I used to schedule the worst possible meetings between 2 and 4 in the afternoon and then sit there in a low-grade fog wondering what was wrong with me. Coffee didn’t help. A walk didn’t help. The crash was just the climate of those hours.
I thought it was age. Then I thought it was hormones. Then I thought it was just being a person.
It turns out it was none of those things. Or, more accurately, it was a thing I could have been doing something about for years and didn’t know I could. GLP-1 wasn’t sold to me as an energy intervention. It wasn’t sold to me as anything other than what it’s known for. But the afternoon fog is gone. And once I started reading about why, I felt a little robbed of all the afternoons I’d already written off.
The slump was a clue, not a personality trait
I’d been so used to it that I’d folded it into who I was. Some people are morning people. I was apparently a not-after-lunch person. That was just my whole deal.
It did not occur to me, for years, that the afternoon collapse might be telling me something specific. That it might be a symptom of something happening in my blood right after I ate. That it might, in fact, be fixable.
I mentioned the fog to my doctor at three separate annual physicals. Each time, the answer was some version of: you’re aging, try to sleep more, here’s a brochure about magnesium. Not one of them connected it to my eating patterns. Not one of them suggested it might be a glucose issue. It wasn’t until I started reading about GLP-1, and what GLP-1 actually does, that I started to understand what had been happening to me every afternoon for ten years.
What I was doing to my glucose without knowing it
I’m not going to pretend I understand all the chemistry. What I do understand, now, is that some meals were sending me on a small rollercoaster every afternoon. Up, way up, and then crashing down. The crash was the fog.
Nobody had ever explained this to me in those terms. I’d been treating the fog as the problem. The fog wasn’t the problem. The rollercoaster was the problem.
GLP-1, as best I understand it, slows down the rate at which sugar enters your bloodstream after a meal. Which means the rollercoaster gets flatter. Which means the crash is smaller. Which means the fog never quite arrives. Once I understood the mechanism, I could basically predict the change in my afternoons before it happened. And then it happened.
When the spikes calmed down, so did the afternoons
I’d love to tell you about the dramatic morning I noticed. It wasn’t dramatic. It was just that, a few weeks in, I realized I’d done my whole afternoon without coffee and without the slump.
Which, when you’ve lived with a particular dragon for thirty years, is what success looks like. Not a fanfare. Just a quiet absence of the thing you’d assumed was permanent.
I told my husband. I had to explain it twice because he didn’t get why it was such a big deal. To him, an afternoon without a slump is just an afternoon. To me, it was the first one I could remember since maybe my mid-twenties. The reclaiming of an entire third of every day, all of it just handed back to me because my blood sugar stopped doing what it had been doing for decades.
Exercise stopped feeling impossible
The biggest unlock for me was a small one. I started taking walks in the late afternoon. Not workouts. Walks. Twenty minutes. Around the block, a couple of times.
In my old life, that twenty minutes was when I was draped over my desk. In my new life, that twenty minutes is when I get my best thinking done. Same person. Same hour. Different blood.
And because I’m actually exercising consistently now, the rest of the system has started to compound. My sleep has improved. My morning energy is better. I have, for the first time in years, a genuine appetite for the activities of my own life. None of this was specifically what GLP-1 was supposed to do. All of it is downstream of the glucose piece. The category they list this medication under doesn’t really capture what’s actually happening.
I’d written off so many things as just my age
Tired in the afternoons. Slow in the mornings. Stiff after sitting too long. I’d accepted all of it as the price of being in my forties.
Some of it probably is the price of being in my forties. But some of it, it turns out, was just a body running on a fuel pattern that wasn’t doing it any favors. Worth knowing the difference, I think. Worth asking the question, at least.
If you’re losing your afternoons to a fog you’ve been blaming on getting older, I’d gently encourage you to consider that the fog might be answering a different question than the one you’ve been asking. GLP-1 isn’t a stimulant. It isn’t an energy drink. But the side effect of stabilizing how your body handles food, for me at least, has been getting my own afternoons back. I don’t know how to put a price on that. So I’ll just say it’s been worth it.
