522. Why I Went On and Off GLP-1

Unless you’ve been hiding out in a cave, you’ve probably heard about or are using or know people who are using GLP-1 medications. This is an injection in most cases that people are taking that is allowing the body to release the hormone GLP-1, which is something we naturally produce, but it produces it artificially, which can help in reducing blood sugar and minimizing ultimately the amount of food that we need to feel functional and to sustain ourselves, which can be very healing and healthy for many people for many reasons.

But along with all the benefits, it is bringing with it a lot of controversy, a lot of thoughts, a lot of confusion, a lot of opinions, and I’ve been coaching on this a lot lately. I’ve coached many people who are considering taking it but have a lot of drama and noise about whether or not they should. I’ve coached people who are very against it, who got healthy the “hard” way and now have a lot of resentment. And I’ve coached on a lot of things in between that I’m going to address today.

So whether your drama is around GLP-1 or anything else, you’re going to be able to apply this to a lot of other areas in your life when it comes to difficult decisions and making peace with others not having the same opinion and really cleaning up your own story about whatever choices you make and having a lot of openness and compassion and understanding that other people get to decide what’s right for them.

Along with that, I want to be very transparent in sharing my own experience with GLP-1 this year. I’m going to tell you why I went on and off GLP-1. This is episode 522 of Better Than Happy. Let’s go.

Welcome to Better Than Happy, the podcast where we transform our lives by transforming ourselves. My name is Jody Moore. In the decade-plus I’ve been working with clients as a Master Certified Coach, I’ve helped tens of thousands of people to become empowered. And from empowered, the things that seemed hard become trivial, and the things that seemed impossible become available, and suddenly, a whole new world of desire and possibility open up to you. And what do you do with that?

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Hey there everybody. Thanks for joining me for this podcast episode. This topic has come up so much in Ask a Coach in The Lab and has been coming up more and more frequently on live coaching calls that we’re doing. And it’s something that’s been playing a big role in my life the last little while. And so I felt like in true transparency, I wanted to share my experience only by way of again being straightforward. And I do think there’s a lot of shame around this topic for people. I think the best way to minimize shame is to be more open and honest. So that’s my hope in sharing it. Not that my story is everybody’s story or that it should be your story.

But also, I think this is applicable anytime you have a decision to make that is somewhat controversial, that maybe not everybody in your life agrees upon and that has either way some pros and cons, which of course we run into those situations all the time, right? So that’s what we’re going to do today. I want to tell you that this is not a podcast that is pro or anti GLP-1. 

I am neither pro nor anti GLP-1. Both as a coach because I try not to be pro or anti anything as a coach. I try to help you discover what’s going to serve you best in your life. But even personally, my own opinion about GLP-1 and about many things actually is I get to decide what’s right for me, but I have no idea what’s right for anybody else.

So this is not a podcast episode that’s meant to sway you one way or another. You don’t need to send me – thank you in advance, but you don’t need to send me your literature or research or your thoughts on whether or not I should be pro or anti this drug. I don’t view it as my role to try to sway people’s opinions. So that’s not what we’re doing here. What I want to do is show you how to make a clean decision for yourself, especially around this topic, but again, around many others it might apply and how to deal with other people maybe not agreeing with you or how to clean up and make that decision from a clean place for yourself in the first place. That’s what we’re doing here today.

Okay, like I said, I’ve been coaching a lot on this and I just want to break down some of the coaching I’ve been doing and I’m going to offer it to you here in the best way that I possibly can. And then I’m going to share with you my own experience.

So, first of all, I tend to see people in two categories so far. Maybe there are others who are going to come up with different situations, but so far, I feel like the first group of people that I’m coaching are people who either have just started using it or want to use it for some reason. Something has prompted them for whatever reason they hadn’t considered it before. I’ve even coached people who were very outspokenly against it for all kinds of reasons. But now are considering using it. It may be that their doctor has recommended it or that it’s now become available to them and maybe it wasn’t available before, meaning they couldn’t get the prescription or it was not affordable and now there’s a more affordable option for whatever reason, they’re considering using it. 

I’ve had people say that somebody that they’re close to and that they trust has had a lot of success and is really loving it and it now is recommending that they use it and they’re really tempted to want to use it because of the success they’ve seen this person have. Success meaning they’re getting their health in check or they’re losing the weight or whatever goals they have, right?

And so again, for the people that are coming on coaching calls or writing into me who want to use it, there’s a handful of things and of course different ones for different people that are coming up. First of all, again, if they’ve been against it before, maybe they’ve spoken out against it somewhat publicly like on social media or maybe they’ve just in conversations with family and friends talked about why they thought it wasn’t a good option. Now they’re feeling like hypocrites. They’re feeling like, oh no, I said all these things and now I want to use it, what kind of hypocrite am I? So, is that hypocritical? Yes, but also no if you decide that what you’re going to do is tell the truth, right?

So, it’s one thing to say you shouldn’t use medications like this and then be using them. That’s definitely hypocritical. But if it’s, oh, I thought I felt this way about it, but I’ve changed my mind. An experience or a conversation or some more information or whatever has caused me to change my mind and I’m now actually going the opposite direction, which I didn’t expect at all. But that’s how I feel about it now. I’ve changed my mind. Did you know you’re allowed to change your mind? You are. 

And I think that we actually respect people more when they can admit, I think I might have been wrong about that. Or maybe I’m wrong about it now, but I’m choosing to try on a different opinion and a different approach and I want to change my opinion. I want to change my perspective. I even want to change my actions. I think that’s a very healthy human thing to do. As long as you don’t continue to keep up the facade that you feel one way when you’re doing something different.

You see what I’m saying? So again, this is a personal decision. I’m not saying you have to go around to everyone you ever talk to about it and say, hey, just so you know, but if you’re a very public person or maybe you have a business or you have a following online, it might be useful. It might feel like the right thing to do to publicly state that your opinion has changed. On the other hand, maybe not. Maybe it’s more personal or maybe it’s just when it comes up and it’s appropriate that you’re not going to lie about it, right? You’re going to tell the truth about it. So the difference between being a hypocrite and telling the truth is that a hypocrite is lying.

In other words, they’re saying one thing but they’re doing something different versus changing your mind is you had one opinion and you took one action and now you have a different opinion and you’re taking different action. And as long as you don’t lie about that or you tell the truth about that, then that is called changing your mind, which is a very healthy thing to do. We all I think would benefit more by being more open to changing our minds.

The next thing they say a lot is it feels like cheating. If I take this medication so that I can lose this weight or that I can get my blood sugars in check or whatever, that feels like cheating because we can also do all those things by eating the right foods and moving our bodies more and taking care of our physical health in the ways that we’ve been taught to by managing our urges and cravings and planning our food and doing all these things staying hydrated all that, right? will assist in all of that significantly and we many people achieve their health goals without ever going on a GLP-1 medication. So if I go on this medication is isn’t it cheating?

So I always tell people when I’m coaching on this, what is cheating to you? What do you mean by cheating? Okay? So if we think about someone cheating on a test, in my mind, cheating is doing something dishonest, right? Breaking a rule, violating some kind of a policy, etc. in order to get a result that I haven’t earned or deserved.

So if you take GLP-1 and now your body is artificially creating this hormone that makes you feel full. Let’s just simplify it into that. I know it’s much more complicated than that, but let’s say our body creates this hormone. Now I don’t desire as much food and so I don’t eat as much food. Is that cheating? I don’t see the dishonesty. 

Again, unless you’re lying to people about it, then I don’t see it as a violation of any kind of policy or rule. I see it as a tool that helps you then eat better. You still have to eat less food to lose weight. You still have to eat the right kinds of food at the right times or the right portions of food or whatever to regulate your blood sugar. It’s just that this is going to create a sensation of fullness, a sensation of not craving the sugars and things so that you don’t end up eating it. So you’re still doing the things, it’s just a lot easier to do because you don’t have the same level of hunger or cravings or urges.

I don’t know, that’s how I feel about it. Now, I had somebody else come on a call and say, okay, I heard you talk about that definition of cheating and I would agree with that, but I also think that cheating is being lazy, she said. So is this the lazy way?

Again, you get to decide that, but I will just say that in my opinion, as the world evolves, as we develop new tools, new technology, new medical discoveries, etc, that make it easier to create the result we want. You could call that laziness or you could call that using the tools.

I mean, we talked about using the GPS on your phone or in your car to get somewhere. Isn’t that cheating because now we don’t know how to read a map. I noticed this, my kids don’t know how to read maps, okay, because they never had to. We just plug it in the GPS and we just follow the directions and follow the blue line and it takes us right where we want to go. So they don’t know how to read a map. So is that cheating or is it utilizing a tool? Why wouldn’t I just read a map? Well, because I don’t need to because there’s GPS now.

Now, might I end up in trouble one time? Might the GPS go down or I don’t have it for some reason and now I need to get somewhere and I don’t know how. Yeah, maybe. That’s a risk, but is it a risk that we’re willing to take? For most of us, the answer is yes. We’ll figure out how to get there if we need to, but odds are we’re always going to have that GPS with us and so it’s okay that we’re not as great at map, right? And this is true in so many areas. 

Let’s take it to more of a medical example. If we’re talking about medicine, a couple generations ago, a few generations ago, they had babies the hard way, right? They gave birth without, they didn’t have medications, they didn’t have epidurals, they didn’t have all the luxuries we have in a modern day hospital to make it easier to deliver that baby and safer for both the mom and the baby. 

And to this day, there are some women who choose to have that baby that way. They’re like, I don’t need medications. My body is meant to have babies. It knows what to do. And they choose natural births, they choose home births, or they choose whatever kind of alternative birth. And then many people decide, I don’t want to do that. I don’t need to do that because there is a medication that makes it less painful and makes it easier. I’m going to go into the hospital, I’m going to get the epidural, I’m going to get hooked up to the machines and I’m going to do it that way.

Either way, beautiful. I’m not for or against epidurals either. I’m just saying, can you think of an example in your own life where you don’t have the same level drama around it? If you used an epidural and you feel fine about that, even though many people don’t use epidurals because there is risk, right? There’s a risk when we take when we get an epidural. There’s risk to us, there’s risk to the babies. That’s a risk that many people are willing to take. If you feel okay about that and you don’t call that laziness, you don’t call that cheating, what is the difference with this GLP-1 medication? And I’ll tell you what I think it is.

I think the difference is that, and I don’t remember where I heard this. I heard somebody else on a podcast describe it this way. I think it was like Kristen Bell, I want to say for some reason, but I don’t know. Anyway, that we still make physical health and bodies and weight a moral issue in so many of our minds. We have this morality tied to whether or not you’ve eaten well and exercise and taking care of your body or if you haven’t and you’re carrying extra weight or you have these problems. We have judgment of ourselves and other people about that. We make it a moral issue, an issue of goodness or strength or willpower or something like that. And I don’t think that’s serving us at all.

I don’t think that somebody getting, I think if you get lean and strong and healthy and you do it by really watching your food and changing your habits and all that, I think you should be so proud of yourself and grateful to yourself for doing that hard thing. But I don’t think that makes you a better person than somebody who doesn’t do that, who is unable to do that or just doesn’t choose to do it. And they’re less healthy for whatever reason, it’s not a moral failing. It’s just a challenge and it’s genetics and it’s so many other factors, right?

So I think that’s the problem here is when we label this as different. Why is this any different than taking medication to lower your blood pressure or whatever other medications people take? Why are we okay with that and we’re not okay with this one? That’s just a question I want you to ask yourself. I’m not trying to convince you to take it. I want you to first clean up your judgment about it, the morality you’re tying to it, and then decide whether or not you want to take it.

Okay? The other thing I hear from people considering or using it is a lot of fear. Fear like, will I be on it forever? And again, in coaching, I always say, I don’t know. Will you maybe? First of all, don’t forget, you don’t have to make that decision right now. This is a drug that you can go on and then go off and there’s no downside as far as we know anyway, to just going on and then going off of it. It’s not like the kind of medication that a doctor has to slowly wean you off of, etc. They may do that for various reasons, but it’s not necessarily dangerous if you don’t, right? As far as I know.

Will I have to be on it forever? Will I gain all the weight back? These are all future questions. What I try to remind people is first of all, when you think about your future, I want you to be empowered around it. I don’t want you to just go, will I gain all the weight back? Because that describes it as though it’s not in your control. It is in your control and I want you to just decide, I’m going to go on this and I want to make this a long-term lifestyle change. So I’m going to figure out how to make that happen. And maybe I decide to stay on it forever and maybe I don’t, but either way, I want to make permanent changes to my health and my routines and my habits and I want to get healthier here. 

And if this is a tool I decide I want to use, I’m going to use it, I’m going to try to use it in the healthiest possible way. I’m going to do whatever I need to do to make sure I’m also working on my habits and my routines and my health and whether I stay on it forever or not, I want to own my part and do what I can to contribute here. Do you see what I’m saying?

There’s also fear around what other people will think, right? And we spoke a little bit to that before and I really do think that when you clean up your own drama about it, your own judgment, maybe you’ve had judgment about it in the past, you got to clean all that up, my friend, because when you do, then it’s no big deal. There will be people who will have judgments of you because there just are strong opinions about this for all kinds of reasons. That’s okay. As long as you are confident and you’ve got your own back, then other people’s judgment is really not dangerous. I’m not saying you have to go tell everyone this, this is your business if you just want it to be your business. But when you clean up your own drama about it, other people’s judgment doesn’t become nearly as scary anymore.

And then of course, there’s side effects. I’m going to share with you what some of the side effects were for me, but the truth is everybody has their own experience. I’ve done a lot of research on this as I was on it myself, just trying to navigate is this common, is everybody having this experience and if so, what do we do about it and how long does it last, etc. But I’ve had some unusual side effects, I will say.

And the truth is we don’t even know what all the possible side effects are. We’re still learning a lot about this. It’s still new. We definitely don’t know what the long-term effects will be. So there is some risk involved. But again, that’s where you have to check yourself, I think, internally. You have to trust your own intuition. Get counsel from your doctor or whoever is going to prescribe this to you and talk to people about it and find out what people’s experience is. But when you clean up the judgment and the drama and you just gather information and then you do a gut check or maybe you’re prayerful about it, whatever you believe, wherever you get guidance internally, talk about it with people that you trust and love. And then I want you to trust in that. And the truth is there are long-term effects to not treating these issues that we have, right? 

So there’s going to be long-term effects probably either way. And here’s the best part. You get to decide. You get to decide if you’re going to be okay and you’re going to figure out whatever comes up or not. The way I go into something like this and the way I went into this decision myself was, I’m going to try to pay really close attention to what my body’s trying to tell me. And I’m going to be thoughtful and I get to revisit this decision over and over again. I did not make a lifelong decision in the beginning about whether I was going to be on this medication forever or whether it was going to be temporary. I just decided it was a tool that I wanted to try. 

So let me move into that part now. Let me tell you about my experience. Let me think, it’s July, so this would have been back in like February or March. I was working with a doctor at Midi Health. I love Midi Health. I highly recommend them and I’m not affiliated with them in any way, but I just had a good experience there.

So Midi Health specializes in women’s health, helping women navigate menopause and weight loss and things like this. So I started working with a doctor there and what I loved is that they ran a full hormone panel for me. I don’t know exactly what that means. I just know that with my other doctors that I’ve been to in the past, when they’ve done blood work, there’s a handful of things they look at. This doctor looked at three times as many different things going on in my body. I don’t even understand what the blood work said, but there were so many different things she looked at. I know because I took it into my primary care doctor later and he was like, whoa, this is really thorough. But I like that. I like her being thorough. She said, before we talk about, you know, getting your weight down a little bit or anything like that, I want to run your hormone panel because I’m 50 years old, probably getting close to menopause and she said, let’s just make sure that your hormones are all looking good.

So she did, she looked at all that and my estrogen looked good and my blood pressure looked good and everything looked good except for my glucose levels, which I suspected because that has been the hard area for me to manage. My blood glucose is usually high. It’s often high. And I’ve had some success in managing that with my diet by managing my diet. I use the Feel Great system, which I continue to use all through my GLP-1 experience. I’ll tell you about how that came into play in a minute and I still use it today, which is basically like a fiber supplement and a Unimate drink that I drink regularly. But in any rate, I’ve had some success with it, but still a constant battle, a constant challenge that requires a lot of my attention, a lot of discipline, and I tend to rein it in for a while and then it gets out of control again for a little while and it’s this sort of this constant yo-yo thing happening, right?

So anyway, she ran that full panel, she said, everything looks good, but your glucose levels are pretty high. I’d like to see you get a little bit more weight off and I’d like to get that glucose in check. Have you ever considered GLP-1? And I was like, maybe, I don’t know. I didn’t really know before. I think before when the medication first came out and it was really reserved for people that were already diabetic or things like that, I wasn’t a candidate for it. But she was telling me that now I was. 

And so I was like, I don’t know, I’m open to it. So we talked all about it. She was very thorough and explaining to me what benefits her patients have seen and what the research is showing and what the possible negative side effects are and what the risks are. And I felt like she did a really good job of sort of informing me. And I said, what do you recommend? She said, I think you would be a great candidate for it and you might just choose to use it for three or four months and give you kind of a boost and then we can take you off of it. And that’s kind of what I would recommend if you want to try it, let’s see. And I was like, cool, let’s do it.

I already personally had, I didn’t have a lot of judgment about it. I don’t view it as cheating or lazy or any of that. And it’s okay if you do. So if you’re in this situation, you’re going to have to clean up your thoughts about that. Bring it to me. I can help you, help coach you on it. But play with that in your head. And again, if you decide no, I don’t want to use it, cool. I love that for you. Okay?

I like you to go on, like I said, your intuition or your gut. I like you to be informed about it and to be open to both, open to both using it and not using it. Like really inform yourself from a neutral space and then make a decision. And the best reason to either take it or not take it is just because you want to or because you don’t want to. That’s it. That’s kind of the way our intuition or our gut works. That’s the way the spirit works for me too, right? It’s like, do this. No, don’t do that. It doesn’t go, here are the reasons why a list of one through seven points, a pros and cons. That’s not really how my intuition works. I don’t know about yours. It’s just like, I don’t know, I can’t describe it, but I just feel like I shouldn’t take that. Or I can’t exactly explain why, but I want to, even though part of me is not sure or thinks I should be doing this the hard way, I just kind of want to. Sounds like a nice to have an extra tool. That’s what this is. This is an extra tool. This is another tool, okay?

At any rate, so I went on it. Now, like I said, I continue to use the Feel Great system and I did, although I cut back a little bit on the amount of Unimate I was drinking. I didn’t need as much of it. I didn’t feel like I needed it at all and I had a harder time tolerating the taste of it while I was on GLP-1, but I upped how much balance I was taking. The balance is the fiber supplement and I will tell you that for me and most people, the GLP-1 messes a little bit with your digestion. So constipation, nausea, things like this are very common. And so I took lots of balance, which I’m so glad I had to help me just stay regular and I felt pretty good overall. Well, let me just explain first of all, the dosage for me.

Again, I just want to be fully transparent with you here. So I don’t know how your doctor regulates it or what your experience will be, but for me, my doctor was like, I like to start you on a very low dose and then we just see how you do and then we can up it slowly as needed and just see how you’re doing and how you’re feeling. So for my first month I was on a very low dose, I didn’t feel any different at all. I was even like, is this even working? Are we sure? Like what is this? Why am I still having these cravings and urges and whatever.

So we upped the dose after that. I think she doubled the dose. It still took a few weeks, I would I want to say if I can remember correctly, before I remember one day it was a Friday and I had taken my injection that morning and then I was working and whatever and then that evening we went to a movie with our kids and there’s a movie theater that we like to go to because we get food and take it in to the movie with us and I remember getting there, they have like a barbecue chicken pizza that’s not too bad for me that I’ll eat a piece of sometimes. That’s what I was going to do for my dinner. I remember getting there being like, I don’t want that. In fact, what do I want? And the answer was, nothing. I’m not hungry. I don’t want dinner.

I think I did eat a little something because I knew I probably needed to eat a little something. I don’t remember what I ate. I just remember thinking, I don’t want popcorn, I don’t want candy, I don’t want a diet Coke. I don’t really want, I just want a few bites of something and that’s it. And I was like, oh, I kind of feel not hungry, but also not great. Like a little bit maybe nauseated or maybe tired or like, I don’t know what I’m feeling, but that was the first time I remember feeling, I think this is the GLP-1. Here we go.

Okay. So after that, my dosage was upped a couple of more times. like every month we upped it just a little bit. She was just trying to make sure my body would get used to it. But what happened is rather than feel hunger, I would sometimes feel what I can best describe as nausea. I don’t know if this is everybody’s experience, but for me it felt very similar to the way I remember feeling when I was pregnant.

When I was pregnant and my hormones were all over the place, I didn’t experience hunger in the same way. I would just get this kind of nauseous sensation. I was like, I know what this is, this is because I haven’t eaten anything. And if I eat something, it will settle my stomach. You know how pregnant women are eating soda crackers a lot, right? Because of the nausea, settle the stomach a little by eating a little something. And so I experienced more, again, I’m calling it nausea, but it’s not the same kind of nausea as when I have the flu. It’s just like a little bit of an upset stomach kind of feeling.

My cravings were minimal. I was amazed at how people can bring dessert over and whatever and I could take it or leave it. I don’t really care about it to be honest. So people talk a lot about the chatter, the food chatter quieting down. That was definitely apparent to me. And because of all this, I was losing weight pretty quickly for me. I think I lost almost 20 pounds over the course of like two and a half to three months.

So food, not interesting anymore, right? I didn’t really care what we ate. If the family wanted to go somewhere and get food and they’d say, well, I want to go here, where do you want to go? Does this sound good? Does that sound good? I was like, you know what you guys, nothing sounds good and anything sounds fine. I really don’t care. We go wherever. I already knew I was only going to be able to eat a little bit of it. And then what would happen for me is I would be eating something, I’d have a few bites, I’d have, I don’t know, maybe half of a chicken sandwich or something and suddenly I would have that kind of gag reflex almost. Not that it was bad to begin with, it just wasn’t great, but if I take one more bite, I’m going to gag. I can’t possibly eat another bite of it. Just, I don’t know, I guess you’d say full, but not full like, oh, my pants are too tight. I ate too much food, just full like, I don’t want anymore of that. And so, again, when you feel that way, you just stop eating so much food.

When I did eat a dessert, because I still remembered that dessert is good, right? Even though I didn’t have the cravings, I still would see something go, I know that would probably taste good. And it did still taste good, but after about two bites, maybe three bites, I was completely satiated. And I started thinking, I wonder if people feel this way sometimes just on their own. I think my husband feels this way a lot. I think my son feels this way a lot. I think some people maybe naturally have higher GLP-1 where they’ll be like, I couldn’t eat another bite or I eat two bites, three bites and then I’m satisfied. I don’t need anymore. I remember being like, what are you talking about? It’s so good, why wouldn’t you just eat the whole thing?

So anyway, I started to experience that and along with that, I had like such a low appetite for food, but I also had a low appetite for things like shopping online or shopping in stores, which to me is a temptation. I’m a shopper. I like to buy clothes, I like to look at things online. That wasn’t very appealing to me anymore. Scrolling social media, whatever other habits, whether you want to call them good habits or bad habits, none of it sounded appealing to me anymore. I suddenly was just kind of like, meh about most everything. Now, so this is why they say GLP-1 not only helps with your food stuff, but it can really help with all kinds of addictions and habits.

Meanwhile, on a biological side, my glucose was leveling out. I know this because I wear a CGM. So even when I did eat a little bit of sweets or whatever, my body seemed to be releasing the right amount of insulin or using insulin more efficiently to move things out of my sugar into my blood. My glucose levels were so even, more even than I’ve ever been able to get them before, which was pretty amazing to me to see. So that’s good, right? 

My pancreas is working or something is working and I have been through gestational diabetes to the extent that I even was taking insulin shots with my last pregnancy. And did some medications before that, before the insulin. And any other thing that I’ve tried in the past, and not that I have a lot of experience with it, but in my little bit of experience in trying to get glucose levels down, there was always blood sugar lows that happened a lot, right? It was really hard to get the right amount of insulin or the right amount of medication and then eat the right amount of food. 

And so it would bring my blood sugar down but often too low. And you don’t want to be experiencing blood sugar lows. That is not fun or good for you either. This was different. I never had blood sugar lows. I mean it would get low enough that I knew I needed to eat, but not like dropping super low to where I had to hurry and drink juice or something like that. And it also never got real high. It was very leveled out, which was pretty amazing and really ideal, right? My A1C was really exactly where it was supposed to be.

So these are all the benefits. So why did I go off it? I’ll tell you why I went off it. There’s also negative side effects to being on GLP-1. And again, everybody’s different. so I’m not here to talk you out of taking it because a lot of my experience has not been the experience of other friends and family I know who’ve been on it. But this is just for me what the negatives were. I talked already about the nausea and the gag reflex. That doesn’t feel great, but it was doable. I could have lived with that forever if it were just that.

Another negative side effect for me was that my mouth constantly tasted like garbage. It’s the only way I can say it. Not just bad breath, I need to brush my teeth. I mean, that’s still a thing, but literally like the worst taste. I had to keep mints with me or gum all the time because I just always had, I don’t know how to describe it. It wasn’t necessarily a metal taste. It was just garbage. That got old. Like I’d wake up in the night and it was annoying. I first thing in the morning I’d get up and brush my teeth and just again, mints and gum all the time.

I mentioned my digestion. Again, if it hadn’t been for the balance supplement that I take regularly, which I still take, but that was like my best friend. I took extra of that. That might have been more of a problem if I didn’t have that.

Protein. It was harder for me to get enough protein because like I said, instead of hunger, I would feel that kind of like upset stomach feeling. And for me, when I feel that way, I don’t want to have chicken breast. I want to have a piece of white bread or a taco. And so when you’re not eating very much food and you’re still trying to get protein, which I was and I still am because I didn’t want to lose lean muscle mass, I didn’t want to lose bone density. I didn’t want to lose muscle. I wanted to lose fat. 

And if you’re not eating enough protein, then you’re losing the wrong kind of weight, right? I was not just trying to lose weight, I was trying to lose fat and I was trying to regulate my glucose. So eating a lot of protein is really important. And I was in a big calorie deficit, which meant I needed probably a higher percentage of protein and it was really hard to want to eat. It felt like protein and fiber are harder to digest and they just don’t sound very good.

So even like a lot of the protein things that I like, like a Fairlife shake, oh, I could barely stand the taste of it. Eggs, I used to eat a lot of eggs and egg whites and I could barely choke down an egg or an egg white. My taste buds changed and my cravings had changed a little bit or my desires, my food desires changed. So I was constantly battling that to get the right macronutrients and micronutrients in my diet. That was hard.

All of those things though, even this next one, I could have lived with, okay? Those were annoying things that I had to deal with, but I could have lived with them. This next one is a little bit bigger and then I’m going to tell you why I really ultimately made the decision to go off of it. So the next one is that my energy was so low. Now, again, this is common because first of all, you’re getting fewer calories and so your metabolism is trying to adjust and down regulate how much energy you’re outputting to accommodate for that. But I’m talking like I was so tired, sleepy. Again, the best way I can relate to it is how I felt when I was pregnant, where I was just like, I have to take a nap right now. I have to lay down and close my eyes. I’m so sorry.

So I got to where I had to take a nap every day, and then even then, I wanted to go to bed at 8:30 or so. And in between there, it was like moving through mud for me to show up in my life as a mother, certain activities I always have more energy around than others, of course, but just showing up in my life the way I wanted to was really, really hard. My energy was low. I was tired. I loved to lay on the couch during that time.

So this is the one that really made me decide, I’m not staying on this any longer than I really have to. And of course, I didn’t have to be on it at all, but I decided at a certain point to go off it because my desire for food had gone way down, because my desire for everything had gone way down. My desire for life was way down. I don’t mean that I had suicidal tendencies, I didn’t. I just didn’t care about anything. Everything felt like hard work. Little simple tasks I couldn’t bring myself to do. It almost felt like a depression, if you will.

I was like, yeah, I don’t care about food and I don’t care about shopping and I don’t care about my kids. I mean, I love my kids, but I don’t care what they do, whatever you want, kids. I don’t care about, like I just really was like, I don’t care about anything. I don’t have a desire for anything. I don’t have a hunger for anything. And that made me kind of depressed, if I’m being honest.

I started realizing how much I value desire, how healthy for me anyway, appetite is in my life. I’m not just talking about food appetite. I’m talking about appetite for learning, appetite for connecting with people, appetite for getting my house organized, desire, motivation, appetite. Those things make me feel alive, it turns out. Without them, I feel a little bit dead inside.

And then the final straw for me, and here’s the thing, a lot of times there’s an adjustment period to being on the GLP-1 according to what I’ve read. And so I kept thinking, okay, maybe I’m going to get more used to this. And I will say many of the side effects did get slightly less each month. They got slightly better. And maybe if I’d stayed on it longer at the same dosage amount, that it would have completely leveled out. Maybe I wouldn’t have most of those negative side effects. I don’t know. All I know is it was still bad enough at the end that everybody was getting on my nerves. It was requiring so much energy for me to manage my thoughts and manage my own emotions to not have everybody driving me crazy.

And I could do it. I know how to do it, but it was a lot of work. And mostly I wasn’t willing to do it because doing a lot of work when you have no energy or motivation or desire, super hard to do, right? And so at one point, I just decided, you know what, that’s enough. I’m done. I’ve lost a good amount of weight. I’ve got my glucose my glucose levels leveled out. And now I’m going to have to learn to maintain this. And I know that’s not going to be easy.

And that’s why I still have coaches, which by the way, I had coaches all the way through it. But I’m doubling down on my Feel Great system. I’m upping how much Unimate I’m going to drink because that helps tremendously with my glucose levels. I’m being really consistent because I gotten a little bit lazy with using it as consistently as I know I need to. So I’m not only consistent, I’m upping how much Unimate I drink every day. I’m really on top of my balance. I’m really watching when I eat food and what kind of foods I eat, but I just decided I wanted it back. I wanted my appetite back. 

I wanted my appetite for life, my appetite for people, my appetite for shopping, my appetite for food, all of it, even though I have to manage some of it, I just going off of it, I’ve only been off of it like a month now, and I already feel like, here I am. This is me again. Thank goodness.

I’m continuing to lose some weight because I’m really dialed in and watching everything. Like I said, I’m working with my coach. And I’m also staying really open. Maybe this is something I’ll decide to do every year. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll decide to microdose it. Maybe I’ll decide not to do it ever again. And maybe it was the jump start that I needed. I don’t know any of that.

All I know is for me, I don’t regret doing it. I’m glad I did it. And I also don’t regret going off of it. And that’s all I know for today. And when it comes to you and your decisions, and like I said, I hesitated to tell you this because I don’t want to give you limiting thoughts and I do believe that the placebo effect is a real thing. And so I will tell you like my lack of desire for life, I didn’t talk to very many other people that said they experienced that. Okay? So don’t go into it thinking that’s going to happen to you. It may not. I hope it doesn’t. I hope you don’t experience that the way I did. Most of the people I talked to experienced it a little but not anywhere near to the extent that I felt like I did. Okay?

So don’t go into it thinking that, but I just wanted to be real with you about my reasons for going off of it. Should you go on it? I don’t know. I think you should clean up your judgment of it, neutralize that you could go on it or not go on it. And it’s going to be a little bit hard either way. And what I do recommend is that we stop judging each other, okay? 

So for any of you that are like, I did it the hard way, or I don’t think we should be losing weight intentionally, or whatever your thoughts are, okay, about why you might have judgment of people on it. I want to recommend to you that’s not serving you. I absolutely want you to make your own decision. If you don’t want to go on it, cool, love that for you. Okay?

But the judgment we have of one another, whether we’re on it or not on it is not serving anyone. It’s really not. It’s continuing to contribute to the toxic messaging around bodies and health. Okay? So we need to neutralize that a lot. We need to understand that we still have a lot more work to do and understanding that this is not a moral issue. This is a personal issue, right?

I also want you to know that you don’t have to make a long-term decision today about whether or not you’re going to stay on it for life or just take it temporarily or how much you’re going to take. It’s sort of one of those things that if you do decide to try it, you’re going to see how you feel and you’re going to continue to make new decisions. That’s what I did every month. 

I almost went off it a couple of times, but then decided to give it a little longer and to see if maybe my body was still adjusting more. And finally at the end, I was like, I’m done. This isn’t worth it to me anymore. And I think you can trust that you’ll know that, right? Or you’ll know like, no, this is really serving me. I’m going to stay on it long-term or whatever you decide. Okay? And you can continue to consult with your doctor and professionals about this and run your blood work and make sure you’re making informed decisions.

I want you to know also that it will require work either way, different kinds of work. I do recommend that you have a coach that you’re working with, whether you’re going to be on it or not. Because not being on it and trying to change your eating habits, etc. of course is going to be more doable with a coach. But also being on it is more doable with a coach. It’s just going to be different work you’re going to be doing. I’m so glad I had my coach, Jen Pennell, and still do to this day. Okay?

And then finally, the one thing I would recommend, and I said this already, but I just want to bring it home, we got to stop judging each other. We don’t know what other people should do. We really don’t. We don’t know what other people should do in any area of their lives. We don’t know whether other people should go to church or not, whether they should take GLP-1, whether they should be on their phones when they’re at dinner with us. We really don’t. 

That idea has set me free because I don’t have to waste time in my head thinking about what other people should do. I get to use my head to decide what I want to do, who I want to be, and how I want to show up and how I want to love on people and how I want to best take care of myself. It’s such a better use of your brain. 

All right, thanks for joining me today everybody and for hearing my story. I hope it’s helpful to somebody out there and I will see you next week on another episode. Take care. Bye.

Oh wow, look at that. You made it to the end. Your time and attention is valuable, and I don’t take it lightly that you made it this far. In fact, it tells me you might be like me; insatiably curious about people and life and potential and connection. Maybe you have big dreams but a small budget and no time. You’re tired, but bored. You’re content, but dissatisfied. Sound familiar? Come to a free coaching call and see for yourself what’s possible: JodyMoore.com/freecoaching to register. That’s JodyMoore.com/freecoaching.