a messy, real week on GLP-1 and why i think it’s actually working.
split dosing experiments, 185 again, a concert moment & what my five year old taught me about food and mood
still at 185
I have been in the 185s for what feels like forever.
And I want to be honest about what that actually feels like from the inside, because I don’t think I fully said it in the vlog. It’s not devastation. It’s not panic. It’s more like this low hum of frustration that you just learn to carry around with you. You’re doing the things. You’re showing up. You’re taking the medication and going to the gym and making the choices and the scale just sits there like it has absolutely nothing to say to you.
What I’ve learned though, slowly, is that the scale being still doesn’t mean nothing is happening. My Happy Scale is still showing a downward trend. Half a pound a week. And honestly after weeks of that thing being basically blank, seeing any number there feels like something.
“The frustration of not moving faster and the evidence that I am actually moving. I’m trying to hold both things at once. It’s harder than it sounds.”
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the split dosing experiment
This week I made a decision I’ve been sitting on for a while. Instead of one weekly injection I split my dose. Smaller amount on Sunday, another on Wednesday or Thursday. Roughly the same total, maybe even a little less. But the way it hits my body is completely different.
Here’s what I’ve noticed about how this medication moves through me specifically:
Days 1 and 2 after an injection I’m actually the hungriest. The medication hasn’t fully kicked in yet and my body knows it.
Day 3 onwards the suppression does its job and I’m completely fine.
End of the week it’s faded. I’m hungrier again. The cycle resets.
So I spend the first half of every week slightly more hungry than I want to be, the second half doing great, and then it starts over. What I’m hoping split dosing does is even that out. If I’m injecting every three days there’s theoretically never a point where the medication has fully worn off. No big peaks. No noticeable valleys. Just a more consistent baseline.
It’s been one week. I don’t have answers yet. But I like the logic and I like that I’m paying attention to my body instead of just following a calendar.
Not advice. Talk to your doctor before changing anything about your dosing. This is just what I’m trying and I’ll keep sharing it honestly.
what I noticed about hunger that I haven’t said out loud before
I used to treat every hungry moment like a problem to solve. Like hunger meant I was doing something wrong, or the medication wasn’t working, or I needed to adjust something immediately.
But I’m starting to think about it differently now.
“Hunger is information. It’s my body telling me where it is in the cycle. And once I started seeing it that way instead of panicking, it became a lot easier to just... wait.”
To trust that the suppression would come back. To not catastrophize a hungry Tuesday afternoon. This is a small mindset shift but it has made a real difference in how I’m experiencing this journey week to week. I’m not fighting my body anymore. I’m watching it and learning from it.
That feels like progress even when the scale doesn’t agree.
Jude, breakfast & the food and mood connection
This week my five year old got sent home from school twice for behaviors.
And I’m a teacher. So watching my own kid struggle in a classroom while I’m managing 28 other people’s kids every single day is a specific kind of exhausting that’s hard to explain.
Something clicked though. We looked at what he was eating every morning.
Muffins. Every day. Basically cake for breakfast, and then we were surprised when he couldn’t regulate his emotions by 9am.
We switched him to:
sausage patties
string cheese
applesauce
raspberries
Protein heavy, less sugar. Two days in. Not a magic fix, but it made me think about my own relationship with food and mood in a way I hadn’t before.
I talk a lot about food noise on this channel. That constant mental chatter about eating, wanting, craving, regretting. I’ve always framed it as a GLP-1 thing because the medication quiets it. But watching my son this week reminded me that food affects our brains long before we’re even aware it’s happening. What we eat shapes how we feel, how we cope, how we show up.
That’s not just true for a five year old having a hard morning. It’s true for all of us.
Bruno Mars and the 100 pound moment
Tuesday night my husband and I drove almost two hours to see Bruno Mars. I wore a red jacket I love even though it’s oversized and does nothing for my shape. I changed out of a bodysuit in my sister in law’s bathroom because comfort won. Zero regrets.
We stood for most of the concert. Feet hurting. Thighs already wrecked from the Smith machine squats Lia had put me through the day before. We didn’t get home until 1:30 in the morning.
But here’s what I kept thinking on the drive home.
“100 pounds ago I would not have done that the same way. I would have sat down way more. I would have spent so much mental energy on how I looked that I might not have actually been there. Tuesday night I was just there. Tired and sore and happy and there. That’s not a small thing. That’s actually everything.”
where I’m landing
185 again this week officially. Up half a pound from last Saturday.
And I’m okay. Not performing okay. Actually okay.
Because I can see the trend. I can feel something shifting with the split dosing even if the scale hasn’t caught up yet. I went to a concert and stood for most of it. I had a hard week with my kid and didn’t fall apart. I’m still going to the gym even when my legs feel like they’re broken.
The middle of this journey is not glamorous. It doesn’t make for a clean before and after. But it’s real and it’s mine and I’m still in it.
That’s enough for right now.
The paid Substack is where I go when I have more to say than a vlog can hold. Every Friday, a new deep dive. Access to everything in my vault. And starting May 1st, the Back to Day One Reset: a 30 day challenge for anyone who wants to get back to basics on GLP-1. $29 for the whole year, but only until May 1st.
Awesome NSV for standing all that time at the concert! You are doing great, keep it up. 👍
I would just really encourage you. You are doing an amazing job tuning in and listening to your body. How Your clothes fit, how you feel in your own skin, how you can do things like stand longer, carry more bags, walk up hills without getting winded. Those are the things that matter!!
All the number on the scale is is the relationship between your body and gravity. It does not tell you how much water weight is present, how you are decreasing your visceral fat and insulin resistance, and how much you are building resistance and longevity through muscle. So I would encourage you to find a DXA where you are, I can help if you need….focus only on body composition and all of those non-scale victories because those are what really matter! And keep up the good work!