just not for me.

I understand what OP means to a certain extent. I am a couple of stone overweight now I’m in my 50s, but was average weight until then. I tend to think of myself as ‘greedy’ and it being a character flaw. If someone opens biscuits at work, I find it so hard to stop at one, and all afternoon I will be aware they are there, and want to take another one. At a buffet I would go up for multiple desserts etc. I also get extremely hungry every few hours, not just a slight ‘hmmm I could eat something now, gosh it’s way past lunchtime’.

WLI takes all that away. I can eat a biscuit, enjoy it but then just forget the packet exists. I can go from 9am - 1.30pm without being hungry and having to snack. I don’t feel ‘greedy’ or desperate to eat something sweet, salty, or fatty. Food is not my first port of call if I’m stressed or feel I ‘deserve’ a treat. So yes, to some extent I think that WLI makes me more on the ‘normal’ side of how people generally feel about food.

As I said earlier, I’m in the fairly rare position of having been in maintenance for some time. I can feel that taking different doses changes some kind of dial on my desire to eat and have experimented with changing it by very small amounts. Desire to eat is a spectrum. At one end, there is not thinking about food at all. At the other, there is raging appetite and irresistible craving.

No one knows what anyone else is feeling and no one knows how much will power anyone else has. All we can tell is that most people can lose weight at a specific dosage for them, most people can maintain at a specific dosage for them, and some people will gain weight below a certain dose.
For me, currently, I don’t have to think about food too much at 7.5, I have to be careful at 5, and if I drop to 3.75, I have a constant struggle to not overeat.

So is this how “normal “ people feel? This thread has shown that some people probably feel like me on each one of those doses. Some probably feel like me on no dose at all but have iron will power (or maybe they’re really vain?)

I don’t think OP was really saying everyone in the whole world felt exactly like her or that all thin people were on easy mode all the time (like my 7.5 level). I think she was just amazed that easy mode even existed and overjoyed to be experiencing it.

People on Mounjaro have a good idea of what the struggle to lose weight or eat less than the body desires feels like. Anyone who has been on a diet knows the sense of deprivation it can bring.
But people who haven’t been obese can’t know the negative feelings of trying to deprive themselves and failing, over and over. Clearly, lots of people on this thread think that they should just have tried a bit harder.

Can people not acknowledge that lots of obese people were actually trying as hard as they possibly could? And that the reasons why one person might be able to cope at a different point on the dial and another not aren’t actually always within our control? That person who put on weight might have been putting in just as much effort as someone else who successfully lost and kept it off, but may have failed because they were on medication. Or they might have put in huge amount of effort initially but not been able to maintain it for long enough due to adhd.

No one knows how much effort another person is putting in to be where they are at. No one is belittling the restraint some people show to stay thin. But so many of those people who stay thin by exercising iron control clearly judge those who turn the dial up and move to easy mode.

Lots and lots of people on Mounjaro try to stay on low doses because they want to not rely on it too much. But is there really anything morally wrong in not doing that and choosing easy mode if it is available, particularly when the original advice was to up your dose every month?

My opinion is that lots of us are on this for the long haul. Mounjaro does seem to become less effective over time and I think we’re going to see people for whom it slowly wears off. I think it’s probably a good idea that if it feels like easy mode, reduce the dose a bit until the struggle is back. I don’t think that not having to think about healthy choices is a good thing and I want this drug to work as long as possible for me.

But I also have never come across, on all the support boards (and I read three months either side of my own, and read Reddit as well) the stereotype of people eating bad food in smaller quantities. People making no effort to change eating habits and just relying on the drug alone, is not something I ever saw on those boards, even once.

There’s lots of judging that goes on in these threads. I will be honest, I judge people from these threads too. I judge people as being vain, mean spirited, judgemental and vindictive. To be honest, if I had the choice between being those things or fat, I’d choose fat.

As much as I agree with your posts, mounjaro does not become less effective with time. Think about that logically, it would not be approved for diabetes or shortly cardio vascular disease, if that was the case, it would be far too dangerous.

what does happen is the placebo effect wears off, diet fatigue sets in, people realise they can push through, and eat more. So it feels less effective. For some. But it is simply a mix of feeling the real impact of the meds, and their own mental health.

I’m very happy to say that. “All you and your fellow furious posters, could simply say, yes for some people it is like that, just not for me.”

’yes for some people it is like that, but not for me’.
So don’t assume it is.

are you ok, as I certainly didn’t assume, nor did the op, if you look at her title, the use of question marks indicates a question. This is why they are used.

and so what if she did assume, does it really require your fury, I’m sorry it’s so hard for you, that it can’t be made easier for you. but it is not my fault or the ops, or anyone else posting.

you can hate the game, but it’s silly to hate the players.

What fury? I’ve agreed with you. I don’t like other people who have never met me telling me I simply don’t think about food in a meaningful way.
That’s it. I’m all for people taking the jabs, good for them.

YABU. Most of us think about food, have food noise etc but force ourselves to have healthy servings and not eating more chocolate even if we're craving it in order to stay a healthy weight. So I find it quite offensive when people on wli like you @thatsginthough think that it's easy just because we're never hungry. We are just harder on ourselves and don't give in to temptation.

I don't know what is "normal".
FWIW, I am long healthy BMI & I can forget to eat.
Which sounds like what OP is describing.

I don't actually like to eat unless I can enjoy the food, take time over it, always want to wait until I'm hungry so it tastes better.

So it's easy to just delay a meal and then stop as soon as I'm not hungry any more since that's when food stops tasting so nice.

I find food noise so fascinating mainly because of my unhealthy relationship with food. Food was an obsession of mine, there wasn’t a minute pass in the day that I wasn’t thinking about it obsessing about the calories and what I could or couldn’t eat next.

I accidentally found out that my food noise was actually a symptom of my ADHD and my brain was actually seeking the little dopamine boost that food gave it. Once I became medicated it went away and I felt I’d been living life on hard mode all my life. I wasn’t expecting it to affect my diet.

There must be so many other things that causes food noise that we don’t realise. It’s amazing that the injections help.

I’m not a scientist, but this really doesn’t tally with what I know. Firstly, if it doesn’t become less effective, why do so many people need to keep increasing their dose? Diet fatigue cannot explain that away. If you have diet fatigue at 5mg, and you move up to 7.5 to overcome it, and it does, why would you ever need to move up again?

Secondly 7.5 now does not feel like 7.5 did when I first got to it. Or even after a couple of months on it. I can take 7.5 now and only realise very occasionally that I’m even on it, whereas I used to struggle to eat 1000 calories on it and had to move back down to 5 a couple of times because it was just too strong for me to function.

Lastly, just because something continues to work for diabetes (thank goodness) does that automatically mean that it will continue to work for weight control? I don’t think the one necessarily proves the other.

I’m not too worried about it stopping working - I think they’re going to get better and better at developing long term weight loss solutions. I’d rather not be at the cutting edge with new medications, however, so I’m definitely trying to keep a bit of wiggle room available on the doses.

I realise some people need the 15mg for it to be effective, however. There’s no point trying to stick in a lower dose if it’s not sufficient for you to manage your weight effectively.

And that’s the goal, I think. For people to be able to manage their weight effectively, hopefully with the smallest medical intervention that allows them to do that. Kudos to people who manage it through Will power alone. Google tells me that 66% of adults in the U.K. are overweight, so really, those unmedicated slimmies aren’t really the “normal” ones at all.

There is good evidence that people differ substantially in the biological systems controlling appetite, satiety, food reward and body-weight regulation. So yes I agree with the above comment, there's a spectrum from 'don't care about food at all' to 'obsessed and can't stop overeating'.
And clearly people placing towards food obsession end of scale will find it harder to 'just exercise some self control' than people in the middle or towards the other end. Your interest in food is say level 4, while someone else's is constant 10. Yes, both those people might want that mars bar, but for one of them, but it is easier for one than the other.

I feel a bit like I’ve seen both sides of the story.

I was very underweight as a young woman and teenager. It was only in my 30s with a stressful job and in particular post babies when I had to shovel food in my mouth as fast as possible that my appetite changed.

Mounjaro is a lot more suppression than I ever experienced as a young woman who never really thought much about food. The main difference between me then and now is that I used to eat slowly and get full fast, but I still used to look forward to 3 meals and snacks a day. I vaguely remember one of my colleagues complaining that I was always eating biscuits in my first grad job despite being very thin.

Mounjaro for me more akin to a period when I broke up with a long term boyfriend and lost all interest in food and lost a lot of weight fast. I don’t think it’s how “normal” people think about food.

The other thing I strongly believe is that people are genetically hardwired to be slim or obese. I have a sister who has essentially been obese since KS1 age who was diagnosed with PCOS as an adult. My other sister was underweight like me. There was obviously no difference in how my parents fed us but we still were very different shapes.

Sorry for the multiple posts, I’m really just thinking out loud here. Those people who say, “Those of us with self restraint notice we’re putting a bit of weight on and we just adjust our diet a little”, do they not realise how insidious it is?

At 16 I was 9.5 st
at 26 10.5
at 36 11.5
at 46 12.5 and well on track to hit 13.5 a bit early
at 53 I’m now 9.5 again.

But before that, I never really put on any massively noticeable amounts of weight, not all at once. I’d lose half a stone here, maybe three quarters, and put on roughly the same amount, lose and gain, lose and gain. The overall gain wasnt much more than a pound a year and even now, weighing every day, my weight can change by a couple of pounds from one morning to the next. It’s really not as easy as “You just sort it out as it happens”. We ALL tried to do that. A lot of us even succeeded a lot of the time. But the underlying trend still got us. For me, it was a stone a decade, for others, it might have been more, but I don’t think the size of the gain has much correlation with will power or laziness or whatever other characteristics we each have. I am lucky that I don’t have a sweet tooth, I think it helped that I’ve always been happier to fill up on big portions rather than chocolates, but I don’t think I’m a better person because I have a preference for umami flavours. But the combination of my diet, my motivation, my pmos, adhd, genetics, everything; put it all together and you got an additional stone a decade, give or take.

It’s a lot easier now to adjust my weight and avoid creep, because I’m adjusting back to a fixed baseline that I’ve made a conscious decision is the right weight point for me (and of course I have this wonderful drug to help me).

I’m aware I wasn’t morbidly obese, but I think for a lot of us either weight gain begins before we’re even old enough to be responsible for it, or happens whilst we’re spending our time prioritising other people ahead of ourselves. We might already be thinking about cooking several different meals a night (eg husband works a manual job requiring lots of carbs, one child with sensory issues, another child with dietary issues, etc). Our own needs so often fall to the bottom of the pecking order, but I don’t think that’s a character flaw.

My sister made a point that once a year, she would hit the weight she was at eighteen. Kudos to her and people like her. However, she is an absolute warrior of a woman (occasionally terrifying, in fact) and I just don’t have her steely determination.

Actually, I do now. Because I inject it.

You are so lucky for being "normal" when it comes to your satiety actually working they way it is meant to in that you are of a normal weight and also feel sufficient full whilst maintaing this weight.
I also prefer to get hungry in between meals as I enjoy food more:)
However, at times I can also go all day without feeling hungry at all...and then when I finally get hungry and eat I overdo it - making up for the full day of not eating. It's like my appetite mechanism is all over the place. Sometimes I'm not hungry for a full day and at other times I just can't get full....or I'm craving....a bit like an alcholic who can't say now. I do feel like food for some people is like alcohol with alcoholics. It's very odd, but something I've lived with for as long as I can remember.
Whatever I do, I know that in order to maintain "slim" I have to feel deprived and tearful. Believe me I've tried it many times hoping that "this time" things will be different. It never was. GLP1 has saved me and helps me feel "normal" around food.

I don't think saying normal when you mean not overweight is an accurate framing.

Because in societies where everyone has enough food, many have majority overweight populations and, at least pre WLIs, they virtually all had increasing obesity rates. It's not actually normal even to be successfully able to exercise willpower to stay slim throughout one's lifetime without appetite suppressants, let alone not to need much of it.

Your comments show me that you truly do not understand addiction at all. Shame that such ignorance still exists but there we are.