I’ve been fat almost all my life. I started getting chubby at about five years old and have struggled with weight ever since. I have always loved to eat. I thought about eating all the time. I would wake up in the morning ready for breakfast. I would look forward to lunch while eating breakfast. I snacked whenever possible. Food was always on my mind- whether I was hungry or not.
In recent years that kind of preoccupation with food has come to be known as “Food Noise.” It’s an apt description because, like being in a noisy room, there’s no getting away from it. You can force yourself to focus on a single voice or a melody, but it takes effort. Noise is pervasive, constant and always demanding attention. If you’ve ever tried to have a conversation in a classroom full of noisy children, you can understand the effort it takes to tune it out and focus on anything else.
For me, that’s what Food Noise was. I thought about food all the time. I could force myself to concentrate on other things for a while, but the constant pressure of Food Noise was always there.
As I got older and had more control over when and how much I ate, I got fatter.
I tried just about every fad diet- SlimFast, Stop The Insanity, Atkins, you name it. Well-meaning people around me- people who loved me, gave me advice: “Eat more vegetables.” “Walk more.” “Apple Cider Vinegar.” “My cousin’s, sister-in-law’s gardener’s hair-dresser’s uncle did the Cabbage Diet and it changed his life.”
I lost weight, gained it back, lost it again, gained it back plus. I knew…always KNEW that this was entirely my fault. If I had more will power. If weren’t such a glutton. If I weren’t too lazy to exercise. If I just wasn’t such a sh*tty human being in general…
Then I gave up. I liked eating and hated exercising and didn’t want live my life hating myself because of what I wasn’t… what I couldn’t. At my heaviest, a common fast-food lunch would have been two double-quarter-pounder meals from McDonald’s. That’s two half-pound burgers…two large fries..two large Dr. Peppers, and probably and apple pie or two as a little treat…more than three thousand calories. For lunch! Of course there was also breakfast, and dinner and a snack or two throughout the day.
At my heaviest I weighed over five hundred pounds. I don’t exactly know how much over five hundred, because I couldn’t find a scale anywhere that went above five hundred pounds. I do know I lost about two pant sizes before the scale moved.
In late 2010 I got as serious as I’d ever been about getting healthy. This time I took a slow, methodical, engineer’s approach. I did nothing but track every bite of food for over a year. I learned my patterns, the rhythms of my eating and came face-to-face with just how far from “normal” I had drifted in my forty years. Then I started making small changes and slowly, I began to transform my body.
I lost over two hundred pounds over about ten years. It wasn’t linear. I went up and down. But, like power lines on a mountain road, each up was lower than the previous up. The overall trajectory was down.
In many ways, though, it was too little, too late. The cumulative effects of decades of bad eating had begun to catch up with me. I was taking three blood pressure medications. In 2019 I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes and began taking first one, then two medications for blood sugar control. I was losing weight, “getting healthier,” but my body had been fundamentally broken.
In February of 2025 my doctor prescribed me Mounjaro, a GLP-1/GIP agonist medication in the same family as the much more well-known Ozempic. I started with the lowest dose of 2.5ml and began to “titrate up” one month at a time: 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10.
When I took the first dose of Mounjaro, the food noise stopped within the first week.
Have you ever been in a loud environment- a sporting event, a concert, a construction site and then get in your car? The door slams, and suddenly the weight of silence is powerful. Your brain had reset itself to accommodate for the loud environment, and when the noise went away, it almost hurt.
Fifty-two years of Food Noise was silenced. It almost hurt.
I remember the first day I forgot to eat. I’d heard other people say that- “I was so busy I forgot to eat.” I had never forgotten about food for a single hour of my life. Over the last nine months I’ve come to realize that this is what “normal” people feel like. They’re not obsessed with eating. They don’t think about food every second of every day. The willpower and discipline I had developed over the previous decade were all compensating for the fact that I’m not normal.
I was a man with a broken leg “powering through it” to keep running the marathon. I was a nearsighted man exercising “self-discipline” to read without glasses.
I was talking with a friend recently about my “weight loss journey” (I really don’t like that phrase) and he was talking about his own struggles. He said. “I just need to change my relationship with food.”
That sounds reasonable, right? That’s the kind of thing I used to say.
Now I realize it’s like watching a drowning man and telling him he needs to “change his relationship with buoyancy.” Would you tell a deaf man that hearing aids are a “cheat code?” Would you tell a crippled man that his crutches are “the easy way out?” Would you deride a SCUBA diver trapped in an underwater cave for “taking a shortcut” to the surface before his air supply ran out?
Why, then, have I heard dozens of people say that Ozempic, and Wegovy are “cheating?”
I wish I’d had this “cheat code” two decades ago.
Today I take only one blood pressure medication, instead of three. I’ve stopped taking one of my diabetes medications. My doctor is confident that by this time next year I’ll be taking only Mounjaro.
“But you have to take it forever!” I’ve heard people say. I was taking five prescription medications “forever.” I’m happy to knock that down to one. Ozempic and Mounjaro are just the beginning. I’ve read about oral medications and skin patches in development which are ten times more powerful than the medication that changed my life.
If you’re reading this and thinking, “I don’t need to cheat. I can muscle through.” Please talk to your doctor about a GLP-1 agonist medication. Don’t go through life blind, crippled, drowning, and blaming yourself for it.