Off Wegovy 2 months and already put on half a stone

[Wegovy81]

I'm so annoyed with myself , I lost a stone and a half on Wegovy over a 5 month period and it obviously cost me a fortune as well.
I came off it in February after getting to my target weight and have now put on half a stone. At this rate, I am going to go back to my original weight within another couple of months and then all the money I spent will have been a complete waste.
I honestly didn't think I would need to use it again, how silly of me! Thought I could control my appetite, obviously not.
I know it's only half a stone I want to lose but I have not been able to lose weight without Wegovy ,it's the only thing that ever worked for me. I also feel like my appetite came back 10 fold since stopping Wegovy.
I don't know what I'm asking here, just having a rant and a bit disgusted with myself.
So I've decided to reorder it, but I'm not sure what dosage as I've been off it for nearly 2 months.
I don't want to spend all that money on the very first dosage of 0.25 mg if it's not going to be strong enough. I finished my last dose of 2.4mg in middle of Feb. Any ideas what dose I should get?

There is a thread around where I stopped taking it and did not gain weight. I assumed I would have to stop taking it one day, albeit it was making me feel rough and it was expensive. I was told by a GP to stop as I was having gallbladder episodes. Also I felt very rough every day.

Anyway I realised I was going to be hungry as this is what the studies showed so I spent a lot of time, and it was a struggle working out how to manage it. Mostly it’s psychological. As you are going back onto it I am not sure you are in a place to do the work you would need to do to come off and maintain the weight loss - it’s a real big investment of mental energy tbh. I have to work on it every single day. It is hard. But it’s not impossible

My tips are:

• mindfulness. Really look into this

-addressing why you are afraid of hunger and how you can use other strategies to self sooth and distract when you feel hungry but it is not time to eat, or the reasons why you are over eating - is it boredom? Emotional? Again this is mindfulness territory. You have to look at all your food, take it into account, question yourself, and not just blindly eat it. Most of us cannot remember what we ate all day, as we are not mindful and we are distracted by phones, TV, work etc.

• being accountable to yourself, being honest and keeping a track of your food intake and making sure you keep up with, or start working exercise into your daily routine, even if it’s just walking. Keep busy, build new habits

I have more but I don’t want to bore you 😂

@Menora wow thank you so much! That's so helpful. I like the bit where you say about not being afraid of feeling hunger because I actually really don't like the feeling of hunger.
In terms of why I overeat , it's basically because I like the taste of the food I'm eating, eg, pizza, chips, cake , chocolate.
I don't overeat on lettuce or vegetables so there's something in the ultra processed food that is making me addicted to it. So that's why I can't lose weight on my own, I've tried everything before using Wegovy. I have been extra hungry as well since coming off Wegovy .

This is really good information.

I want to loose weight, like the idea of the Jab but do worry about the weight coming back when I stop, an I really can’t afford it for any length of time.

I do emotionally eat and eat out of boredom esp at night and chocolate is my downfall 🙁

might need to get more mindful

Yeah so what I noticed is that I challenged myself to be hungry and not freak out. And be mindful of it and work out what I could tolerate. I can’t tolerate feeling so hungry I feel shaky but I noticed hunger was cyclical so it would go away if I didn’t eat straight away and then come back again, and I also noticed when I was feeling hungry, so around 9.30am, then again at 11.30am. So I eat at 9, before I am hungry, and I eat at 12.30pm so I am not forcing myself to wait ages. I always eat at similar times. I also look at my food when I am eating it, the whole time. I think about the taste and if it’s the right portion size and if I am full I don’t make myself finish it. I then snack around 3pm then I try to eat at 6pm then I don’t eat again till the morning. Now I am in a routine I don’t really feel hungry in between at all.

I also like the taste of those things but they do encourage you to want more. I tried to use technique where I asked myself if something else tastes nicer… and you know what.. a beautiful seasoned lovely well cooked hot side of salmon tastes bloody nicer than a greasy old pizza. All slices of pizza have the same taste. There is no different textures, all bites are the same. A plate of different foods is interesting, you get different flavours and textures.

With mindfulness there is a hunger satiety scale

you Need to be in the green zones most of the time and only sometimes the yellow zones

I will also ask myself to recount all the things I have already eaten, and whether I can ‘afford’ to eat what I am planning to. This I mean ‘did I already eat chocolate today?’ If it’s yes then I am not going to eat more. But if it’s no, I might a small portion of it, it but enjoy all of it and then agree with myself I can eat more tomorrow, but not today.

I DO NOT BARGAIN WITH MYSELF WITH FOOD that I have had a bad day, or i am stressed. If I am those things I will promise myself to go for a walk, or have a bath, or maybe go to bed early, just something nice and self care. If I think I am bargaining with myself I will try to realise I am being deluded 😂

eating can be a wonderful experience and hunger should just be a food cue, not a scary or stressful experience. If you use food as your de-stressing experience it can create more stress when you are unpicking all the emotions and trying to lose weight. You miss it as it’s so comforting and familiar. It still can be, but in a different way. I still love to eat food, but I now get myself excited about avocados 😂

there is a lot of planning involved but it is worth the time to do it

Thank you so much @Menora for taking the time to share all that info. I have screenshotted it so I can keep coming back to it.
When I was on Wegovy , my life wasn't consumed by thoughts of food and I never felt that hungry. I miss that feeling of not being a slave to food. I wish I didn't need the drug to act like a normal eater

No I know, it sucks and you are not alone by any stretch! Becoming a creature of habit has also helped. I eat a lot of the same types of food very regularly, I know how many calories are in them, I know they fill me up, I enjoy them. I am a huge fan of naked burrito bowls, and salad bowls, and pokè bowls, I either buy them ready made or make them myself. They have so much flavour and also have protein, some carbs, not high fat but some fat (if you add avocado) and they are full of texture and flavour.

I was brought up on a diet of frozen foods and I always turned to crisps, cakes and bread, anything fast to eat and I did not like being hungry. But often I was hungry as I went far too long between meals and had no plan of what I was going to eat

Mindful eating really has changed my relationship with food for the better so I recommend it!

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/mindful-eating/

I noticed that on many of Wegovy threads people mention not feeling hungry and not having the constant food chatter in their heads is “like a normal eater”, “like skinny people” and so on. I’m afraid it’s quite a distorted view of reality. It’s very, very normal to feel hungry and think about food. We need food to survive so it’s beneficial for us as species to be interested in food. It’s also very normal that the feeling of hunger is unpleasant, if it was nice people would starve themselves quickly.

What these drugs do is switching off these perfectly natural mechanisms. It’s not surprising that once off them the feeling of hunger returns quickly.

The thing that really works is replacing the current habits around food with new ones. I think the tips about mindfulness are spot on.

My own trick is that I eat very many dishes with chopsticks. They slow me down and they also make me cook more things that can be eaten with chopsticks to start with. Pizza or sausage rolls don’t really work well with chopsticks, whereas a poke bowl, home-made sushi or stir-fry are perfect and much healthier options.

I also don’t have processed crap and sweets at home. Why suffer? The whole family has lördagsgodis - we only have treats on Saturday and we either buy treats (small amount, to be eaten in one go) or bake a cake. I don’t have enough willpower to go around looking at chocolate, crisps and cookies so I just don’t have them at home.

I agree, hunger is normal we would not survive without it. However it’s become something we fear or dislike, but this is only relevant in modern life if you are living in poverty with restricted access to food/money. Learning to tolerate slight discomfort of hunger but not allow yourself to become level 2 hungry is about listening to your body and its cues. I know the difference between thirst and hunger so it’s not that I am thirsty but drinking water does help to avoid the bad knawing type of hunger.

what happens is not that it’s back worse than before, but you had become accustomed to feeling very little hunger so you have to acclimatise yourself all over again to the sensation

you aren’t not normal, I am not skinny but I am smaller now and even I still get hungry, hunger is normal even in thinner people

Sorry remembered something else 😂

I didn’t really like exercise very much, I had tried cardio it was just hard work and made me feel rubbish.

until I tried weights and strength training. I honestly feel like I get a massive dopamine or endorphin rush now. I just did a work out this morning and the feeling of your muscles being very stretched then getting into a hot shower is weirdly so addictive and a nice feeling. You need to try to find that feeling for yourself without food involved

I'm about to pick up my first dose of wegovy and planning to maintain some lifestyle changes i've recently put in place. I'm your typical lose and gain the same half stone person. My weight has crept on at the rate of a couple of pounds a year, apart from 2 pregnancies which each added a stone. I'm hopeful that I can maintain a weight, i'm just not great at consistently losing.

The first one is avoiding UPF. I read Chris Van Tulleken's book and it made me see that these eduble substances marketed as food are purely designed to make us consume more and more. When I go whole days without UPF, the 'food noise' as people refer to it is reduced in the evenings: my worst time for snacking. The key to this really is planning the shopping.

The second one is making time for exercise. Since having children, I have struggled to fit this into my life because I have this nagging thought that if I am not at work I should be with my children. My husband is supportive and capable - it's coming from my own weird guilt about not pulling my (significant!) weight.

I agree that you need to focus on mindful eating. I love junk food and have periods where I over eat rubbish, it is addictive.
When I focus on food properly it makes a huge difference. I make a list of healthy and nutritious food that I love and refer to this. I make sure this food is always in the house and I measure my portions and keep calories in check. If I crave chocolate I have an Options hot chocolate and a large glass of water so the craving goes. I drink low sugar cordial with sparkling water to give me a sweet boost without the calories. I think about if I’m actually hungry or just bored or in a bad habit. It’s hard breaking habits but maybe while on you’re on your next dosage properly plan for coming off it, you know what it is like now so can prepare for next time.

I’m coming back to this thread to share another tip. I’m taking part in a longitudinal study on healthy habits running in my country (no idea if I’m control or treatment group, lol) but it’s a tip I got from the study, implemented it and it worked great for me.

It’s called hara hachi bu which means eat till you’re 80% full in Japanese and the term comes from Okinawa.

Basically you stop eating when still very slightly hungry. It’s hard at first because if you eat fast and mindlessly it’s impossible to determine when to say stop. So first, it makes you slow down. Second, you learn to recognise when and if you’re full or not and gives better awareness about stuff happening in your body. The most important part is that it takes a bit for our body to send signals that we have eaten and we are now happy and going to survive till the next meal. So whenever I stop eating when I’m not stuffed, within 20 or so minutes I stop feeling hungry.

Of course this needs to be combined with healthy, nutrient-dense meals.

could you start using something like Mindful chef or Hello Fresh after coming off the tablets . They supply the food and you just cook them. Then you’re not buying pizzas etc but eating decent food .

They’re not the cheapest way of buying food, but
don’t work out too bad on some of the introductory offers. It makes cooking more interesting.

Theres also Simply cook . Only the herbs and spices are provided so it’s cheaper and the meals are easy to cook.

@CortieTat this is very interesting thank you, definitely this method helps me. If you wait until you get incredibly hungry you will eat your food too fast and it can take 20 mins for your stomach to register you are eating, then even longer to feel full. If you choose foods that you eat slowly this process is much more manageable if you eat at a reasonable level of hunger then eat slowly until you feel pretty full. There was a post on another thread and I made me think this is often the issue with convenience foods - they are designed to be eaten quickly so they aren’t able to have the same effect at all. Usually this is why people will advocate things like dense salads, they take ages to eat so you have the chance to be more aware of your body’s signals. This is all things that should be taught to people. How to satiate yourself through mindful eating!