What I Eat (& Don’t Eat) on GLP-1s

In April, 2022,16 months before I started Mounjaro, I had an epiphany.

I was lying in a hospital bed, weighing 405 pounds, discovering the damage that having COVID had done to my heart and lungs. I’d been fat my whole life except for one time after my RNY Gastric Bypass for about a minute and a half in 2001.

Two cardiologists and an electrophysiologist, a highly specialized cardiologist, were talking about my case at the door and I had IV lines, cords, monitors, and oxygen surrounding my body. I felt horrible.

When I was younger, I had been told a thousand times that I would get diabetes. So what… everyone in my Latin family has diabetes. No big deal. You take insulin and on you go. After I got diabetes at 35 years old, the mantra began to be, “You’re going to die from being so fat.” Again, so what! We all die. So I die fat, whatever.

The electrophysiologist in my room, Dr. Shravan Ambati, stood leaning against the door jamb and said to me, “You will change your life or you will live in a nursing home.”

In one instant, I was transported to a nursing home, 400+ pounds in a big wheelchair, sitting in a hallway against the wall with dozens of other 400+ pound people. Then I saw myself lying in a bed with a nurse’s aid who hates her job having to wipe the poop from my butt, help me pee, lift up my pannus to clean the intertrigo so it wouldn’t get so infected I would need antibiotics. I could smell the rotten scent of yeast that would waft from my underbelly, grossing out the person cleaning me.

I came back to my Self in the bed and in that second, my life changed.

With a crack of lightning, Dr. Ambati transformed my life.

What I Stopped Eating, Pre-GLP-1s

I’ve been a mostly vegetarian or vegan for decades. During this hospital time, I was a vegetarian. Yes, a 405-pound vegetarian. These are the things I stopped eating on April 22, 2022.

• Uber Eats: After Dr. Ambati made his prediction, I immediately stopped ordering Uber Eats. Almost two years later, I still do not eat any food delivery. I have also eaten in restaurants only a handful of times since April 2022.
• Salt: Because of the Diastolic Heart Failure I was diagnosed with in the hospital, I instantly quit eating salt. I also bought whatever low-salt groceries I could find.
• Fried Foods: Not eating take-out/bring-in food removed fried foods from my diet.

In the four months between stopping Uber Eats and starting Trulicity, I lost 40 pounds.

I Did Have One Extra Helper

On April 21, 2022, I got my dentures. A week earlier, all my teeth were pulled. The day I went into the hospital, I didn’t even know how to put my teeth in. Using dentures is a learned skill and it took me some time. Even still, I have never learned to keep the bottoms in, so I only wear my top dentures. I’m hoping to get implant dentures by the end of 2024.

But not eating certain things has benefitted from my only having uppers. I can’t eat crunchy things at all. No raw veggies (a bummer), no chips, nothing I have to bite through, no cookies (it was wild that first Girl Scout season not having Thin Mints!), no hard tacos, and many other things that crunch in your mouth.

While I miss several foods, mostly harder vegetables, I have welcomed my limitations.

Eating on Trulicity

When I went on Trulicity, I thought it was a replacement for insulin. I did read the package insert and saw that it helps lower glucose, but didn’t know it was a GLP-1 until after I was off of it a year later. I lost 86 pounds during my year on Trulicity, not knowing that it was helping. Again, I read the package insert and this is what it says:

Trulicity is not a weight loss drug. In studies with other diabetes medications, weight change in adults ranged from +0.4 lbs to −10.1 lbs.

If you read that, would you remotely think you might lose 80+ pounds? Certainly not me! It says, minus ten pounds! Weight loss never happens for me with any medications that aren’t specifically for losing weight, so I blew it off. Twenty years ago, when I went on Risperdal, a psych medication, I gained 80 pounds in four months. I have been off it for about ten years. When Risperdal is going to be prescribed for me now, I will try any newer medications they can offer instead of taking Risperdal again. If it came down to my life or Risperdal, I would take it, but 80 pounds in four months traumatized me. I want to write a post about GLP-1s and weight gain with psychiatric medications. Soon.

So, while on Trulicity, I ate basically the same as I had been since my epiphany. No take out, order in, minimal restaurants.

About six months in, my cardiologist said I was so much better they didn’t need to see me for a year. I asked if I could eat regular foods instead of low-sodium and they said within reason… still nothing fried, even from the grocery store. Before all of this, I was a salt-o-holic, yet stopping salt, which included throwing out the salt shakers and box of Morton Salt, was not difficult because it was going to help save my life.

I began adding things into my diet. Prepared, microwavable foods. While I wasn’t eating low-salt, I was watching my salt intake and didn’t eat anything with over 400 mg of salt per meal. Lots of veggie steam bags and beans and rice. I also made a lot of salads without lettuce, eating berries instead of carrots. I love beets, so had a lot of those, too. I threw cut grapes and cut strawberries in my salad, too. The base would usually be plain pasta or rice. The dressing I used, and still use, is Panera’s Low Sodium Balsamic Vinaigrette.

And Then Came Mounjaro

When my daughter told me she was on Mounjaro in August 2022, I asked what that was. She told me all I needed to know and I quickly looked it up. How did I not know about this medication or this class of medications for diabetes? Because I do not watch TV. Or commercials. Or read magazines. Or listen or read the news. I am not on social media.

Years ago, my psychiatrist and therapist told me to quit watching the news because it was probably causing a lot of my depressive distress. I had been addicted to the news, watching every horrible thing going on night and day. When I was able to pull away, they were right. My mood lifted considerably. The last thing I changed was leaving social media. I did that in 2016. Election time. I kind of live with my head in the sand, yes, but if I need to know something, someone will tell me.

So this is how I knew nothing about GLP-1s; Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro, or even that Trulicity was a GLP-1.

I called my endocrinologist and she said the pre-authorizations were hard to get through, but she tried once and it worked. I went off Trulicity for three weeks before starting Mounjaro. It was then, my education zoomed into high gear.

And here we are!

Back to Food During Mounjaro

I have been eating so much less on Mounjaro than Trulicity. I have to actively make myself eat. My main staple is Tyson Grilled Chicken with a small bit of BBQ sauce, Chick-Fil-A sauce, or Honey-Mustard dressing. The lack of variety doesn’t even bug me. I was eating the Lean Cuisines and Healthy Choices but got out of that for a month or so. I just bought more because I really need to eat something besides chicken, vegetable soup, and cottage cheese.

I know most people make their own food and that is fantastic, but for varying reasons, I cook in a microwave, so prepared meals are what I eat.

Even though I was a vegetarian when this excursion began, once I realized I was losing muscle on Mounjaro, I made the choice to add poultry. I tried tuna fish and salmon, but it didn’t thrill me without mayo and bread and I have zero desire to eat bread anymore. Hilarious for a former carb addict!

I am still not eating any take-out or delivery food. I haven’t had fried food in probably a year now. I don’t eat sweets at all. Easter, Halloween, and Christmas all passed me by without a piece of candy, fudge, cake, or pie going into my mouth. It isn’t because I was barring myself from eating them, they were just nothing to me. 

I know some people get wigged out by the lack of desire for food. But I have craved, and eaten what I’ve craved, for 60 years. I think it’s just fine if I finish my years without eating sweets. Even brownies don’t appeal and I used to eat pans of those at one time. If I had to choose the cacophony of Food Screeching or Food Aversion, I’ll choose aversion every day of my life.

Listening to other GLP-1ers talk about the holidays was interesting. Some took the “Ozempic Vacation” and went off the meds so they could eat all they wanted. But many stayed on the medications and their hunger and food intake was limited… and they didn’t mind at all. Many even had some pie. Not the whole thing, not even a whole piece, but enough to satiate them.

THIS IS HOW REGULAR PEOPLE EAT!

People without obesity or overweight don’t have that food noise most of us have. It was always hard to understand how they could ignore something I could not resist.

It is utter bliss to be able to stop eating when I’m full. A joy to know I no longer have to be ashamed of what I put in my mouth. I don’t have to eat in secret anymore. I don’t have to hide candy. I don’t have to sneak food in the middle of the night. I don’t have to go to a drive-thru so I can eat three super-sized French fries before heading to lunch with the family. I don’t have to lie about my food choices. 

I also don’t have to “die-et” anymore. Dieting makes my heart hurt just thinking about it. It was suffocating, oppressive, cruel, and hopeless. Every time I started a diet, I knew I wouldn’t get through a week of it. My mind was on high alert for chances to eat and I could not control myself. It sounds so stupid as I write it. 

I’m a successful woman. I was a Licensed & Certified Midwife for six years and worked in the birth world for 32. I’ve owned a business. I learned a new language as an adult. I can succeed. With almost anything but math and food.

And now, with the GLP-1s Trulicity and Mounjaro, I have conquered food.

Math, I can live without.

 

all photos by Barb Herrera, except the last one