Well, this was unexpected

I started on a GLP1 a couple of weeks ago. I talked about the reasons for starting it in depth on my daughter’s podcast recently, so if you want to hear our conversation, please feel free to listen here:

But the truly fascinating part of this medication for me (I’m on Tirzepatide, by the way), is that the food noise that I’ve battled for more than 10 years has instantly disappeared. It disappeared with the first shot I took. It’s just… *poof*. Gone. I took the shot on a Thursday and by Sunday, I had to get away from the beach. What I mean is I needed to be alone for a bit. Yes, I had a pinched nerve and needed my chiropractor at home to treat me. But more than that, I needed some solitude to process what was happening in my brain. I was having trouble understanding why I was thinking all sorts of new things that hadn’t been there in a while. But now after a full week of quiet and self-reflection, I can see it now. And it’s really weird. Let me try to explain.

Let me start with the food noise bit. That wasn’t always there for me. For most of my life, I’ve been relatively thin and didn’t have to really worry about food all that much. I was 5’8” at my peak height (shrinking a little now, down about an inch) and my typical weight was about 125lbs until I had kids. I fluctuated up and down within 15 pounds of that for the next 15 years, but never really had to think about my weight or my diet. Once I hit age 40, I started running and strength training with more purpose and that got very lean and strong. And I thought I was setting myself up for a healthy future that way. Perhaps heading into perimenopause was NOT the right time for me to be doing that, but I did. And as I increased my mileage and eventually ran a full marathon at age 46, that’s where I started to run into trouble. No pun intended. I talked more about this specifically in this post: https://karenskindle.beehiiv.com/p/perimenopause-menopause But I believe this is ultimately when my food noise was born. Food and eating and macros became an obsession after my doctor recommended that I “eat less and move more” when I actually started gaining weight while training for that marathon. I went from intuitively knowing exactly what to do to fuel myself properly to having absolutely no idea what I was doing when it came to nutrition. And that was in 2013. So now here we are in 2025, 12 years and 55 additional pounds later. And after one shot, this entire inner dialogue has been silenced, like a switch was flipped.

Having this “food noise” switch flipped off like that, all of a sudden I could hear other thoughts again. It’s almost like parts of me had been stifled or silenced for the last decade and were now finally able to make their way out. Now that I’ve had time to reflect on the first few days after taking that shot, I see now that I almost felt unsure of what was happening in those first few days. I was so glad to be rid of that part of my psyche, but I wasn’t at all prepared to address what would be taking the place of this inner dialogue in my head, if that makes any sense at all. It was like I was suddenly hearing from a long lost friend.

It seems like my brain has a lot of other things to catch up on now that thoughts about food is out of the way. There’s a whole new pathway for thoughts and feelings and emotions to finally be heard and felt and lived that had been just stuck under this blanket of “food noise” for years and years. But I can say this: I’ve had a GREAT time catching up with myself! I’ve been out in the world again, catching up with friends. I bought a piano (!) and I hadn’t had the urge to play the piano for about, oh, 12 years. Suddenly I’m dying to play again. I haven’t turned on the TV once (not all that unusual for me, honestly) but I’m having so much fun listening to my own thoughts that I don’t want to interrupt the flow of information in my brain with books of music or anything. I’ve missed ME a lot, and if this keeps up, this could be an interesting journey. I’ll keep you posted!

Love, Karen