i dosed up and felt like trash.
here’s everything that was going through my head.
the part where I finally stopped stalling
I’ve been at 7.5mg for longer than I want to admit.
Not because it was working the way I needed it to. More because it was comfortable. No side effects. No headaches. No cancelled gym sessions. I was showing up to work feeling like myself, sleeping fine, not white-knuckling through my afternoons. After months of adjusting and riding out symptoms, comfortable felt like something worth holding onto.
The problem is that comfortable also meant not losing.
I wasn’t gaining either. Just sitting. The scale doing that thing where it moves up two, down two, up one, down one, and at the end of every week you’re basically in the exact same place you started. I told myself it was inflammation. I told myself it was muscle. I told myself a lot of things that let me stay exactly where I was without having to make a decision I was scared to make.
What finally pushed me wasn’t a bad weigh-in or a come-to-Jesus moment. It was a quiet, honest conversation with myself where I asked if I was actually okay with this pace. And the answer was no. So I went up to 9mg, gave myself a little pep talk, and injected before I could talk myself back out of it.
what a stall actually does to you mentally
I want to stay here for a second because I don’t think we talk about this part enough.
A stall isn’t just frustrating. It’s quietly exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t lived it. You’re still doing the things. You’re still showing up. You’re still making the choices and taking the medication and going to the gym and the scale just doesn’t care. And after enough weeks of that, something starts to shift in your head.
You start questioning everything. Was it that dinner? Is it my hormones? Am I not eating enough, eating too much, moving too little, moving too much? You run through the checklist so many times it stops meaning anything. And underneath all of it is this fear that maybe this is just where your body decided to stop. That maybe you’ve hit your wall and the rest of the journey is just maintenance of a number you didn’t choose.
That fear is heavy. And I carried it for weeks without really naming it.
What I’ve learned, slowly, is that a stall in the middle of a long journey is not the same as being done. It’s not a verdict. It’s information. It’s your body in a moment, not your body forever. But knowing that intellectually and actually feeling it at 6am when you step on a scale that hasn’t moved in three weeks are two completely different things.
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the day after
I want to be specific about what dosing up actually felt like because I don’t think “side effects” covers it accurately.
Monday morning my stomach was off. Not sick, just wrong. That gross taste in your mouth you can’t shake. I was late to work, which almost never happens. Five minutes, which sounds like nothing, but I’m usually five minutes early, so that’s a ten minute swing and I felt every second of it.
Once I started teaching it got a little better. And then the headache hit. 10:30am. Pounding. The kind that sits right behind your eyes and doesn’t move no matter what you do. It stayed until about 5pm. I cancelled my personal training session with Lia. Came home and fell asleep on the couch at 4:15. In bed before 9. I ordered pizza because it was the only decision I had left in me.
I keep coming back to this part because I’m a teacher. I have 28 kids who need me present and functioning every single day. I can’t call in foggy. I can’t push through a pounding headache and still give them what they actually need from me.
So when people say just push through the dose increase, I need them to understand that for some of us the cost of those side effects doesn’t stay inside our own bodies. It lands on other people too.
That’s not an excuse to stay stuck. It’s just the real math I have to do every time I think about going up.
By Tuesday I felt completely normal. Which almost made it worse. Because then I was standing there thinking, was that one bad day actually that big a deal? And I still don’t have a clean answer.
real food, no apologies
This week I also did our usual Sunday grocery haul and I’m going to be honest with you about what was in it because I think it matters.
Boneless wings from the Winco deli. A Digiorno pizza. Little sandwiches with salami and pepperoni. Taco shells. Ground beef. Caesar salad kits. Chicken skewers. Some things for my kids that I’m not going to pretend aren’t in my house.
No produce haul. No carefully curated meal prep containers. No $11 green juices.
I’ve spent the money on the produce. I’ve done the aesthetic grocery runs. And then watched it rot in my fridge because real life doesn’t actually work that way, at least not in my house. So now I buy the food I know we’re going to eat. The food that’s easy enough that I’ll actually make it on a Tuesday after volleyball practice and a full day of teaching. The food my kids will eat without a negotiation.
And here’s the thing. I’ve lost almost 95 pounds eating like this.
Not because the food is perfect. Because the medication changed something deeper than what’s on my plate. It changed the noise. That constant background hum of thinking about food, wanting food, planning food, regretting food. GLP-1 didn’t give me a meal plan. It gave me enough quiet to make choices I could actually live with. And the choices I can live with look like boneless wings and a Caesar salad kit, not a perfectly balanced macro plate I resent by Wednesday.
I’m not telling you to eat what I eat. I’m telling you that the story of GLP-1 success doesn’t have to start with a clean refrigerator.
learning to read your own hunger
Something else happened this week that I want to talk about because I’ve been thinking about it differently lately.
On the high suppression days, I barely ate. Not because I was restricting, because I genuinely wasn’t hungry and forcing food in felt wrong. And on the days where the suppression backed off a little, I ate more. Not a lot more, but more.
I used to feel guilty about the low days. Like I was doing something wrong by not hitting some calorie number. But I’ve started to think about it differently. My hunger across a whole week averages out. The days where I eat very little are balanced by the days where I eat more. And my body knows the difference between a day of low intake and a week of low intake. Panicking over a single low day and forcing food in just because a number says I should has never actually served me.
This is not advice. I want to be really clear about that. But after three years of paying close attention to how my body responds to this medication, I’ve started to trust the signals more than the spreadsheet. Some days my body needs more. Some days it doesn’t. And learning to tell the difference, and actually listening to it, has been one of the quieter shifts of this whole journey.
what I didn’t know about how this medication actually works
I’ve been on a GLP-1 for over three years. I have lost almost 95 pounds (75 on GLP-1). I talk about this medication constantly. And I learned something this week that I genuinely did not fully understand until I heard it said out loud with data behind it.
Every time you inject, you’re not resetting to that dose. You’re adding it on top of what’s already in your body. The medication accumulates week over week. So when I took 9mg this week and take 9mg again next week, that second week isn’t a 9mg week. It’s closer to 10. And 10mg is the highest dose I have ever taken, one time, ever, in three years of doing this.
I heard this on the On The Pen podcast and I had to sit with it for a while because it reframed so much.
It means the reason dose increases hit so hard isn’t just the jump itself. It’s the compounding. It means that spacing doses out, or pulling back slightly after you’ve increased, isn’t giving up. It’s actually a more accurate response to what’s happening in your body than just counting milligrams on a calendar. And it means I’ve probably been thinking about this all wrong for a while.
I’m going to push my next injection a few days later than usual. I’m going to try somewhere between 7.5 and 9 instead of going straight back to 9. I want to find the place where the suppression is working without costing me a full day of my life every week. That’s the experiment.
184
Saturday morning I weighed in at 184.6. Last Saturday I was 187.4. That’s 2.8 pounds.
I know one week doesn’t mean everything. I know water weight is real and inflammation is real and all of the caveats are real. But I also haven’t consistently seen the 184s in a long time. I’ve been bouncing between 185 and 187 for weeks, sometimes feeling like the scale has just decided to live there permanently. Seeing a 4 in that second spot felt like something shifted.
My Happy Scale app showed a current rate of loss for the first time in weeks. It had just been blank. No trend to calculate because there wasn’t enough downward movement. And then this week it said half a pound a week and put a little confetti on my screen and I sat there longer than I should have just staring at it.
The all time loss number in that app says 94.5 pounds. Ninety four and a half pounds. And somehow in the middle of a stall, in the middle of a week where I felt terrible and almost regretted everything, I had completely forgotten that. I forget it a lot actually. I get so locked into the next pound, the next week, the next decision, that I walk right past the fact that I used to weigh 94 pounds more than I do right now.
That number doesn’t let me off the hook for the work still ahead. But it does remind me that I am not failing. I have never been failing. I am just still in the middle of something that takes longer than anyone tells you it will.
where I’m landing
I don’t have a clean answer on whether dosing up was worth it. I think that’s actually the most honest thing I can say.
7.5mg was keeping me comfortable and keeping me stuck. 9mg was too much, at least right out of the gate. Somewhere between those two is probably where I need to be, and finding it is going to require patience I don’t always have and experimentation that is going to be imperfect and sometimes uncomfortable.
But I lost 2.8 pounds this week. After weeks of nothing. And even if part of that is water, even if next week the scale goes back up a little, something moved. And that matters more than I expected it to.
We’re all just doing the math in real time and trying to make the next best decision with what we know right now. That’s all this is. That’s all I’m doing.
xo - Nyk
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Here’s the honest truth about where a lot of us end up on this journey.
We start strong. We feel the shift. And then somewhere along the way we lose the thread. The scale gets quiet. Life gets loud. And we stop feeling connected to what we’re doing and why.
It doesn’t mean we failed. It means we’re human.
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