I Never Introduced Myself. Let Me Fix That.
My origin story, the weight, the mess, the medication, and why I am still here telling you about it.
Before I get into my story, I have to give a quick shoutout to my friend Shelbi from The Thinner Side. She started her Substack this weekend and her very first post was an intro post, which honestly made total sense and also made me realize I never did that over here. I just started posting and never actually told you who I am or how I got here.
So Shelbi, thank you for the accidental nudge. Go subscribe to her Substack right now. Her story is incredible and if you have been around on Instagram you have probably already seen her.
Okay. Let me tell you my story.
I Was Not Always the Fat Kid
I want to start here because I think people assume that if you end up obese as an adult, you must have been overweight your whole life. That was not my story.
I was tiny as a little kid. Like actually tiny. Petite. When I look at pictures of myself from back then I genuinely cannot believe how small I was.
That changed around first grade.
My mom was living in California at the time, married to someone in the Navy. Without getting too deep into it, she had an affair with her best friend’s husband, left her marriage, and when things needed to settle down, she called my grandparents to come get us. My nana and popo drove from Texas and picked up me and my older brother and brought us back to El Paso. My little brother went to stay with family in San Antonio.
So there I was. First grade. Away from my mom. Away from my little brother. Living with my grandparents for an entire year.
I do not have a lot of memories from that time but the ones I do have are vivid. And most of them involve hot dogs.
My nana would slice them into long pieces and fry them up in oil and they were so good. I still make them that way. She made them for me constantly and I just ate them constantly and by the time my mom came back into the picture I had a little bit of a belly that I had never had before.
And that is when the comments started.
The Comments My Mom Made That I Still Hear
She never called me fat. She will tell you that to this day. She will say those words never came out of her mouth and she is probably right.
But the things she did say made me feel fat. And in my second grade brain, that was the same thing.
She would comment on my belly. She would say things about how I looked in a bikini. She had lost weight herself by that point and she was obsessed with being thin and she projected all of that onto me constantly.
I was not overweight. I was a normal sized kid. But I grew up completely convinced that my body was wrong.
By high school I was probably 130 to 140 pounds at 5’2, which yes is on the higher end but is not obese. My best friends were 100 to 115 pounds and I felt enormous standing next to them. My mom was still commenting. I was still listening.
I lived mostly with my grandparents through high school. I was active, walking everywhere, working at McDonald’s, just constantly moving. I ate whatever I wanted, corn dogs and fast food and whatever was easy, and my body just kept up with it because I was never sitting still.
But the relationship I was building with food during those years was not a healthy one. I was eating for comfort. I was filling something. I just did not know it yet.
What Happened When I Stopped Moving
I graduated high school and moved to Arizona. My mom was here and I was still chasing that version of her that I always wanted. The normal one. The present one. I kept thinking if I just stayed close enough, we would figure it out.
Three months after moving here I met my husband. I was 18. We have been together since 2006.
We fell in love fast and we just ate. All the time. Restaurants, movies, home, wherever. He does not gain weight the way I gain weight. I did not know that yet.
By the time I was 20 years old I was 211 pounds.
I had gained 80 pounds in two years. Not because I was lazy or undisciplined. But because for the first time in my life I was not constantly moving and the eating that I had always done caught up with me almost overnight.
The Decade of Trying Everything
I walked into Jenny Craig at 20 years old ready to change my life. It did not work.
Then Weight Watchers. Multiple times. I would lose weight almost every time but I could never stick to it because the food noise was too loud. I could not just stop eating when something tasted good. I did not know what full felt like. I would eat and eat and eat and my brain would just keep telling me to keep going.
I tried Atkins. I ate nothing but bacon for days. I tried a cookie diet that my sister-in-law was incredibly successful on. She is so disciplined. She lost so much weight. I lasted about a week before I felt like a complete failure.
Here is what I know now that I did not know then. Discipline was never my problem.
Discipline is getting up every morning and going to work even when you do not feel like it. Discipline is showing up and doing your job and doing it well. I did that. I do that. I have always done that.
But discipline cannot override brain signals that are telling your stomach you are still hungry when you are not. That is biology. That is not a character flaw. And it took me a very long time to understand that difference.
So from 20 to 34 I just kept going. Losing weight. Gaining it back. Losing it. Gaining it back. Every time I restricted, the food noise got louder. Every time I gave up, I felt worse about myself. It was this loop that I could not find my way out of.
I had my daughter at 28 and lost weight during the pregnancy somehow, which I still do not fully understand. I tried to keep going after she was born. I could not.
Before I got pregnant with my son, I hit my highest weight. 277 pounds.
I do not talk about that number a lot but I want you to see it because I want you to know where I actually was. And I want you to know that I was also in a really dark place at that point. I was not visibly falling apart. I went to work. I showed up. I was an overachiever who was absolutely exhausted by the performance of being fine.
On the weekends I was drinking two bottles of wine by myself. That is how bad it got.
Spring Break 2023. Everything Changed.
My son was born in 2021. I lost weight during that pregnancy too, came back down to around 258, tried again to lose weight, and could not make it happen.
By March of 2023 I was 258 pounds and I was done.
Not done trying. Just done feeling the way I was feeling.
It was spring break. My husband and I had been talking, like really talking, about how unhappy I was. We had gone to Vegas in January and I got dressed up and I felt okay but I did not feel like myself and it had been sitting on me ever since. He brought up Red Mountain Weight Loss, a clinic here locally, and I told him we could not afford it. He said we would figure it out.
So on a Friday of spring break I walked in.
I had never heard of semaglutide before. I did not know what a GLP-1 was. They introduced me to a sublingual version, a small pill you dissolve under your tongue every morning, and I signed up immediately.
On March 29th, 2023, I took my first dose.
That night I went home and got on TikTok and searched everything I could find about GLP-1s and semaglutide and by the time I fell asleep I had more hope than I had felt in years.
What the First Year Actually Looked Like
The food noise disappeared almost immediately.
I know that is not everyone’s experience. For some people it takes weeks. For me it was fast. Within the first month I had lost 9 pounds and for the first time in my adult life I ate a normal sized meal and just stopped. I was not thinking about what I was going to eat next. I was not snacking all day. I was not overeating.
I did not even realize how loud the food noise had been until it went quiet.
I switched to injections after the first month and kept going. The side effects were real, sulfur burps and digestive issues, which as a teacher are not exactly easy to manage. I ended up staying at a lower dose for most of my journey because when I tried to go higher the side effects got too uncomfortable. So I just stayed where I felt okay and kept going.
By September 2023 I was down to 223 pounds.
Then I stalled. I took three weeks off for a trip to Hawaii and came back struggling to get momentum again. My brain decided that meant the medication was not working and I made the very impulsive decision to switch from semaglutide to tirzepatide because everyone online was saying it was so much better.
I will say this clearly and I will keep saying it. Semaglutide is an incredible medication. I lost most of my 75 pounds on semaglutide. If you are thinking about starting and someone is telling you that you need to go straight to tirzepatide, please know that is not true. Start where it makes financial sense for you. It works.
I hit Onederland on April 20th, 2024. The 100s. After years of trying I finally saw a number that started with 1.
The Year Everything Shifted
2024 was slow on the scale. I lost about 22 pounds the entire year.
But 2024 was also the year I started to figure out who I actually was outside of the weight. I started wearing clothes I liked. I started looking in the mirror without immediately looking away. I found this community, women who were on the same journey, who were going through the same thing, who got it without me having to explain it.
I ended 2024 at 193 pounds.
2025 was even slower then 2024, but I keep going. I keep showing up.
Where I am now…
I started 2026 at 185. I still have about 40 pounds to go. I still have not hit my goal. And I am still going.
Why I Started Sharing All of This
I started posting on TikTok on March 29th, 2023, the same day I took my first dose. I have no idea why I did that on day one. I think I just wanted to document it for myself and figured if no one watched it that was fine.
People watched it.
And then more people watched it. And they started sharing their stories with me and asking questions and telling me that something I said made them feel less alone and I just kept going.
I am a teacher by day. I do this at night and on weekends. I am not a coach. I am not an expert. I am a woman who is three years into a GLP-1 journey and still has weight to lose and refuses to pretend otherwise.
I started The GLP1 Girl Code because I could not find content that spoke to where I actually was. Everything was before and afters and huge transformations and people who had already made it to the finish line. I was somewhere in the middle, stuck and struggling and still figuring it out, and I needed someone to just be honest about that.
So that is what I try to be.
Three years in. 75 pounds down. 40 to go. Still going.
And I am really glad you are here.
Come Be Part of This
If this is your first time here, welcome. I post here on Substack every week and this is where I go the deepest.
Every Friday paid members get a deep dive post that goes further than anything I share for free. Right now I am building out a full cycle series, individual posts on every phase of your menstrual cycle and how it intersects with your GLP-1 journey, your hunger, your weight fluctuations, your workouts, all of it. It is the stuff I wish someone had told me years ago.
If you have been sitting on the fence about becoming a paid member, this is me personally inviting you in. This is the space where you should never feel alone.
Come be part of it. The link is right below.
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I also want to say how great you have done. I know you do not feel done yet but the visual transformation so far is still HUGE and one to be proud of. I relate to much of your story in how you felt emotionally. And the "decade of trying"....yup I was there too.
I love seeing all the pictures!