Today, April 13, 2023, is the first day of my Ozempic journey. I gave myself the first shot, a .25mg starter dose, last night before bed, poking a tiny needle into the pale pudge of my abdomen just under one of the scars from my laparoscopic hysterectomy eleven years ago. The first answer for the curious: no, the shot didn’t hurt. A tiny drop of blood welled afterwards, which I wiped off with a tissue.
Honestly, I’m surprised and even embarrassed to find myself on any kind of weight loss journey, let alone a semi-public one. For the past ten years or so, I’ve been a proponent of Health at Every Size and followed The Body is Not An Apology on social media. I’ve read numerous articles on the toxicity of diet culture, the science behind the fact that diets don’t work for most people, and the connections between capitalism and consumption of all kinds. I’m known among my friends as the one with the sweet tooth, especially for chocolate, and I joke that on my deathbed, I’m not going to regret any of the cake I ate during my life. I also truly don’t think that thin people are more attractive and fat people less attractive; I find intelligence and humor attractive, as well as self-awareness, kindness, and the ability to ask questions and really listen to the answers.
So why did I start Ozempic? There are a number of answers to that question, ranging from what my doctors would say—blood sugar, cholesterol, fat around my organs—to chronic illness to the desire to avoid weight-directed observations from family, friends, and strangers. I’ll go into all of those in more detail in future posts. But the short answer is that Ozempic seems to be a non-surgical intervention that actually works. When I did not think such an option existed, I certainly wasn’t going to waste my mental and emotional energy losing weight and gaining it back (with bonus weight) over and over, as so many have. I wasn’t going to settle for a life of intrusive thoughts about all the sweets I couldn’t have.
But then I was listening to the podcast Science Vs, which I enjoy, and this episode came on. I had never heard of Ozempic or any of the related drugs before that. But two things the episode said were super persuasive to me: 1) a patient using Ozempic said that it quieted the “food noise,” so she didn’t spend the day thinking about how hungry she was and how good a candy bar sounded and 2) rats given this drug would take a modest bite or two of chocolate, and then go back to their nutritional pellets—and rats apparently LOVE chocolate. (Side note: I didn’t realize my spirit animal was a rat.)
Look, I’m just a middle-aged, middle-class, white lady carrying around about 60 more pounds than I did in college (approximately 35 million years ago). And no, I’m not going to post photos of myself or provide precise before-and-after weights and measurements. This isn’t that kind of blog. Instead, I’ll write about weight and health, what the body looks like vs what the body does, the life of the mind vs the life of the body, food and mood, and more. So for the record: today didn’t feel any different than other days. Maybe a little less hunger, but I did eat an undisclosed number of chocolate Cadbury eggs, purchased on sale after Easter, at lunch time.