The Weight I’m Not Willing to Lose
GLP-1s didn’t fail me — they erased me. Here’s what I learned.
There’s this silence you don’t notice until you’re living inside it.
It’s not that beautiful winter hush that feels soft and intentional. This silence is hollow. It feels like being unplugged from yourself. That is where I found myself over the last several weeks.
When I wrote If This Is the Easy Way Out, I Want a Refund, I thought I had already reached peak frustration with GLP-1 medications. But this new chapter came with a plot twist I didn’t see coming.
August: Round Two
In August, my doctor convinced me to try Zepbound.
I need you to understand something: Zepbound is not cheap. It’s yet another medication that many insurances don’t cover, and makes you question every single purchase you’ve ever made. You know, the kind where you stare at the receipt and briefly consider selling a kidney.
But I said yes.
Again.
Because everyone says these meds are a “miracle.”
Because, apparently, forty years of diet culture weren’t enough.
Because when a provider you trust urges you toward something, you want to be a good patient.
Because I’ve tried everything else anyway.
So I tried it.
And just like Ozempic, I barely responded.
My food noise stayed loud.
My hunger stayed weird.
My weight stayed basically the same.
The only noticeable effect was nausea and a level of exhaustion that made me feel like I was dragging myself through wet cement ALL THE TIME.
I kept going anyway, because I’m stubborn, and because I wanted to believe it would eventually click. All the while knowing I was ignoring my own inner knowing.
November: The Dose Increase
In November, we upped the dose.
And at first, I didn’t notice anything—because that’s how the nothingness works.
You don’t feel the absence right away.
You just slowly forget that anything used to be different.
The first sign was sleep.
Suddenly, I was sleeping eight hours a night, sometimes more.
To most people, that sounds lovely. To me, it felt wrong.
I haven’t consistently slept eight full hours a night since I was in my twenties. I’m a six-hour person. My body wakes up fully charged and ready without an alarm. It has been my rhythm my entire adult life.
But on Zepbound, I didn’t wake up ready.
I woke up heavy.
Slow.
Blank.
Daytime naps made sense; that was clearly the medication, but the long nights felt different. They felt like a hard shutdown. I started wondering if I was depressed.
My brain wasn’t braining.
My mornings didn’t feel like mornings.
I didn’t feel like myself.
And that blankness spread.
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The Vanishing
I didn’t lose weight or hunger or cravings.
What I lost was myself.
Joy? Gone.
Creativity? Gone.
Excitement? Gone.
Intuition—my daily compass? Gone.
There’s a name for this: anhedonia — the inability to feel pleasure, motivation, or interest. It is a documented side effect of GLP-1 medications. Yet you won’t find it casually mentioned on the glossy brochures or TikTok success reels where everyone is glowing and saying the drug “changed their life.”
The part they don’t talk about is the emotional flatlining.
I felt disconnected from myself.
Disconnected from the world around me.
Disconnected from the part of me that writes, paints, dreams, imagines, senses, and knows.
I tried forcing it — writing, creating, reaching for that spark.
Nothing ignited.
Every attempt felt like a chore instead of a calling.
If I’m being honest, I was gone.
The Anxiety Disappears. That Should Have Been a Red Flag
One of the strangest parts was the quieting of my anxiety.
My normal baseline is severe health anxiety. Chest pains, shortness of breath almost every night, convinced I’m having a heart attack, hypersensitive to every sensation in my body. I’ve lived with this for so long that it’s practically a personality trait.
So when the anxiety softened, I didn’t question it.
I thought it was something I heard recently:
“Intuition is a statement. Anxiety is a question.”
Maybe I was finally learning to listen to my intuition. Maybe I was slowing down. Maybe this was emotional maturity. Who knows?
But now, looking back, I can see it clearly:
My anxiety didn’t calm.
It went mute.
Emotional sedation… chemical muting.
And as horrible as my anxiety is, I realized I would rather be anxious and creative than chemically numbed.
Because anxiety, at least, is alive.
It is movement.
It is thinking.
It is connection.
The nothingness was a coffin.
The Thanksgiving Breakthrough
It started to become clear the week leading up to Thanksgiving. I caught myself asking – out loud – at least eight times a day:
“What is wrong with you?”
I counted.
A few times.
Because if you’re going to shame yourself, you might as well track it, right?
And the question was certainly not coming from a place of curiosity; it was coming from that dark space of shame and self-blame.
By the time Thanksgiving arrived, I finally admitted what my body already knew: something external was shutting me down.
I wasn’t tired of life or depressed.
I wasn’t spiritually collapsing.
I wasn’t in a trauma wave.
I was being chemically dimmed.
Once I saw it, I couldn’t unsee it.
I knew then I was done.
The Cultural Noise No One Wants to Talk About
We are drowning in GLP-1 success stories.
They’re everywhere.
People talk about these meds like they are salvation.
“I feel normal again.”
“My cravings are gone.”
“This changed everything.”
“Everyone should be on this.”
(And I am truly so thrilled for each and every person these drugs work for.)
Yet, what you don’t hear is:
“It didn’t work for me.”
“It made me feel like a ghost.”
“My brain shut down.”
“I felt like a stranger in my own skin.”
“I wasn’t myself.”
And underneath all of that is an unspoken accusation:
If it doesn’t work for you, you’re doing something wrong.
And when your provider tells you it “should” work especially well because you have PCOS and insulin resistance, the guilt gets even louder.
But here’s the truth I needed to learn the hard way:
Every brain is different.
Every body is different.
We don’t have enough studies on people with ADHD, Autism, AUdhd, anxiety disorders, sensory processing differences, or the unique ways neurodivergent brains respond to these type of drugs.
Maybe I wasn’t exaggerating all these years when I said my brain was “different.”
My body knew from the beginning.
I knew from the beginning.
And I let myself be talked out of my own knowing.
Twice.
So I Stopped the Medication
Maybe I’m just meant to have a bigger body.
For some people, that will sound like giving up.
It isn’t.
I have been in the “obese” category for forty of my forty-eight years.
I’m not wasting another day shaping my life around other people’s opinions of my size.
I’m not carrying their projections anymore.
I am tired of apologizing for it.
I am tired of caring about what other people think.
I am tired of hearing, “I just worry about your health,” when people are actually worried about the optics of my health.
Let me worry about my own body.
Let me decide what health looks like for me.
Yes, I’d like to lose weight.
Yes, I’d like new clothes that fit differently.
But not at the cost of my mental health.
Not at the cost of my creativity.
Not at the cost of my actual self.
Facing My Doctor
I love my provider.
I trust her.
I am honest with her.
And I already know she will be disappointed when I tell her I stopped the medication.
She won’t hide it.
But honestly? That’s not my problem.
I want her to hear, really hear, that despite what the drug reps tell her, despite the marketing, despite the hype, these meds do NOT work for everyone.
And it is not the patient’s failure when they don’t.
The Return of My Brain: A 4:00 am Resurrection
My last injection was the Saturday before Thanksgiving.
About a week ago, ten days after the last injection, I woke up at 4:00 am.
And there it was:
My brain.
Fully awake.
Fully spiraling.
Fully alive.
Holiday to-do lists.
Three tasks I forgot to write down.
The sudden realization that I need to get moving on planning a yard sale.
The urge to tear up the flooring in my studio.
The six articles waiting to be written.
Conversations from the day before replaying at full volume.
Everything.
All at once.
Like a flock of birds returning.
A full, chaotic, overthinking mind.
And I whispered into the dark:
“I think I’m back.”
I never thought I’d celebrate the return of my anxiety, but here we are.
Because at least my brain was mine again.
My creativity sparked immediately.
I knew I needed to write about this. About the silence, the nothingness, the return.
The Weight I’m Not Willing to Lose
The weight of my self.
My mind.
My spark.
My intuition.
My voice.
My creativity.
My aliveness.
My humanity.
That is the weight I’m unwilling to shed.
For anyone.
For anything.
Especially not for a medication that promises ease but delivered emptiness.
If this is the easy way out, I’ll take the hard way.
Gladly.
Because at least on the hard way, I’m awake. At least I’m me.
Love today,
Heather 🌸
Again 🎤💥