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.