I counted them once. There were twenty-three. That’s just the ones I remembered. The actual number is probably higher because I’m sure I’ve blocked some out.
Twenty-three different approaches. Twenty-three different sets of rules. Twenty-three different versions of me who started on a Monday with a lot of conviction and a fresh notebook.
I’m a year into GLP-1 now and it’s the first time in my adult life that I have not been planning the next attempt at the back of my mind. Not because I’ve ‘arrived.’ I haven’t. I’m still in the middle of things. But the part of me that used to be perpetually drafting the next plan has gone offline. That part of me, it turns out, was exhausting to host.
The pattern was always the same
Week one, full of certainty. Week two, slight slip. Week three, recovery. Week four, real slip. Week six or seven, total collapse, usually in front of an open refrigerator at midnight.
And then a quiet two-week period of pretending the diet hadn’t happened. Followed, eventually, by the discovery of a new approach and the cycle starting over. I could draw the chart. I have, in fact, drawn the chart.
The chart looks the same whether I was doing keto, low-fat, vegan, intermittent fasting, Weight Watchers, Noom, the one with the prepackaged meals, the one with the shakes, or the one where you weigh everything. Same chart. Different sticker. Same outcome. I should have noticed sooner than I did that the pattern was the pattern, not the approach.
I thought I was the problem
Twenty-three failures looks like a person failing. It looks like a character defect. It looks like someone who can’t commit.
It took me a long time to consider another possibility — that maybe twenty-three different approaches all failing on the same person, in the same way, with the same chart shape, might be telling me something not about the person but about the approaches.
My therapist, eventually, was the one who said it to me. She said, you’ve done the same experiment twenty-three times and gotten the same result. At what point do you start to think the variable isn’t you. That’s the sentence that got me to start looking into GLP-1 in the first place.
Yo-yo is the wrong word, actually
Yo-yo implies a kind of fun springiness. It implies it goes back to where it started. That isn’t what it does. It comes back higher each time. A little more weight. A little less hope. A little more exhausted body.
I don’t think anyone tells you about the exhaustion part. The being-tired-in-your-bones from starting over again and again and again. That kind of tired doesn’t show up on a scale.
What GLP-1 has done for me, more than anything else, is interrupt the cycle at the level the cycle actually lives at. Not at the food level. Not at the calorie level. At the biological-signal level. Which is a layer below where any diet I’d ever tried was operating. None of them were even fighting on the right floor of the building.
What broke the cycle for me wasn’t another diet
I’m careful here because I don’t want to make this sound prescriptive. What I’ll say is that the thing that broke the loop for me wasn’t a better set of rules. It was an actual change in what my body was telling me. Not in what I was telling my body.
Which is a small linguistic difference that turns out to be everything.
In all twenty-three diets, the move was the same: override the signal. Eat when you don’t want to. Don’t eat when you do want to. Power through the cravings. Win the willpower contest. With GLP-1, there’s no contest to win. The cravings are quieter. The fullness signal arrives. I’m not fighting my body. I’m cooperating with one that, finally, is making the right sounds.
Where I am now isn’t about a number
I don’t weigh myself every morning anymore. I don’t have a goal weight. I don’t have a plan that ends on a specific date.
That’s the part I would have laughed at, two years ago. I would have said, well that’s nice but it’s also not a strategy. And the answer I’d give past-me now is, you’re right, it’s not a strategy. It’s a life. They’re different things and I didn’t know that until I was in the middle of one.
If you’ve cycled through a lot of diets and you’re starting to wonder if the issue is the framework itself, not your failure to execute it — that’s a conversation worth having with a doctor who can actually look at the biology with you. GLP-1 isn’t a magic answer. But it is, finally, a different question. After twenty-three diets, a different question is exactly what I needed.
