It usually happens on a Tuesday.
Not the first Tuesday. Not the exciting Tuesday when the medication arrives. Not the Tuesday when three pounds disappear overnight and you spend the rest of the day quietly wondering whether this might finally be the time everything changes.
A later Tuesday.
A completely ordinary one.
The kind that begins with a sink full of dishes, an email you forgot to answer, and a number on the scale that seems determined to stay exactly where it was last week. Nothing terrible has happened. Nothing particularly good has happened either. And yet something inside you feels tired.
Not physically.
Existentially.
You have been carrying the same hope for a very long time.
That gets heavy.
the women nobody writes about
Especially if you are a woman who has done this before.
And before.
And before that.
Most women on a GLP-1 are not beginning a weight loss journey. They are returning to a conversation they have been having with themselves for decades. They are bringing years of history into this experience. Old diets. Old promises. Old disappointments. Old versions of themselves who were absolutely certain they had found the answer this time.
That is what makes this different from the stories we usually tell.
The internet loves the woman at the beginning. The meal prep containers. The new walking shoes. The fresh notebook. The declaration. The plan. Beginnings photograph well. They fit neatly into before and after culture. They create momentum and optimism and the comfortable illusion that transformation happens quickly once the right decision is made.
Nobody pays much attention to the woman standing quietly in her kitchen six months later wondering whether she has enough left in her to keep believing.
But that woman is the story.
She is the entire story.
Because if you zoom out far enough, weight loss is not really a story about food. Food is simply the most visible character.
The real story is something far less measurable and far more human.
the real story is hope
The older I get, the less interested I become in food as the central explanation for everything.
Food matters. Movement matters. Sleep matters. Stress matters.
But underneath all of it is something that does not get nearly enough attention.
Hope.
How many times can a person lose hope and find it again? How many times can a woman decide she deserves another chance? How many times can she look at the evidence from every previous attempt and still choose to believe that her future does not have to look exactly like her past?
Those questions interest me far more than calories ever could.
Because hope has weight.
Not physical weight. Emotional weight.
And women who have spent years trying to change their bodies carry enormous amounts of it. Every new attempt asks them to believe something difficult before they know how the story ends. It asks them to invest emotionally before there is proof. It asks them to trust a process before the results arrive. It asks them to remain open to the possibility of success after collecting years of evidence that seemed to point in the opposite direction.
That is not easy.
That is brave.
And I want to say that plainly because nobody else seems to be saying it.
the kind of courage nobody talks about
I think about this often when people talk about discipline.
Discipline is rarely the thing that impresses me anymore.
Starting over impresses me.
Starting over requires a particular kind of courage that does not get nearly enough attention. Not the dramatic courage we celebrate in movies. Not the courage that arrives with applause and recognition and a visible finish line.
The quieter version.
The courage of showing up after disappointment.
The courage of believing yourself again after you swore you were done believing.
The courage of making dinner that supports your goals after a day that felt like proof nothing is working.
The courage of buying vegetables after twenty years of broken promises to yourself.
The courage of taking the injection when part of you is terrified to hope too much.
The courage of continuing when there is very little evidence to support your optimism.
That is the word I keep coming back to.
Continuing.
Because continuing is invisible.
Nobody congratulates continuing. Nobody throws a party because you logged another ordinary Tuesday. Nobody notices the decision not to quit. Nobody comments on the photo that does not exist yet.
And yet most transformations are built almost entirely out of moments exactly like that.
The quiet Tuesday ones. The ones that look like nothing from the outside.
the Invisible Phase and the practice of belief
I sometimes wonder if the women who ultimately get where they are going are not the women with the most motivation.
I wonder if they are simply the women who learn how to survive their own discouragement.
The women who stop treating doubt as a stop sign.
The women who understand that belief is not something you have once and then keep forever.
Belief is something you practice. Something you rebuild. Something you return to repeatedly, especially when the scale is not cooperating and the evidence is thin and you are standing in your kitchen at 6am wondering why you are doing this.
Maybe that is what the Invisible Phase really is.
Not the absence of progress.
The period where you learn whether you can continue without constant evidence.
The season where your identity begins changing before your body does.
The stretch of road where nobody can see the work except you.
When people imagine transformation they usually imagine visible change. Smaller clothes. Lower numbers. Photographs that make the difference obvious. Before and after. Clean and clear.
What they rarely imagine is the person becoming someone who can continue.
And yet that may be the most important transformation of all.
Bless our hearts for thinking it was always going to be the number.
maybe you are not starting over
If you are reading this today feeling tired of beginning, tired of hoping, tired of waiting for proof that this is working, I want to offer you something different.
Maybe you are not starting over.
Maybe you are continuing.
And those are not the same thing.
Starting over suggests everything that came before was lost. That the attempts did not count. That the woman who tried and fell short and got back up anyway was wasting her time.
Oh no. We are not doing that.
Continuing says every version of you still matters. The woman who tried. The woman who stopped. The woman who learned something even when the lesson was painful. The woman who got back up when she had every reason not to. The woman who is reading this right now on what might be a completely ordinary Tuesday.
All of them are part of this story.
All of them brought you here.
Which means this Tuesday is not the beginning.
It is one page in a much longer book. A book that has survived disappointment. A book that has survived doubt. A book that has survived every previous ending you thought was final.
And if you are still here, if you are still willing to believe that change is possible after everything that came before, then the most important thing about you is not that you started again.
The most important thing is that you continued.
Slow still counts.
We stay.
Nyk
Have you ever mistaken continuing for starting over? Tell me about a moment you almost quit but did not.
And if this landed for you, share it with a woman you know who is in the quiet part of her journey. She needs it more than she will say.
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Your article touched me deeply. I “started over” through WW at 10, through bariatric surgery at 22, through Phen-fen in my 30’s, roux-en-y at 42, and a GLP-1 at 68. It felt like I was fighting for my survival, for relevance. A GLP-1 is the first time I have truly felt “hope” without panic.
Nykki, wow. This one has resonated with me deeply. And I think the nerve you touched was hope.
I’ve been doing this almost my entire life. As a kid I was told I was fat and eating was also restricted from allergies. By my teens I was searching for diets myself—the beet diet (I still can’t eat beets 😂), crazy low-calorie diets, the no-fat-everything era. I dieted so hard I lost my hair and, at 18, my gallbladder… then I moved to binging.
Years of therapy. Prayer. 5x Weight Watchers, Optifast, Medifast, juice diets, denied medical surgeries… I lost weight and regained it during years of stress and injuries, recovered and went at it again. My closet actually has three eras of me in it—sizes 22–28, 14–18 and 8–10.
And the exercise! Aerobics, gyms, power walking during lunch and after work. After years of memberships, I basically brought the gym into my house. 😂 I have equipment everywhere. Elyptical, spinning bike, cable machine, A TRX hanging on the guest-room door, PT bands all over the place, a shoulder pulley hanging from the coat closet because if I SEE the darn thing I’ll USE it. I’ve spent decades exercising, getting injured, doing the PT, recovering and finding another way to move.
And you know what? I’m proud of that woman. I’m proud of that tenacity.
But I also see now how much of that tenacity was mixed with willpower, obsession and white-knuckling. I was constantly working a program to the extreme. I could lose weight since I’ve done it over and over. But usually by a year I was just… exhausted.
I was at war with myself.
I just passed one year on Zepbound, (yay!) and THIS is what feels so different. My tenacity didn’t go anywhere. But with the food noise so quiet, I don’t have to use all of it fighting myself anymore.
I have room for my life. I’m finding balance and joy again. Being retired certainly gives me more time too! But I’m not white-knuckling this anymore.
Instead of waking up exhausted from trying to keep the whole thing going, I still wake up with hope that I get to continue.
THAT is what your words gave me. All these years I thought I kept starting over. Maybe I never was. Maybe I’ve been continuing all along.
And maybe the part that amazes me most, 50 years into this journey, is that I haven’t run out of hope.. I have more ❤️