Some time, before third or fourth grade I think, I remember going back-to-school clothes shopping with Mom—not sure if my sisters were around or out with friends, or what—and we were at JCPenney. And we ran into a relative we didn’t see often—an aunt or cousin, I don’t quite remember, but if I had to guess, cousin. I don’t know what they were talking about, or what specific question got asked, but I remember Mom’s response (not word-for-word, but close enough)—“It’s baby fat, she’ll grow out of it.”
I was around ten then. Over thirty years later, I still remember that.
Yes, I was overweight. Yes, I remember often being told I would be pretty if I just lost some weight. Yes, I had well-meaning family making suggestions that were supposed to help. Yes, I tried all kinds of things to lose weight—it’s a miracle I never developed any form of disordered eating (planning to get back to this statement eventually).
In 2013, I got diagnosed with insulin-resistant polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS). Short, generalized synopsis—insulin helps control your blood sugar. Too high a blood sugar, you can become Type 2 diabetic. Insulin resistance is when your body overproduces insulin to keep your blood sugar in a normal range, and when it doesn’t know what to do with the excess, it stores as fat. To fix insulin resistance requires weight loss. Insulin resistance means that weight loss is very difficult to near impossible.
My blood sugar always came back on the high side of normal, sometimes touching but not passing the border for prediabetic—5.7 was the highest number I’ve seen on my bloodwork. When my insulin level was first checked, it was quite a bit higher than baseline.
Doctor put me on metformin. I’ve always tried to exercise and eat better, though I’m not always as consistent as I’d like—for various reasons—but consistent enough. My weight fluctuated up and down about five pounds, and it was a trial just to get that. Kept at it, and saw little change.
Also, insulin resistance can fuck with your lipids and cause metabolic issues. Yay. My lipids have been up and down, all over, and while they have shown up in the normal range, never all at once and never more than possibly twice in a row. If I’m lucky.
So, 2023, I’m at my annual exam, and my doctor asks if I’ve heard of Ozempic. This is after that year’s Met Gala, when rumors were flying of Kim Kardashian having used it to lose weight to fit into a Marilyn Monroe dress (and weren’t people pissed about the damage from that). So yeah, I’d heard of it. And decided that kinda this wasn’t something I wanted to do. Doctor said she thought I’d be a good candidate for it and asked me to think about it. So I did.
What I found—again, generalizing—is that Ozempic treats Type 2 by getting the body to produce more insulin to control blood sugar.
But my body already overproduces insulin—wouldn’t that not work right for me?
I started searching about GLP-1s and PCOS. And they’ve been used off-brand to treat PCOS for a while. And helping insulin resistance, getting lipids under control, and, obviously, weight loss.
Okay then. Messaged my doctor, and she referred me to an endocrinologist. The endocrinologist tried prescribing Ozempic, but that was right when everybody wanted to get it off-brand for weight loss. And insurance had started requiring prior authorization, as well as a Type 2 diagnosis. I got rejected. Tried to appeal, tried a peer-to-peer review. No go. Endocrinologist changed to trying for Zepbound, or Monjourno, because of the shortage issues. Again no insurance coverage. So I said I’d cover the out-of-pocket cost. $650 with the manufacturer discount. Okay, fine. I had plenty in my HSA. This all took place over the course of about a year.
Pharmacy said insurance preferred Wegovy. Told my endocrinologist, she changed the script (insurance still didn’t cover it), and I started Wegovy in May 2024.
Started slow—saw no real changes the first month, then about 2-3 pound loss a week. Cool. Hadn’t ever had anything work that well before. Course, the side effects sucked–and mine weren’t as bad as they can get. I got nauseated a lot. Threw up more easily than I ever had, and I gag really easily. Started getting some heartburn, and my nose got super runny—this can apparently be a sign of heartburn. But that excessive runniness/postnasal drip made me gag and throw up even more. Not ideal.
In December, endo switched me from Wegovy—I had been on the max dosage for a couple months and loss was slowing—to Zepbound. So May-Dec, on Wegovy, I lost 20.1 ponds.
Considering I had trouble losing/gaining the same roughly ten pounds for about ten years, That’s pretty good.
I’ve been on Zepbound for over a year now. As of mid-January, I’m down another 35.7. There’s been a bit of a stall the last few months, and up and down about three pounds, but a lot of that is likely stress—no job, unemployment ran out, debt to pay down, plus the holidays.
But I’ve been getting space cleaned and cleared—couldn’t get to my treadmill, much less use it, for most of the past year. That’s fixed, so I’m back to that, and starting to add in more strength exercises, cause I know I need that.
Doctor has a goal weight of 170 for me (not that she ever said that; I discovered it in the after visit summary), which is a BMI just below obese. I don’t have a goal weight–the weight loss is a side effect of getting healthy, and the bigger impact with it is feeling more comfortable in my own body. If I had any weight loss goals in mind, it would be getting to a size between regular and plus, simply because that’d give more options for shopping, and sometimes there’s clothes I’d really like to have only available in regular sizing (and I’m aware that a regular 3x isn’t the same as a plus 16–closest comparison going by measurement/size chart). Also, without double-checking, I might actually be in that size range, maybe. Huh.
Haven’t had blood work done in over a year, and not scheduled until Feb or March, so I’m not sure how well that’s going. Last check, improvement but not yet all where it should be, and no insulin check.
About a month ago, I went looking for comparison pictures, cause I could see some changes, but wanted a visual, and I’d lost in places that surprised me—like my shoulders.
The best change was that I was able to go clothes shopping in the same store as my sister, and have something I tried on not just fit, but be too big (I think that shirt might be too big now 🫤). Never happened before.
