I'm melting! Melting!

I thought about writing a setup post before writing this one, something that would explain why I'm doing this before actually admitting I'm doing it, because I feel ambivalent and a bit guilty about it. But the setup post was starting to get a little too coy, so I'll just say this right up front: I started on a GLP-1 (Zepbound) a little over two months ago. There. I said it. 

I was going to explain that I firmly believe that women can be healthy and active at whatever size they want to be. I absolutely still believe that there is way too much pressure on women to be thin. I am still in favor of you managing your health however you want to do it, whatever that means for you, at whatever weight you think works for you. All of that.

But. I kept reading about off-label uses of GLP-1s (meaning, improvements that people report that have nothing to do with the official, sanctioned uses of the meds, which are mainly for managing diabetes). And two of those off-label uses are for people who have experienced long covid, and people with chronic migraines. 

If you've been following along, you know that I had covid early on and ever since, the frequency of my migraines has gone way up. It seems to be my version of long covid. I went from having maybe 6-10 migraines a month--not great, but manageable with triptans-- to 24 or more days per month. I just always had a migraine for awhile there. It has been better recently, but still I'm averaging 10-14 a month, which is too many.

After reading several articles in a row about the surprising off-label uses, I decided to talk to my primary care provider about it. I had halfway-expected that she would look at me with surprise and say, what? oh no, you don't need a GLP-1! But she thought it was a great idea, ha.

I had no idea how they would work for me, but I figured I could give them a couple of months, and in that amount of time, I couldn't lose that much weight. I'm not going to claim that the possibility of losing some weight had nothing to do with it, but I would never have done it only for weight loss. Or at least not with the data the way it is now, because really, scientists don't entirely understand how GLP-1s work at this point. And although people have been taking them for "on-label" use for years, there's not much data out there about what the long-term effects are for people who don't have diabetes. 

But it turns out that I am probably a super-responder. Apparently there are people who don't respond to GLP-1s at all (non-responders), and there are people who response is heightened (super-responders). According to google, a super-responder is someone who loses 15-20% of their body weight within a year. In two months, I lost more than 10% of my body weight. It has been insane. 

Figuring this out has been complicated by the fact that I have refused to weigh myself since 2017, a few months after I quit Weight Watchers. I decided I had become unhealthily obsessed with the number on the scale while I was doing WW, and really, I can tell if I'm gaining weight by how my clothes fit. So I stopped weighing myself. I even refused to step on the scale at the doctor's office except for once a year at my annual exam. 

Which means I don't know exactly how much I weighed when I started-- like I said, I wasn't doing it for the weight loss. In November at my annual exam, I was 175, so that's what I'm using as my starting weight. When I weighed myself last week, I was 156. That's the least I've weighed since I went through menopause 15 years ago, and several pounds less than my WW low. In two months. 

I guess if my goal had been weight loss, I would be thrilled. As it is, I just feel confused. what IS this? what is it doing to my body? how can you possibly lose this much weight this quickly? It sure isn't from calorie restriction and exercise. I did that with WW, and I didn't lose this much weight in a YEAR. It's like somebody just swapped out my body while I was asleep one night.

I have many more thoughts about this, but this post is already long enough. There will be a part two, maybe by the end of the week. As for the long covid and the migraines, it's too soon to tell. I think I'm having fewer, and that I get over them quicker, but for me, weddings are migraines, and I was never going to get through helping to put on two weddings without having some bad days. I don't think I'll really be able to tell for another month or two. 

Stay tuned. 

Related New York Times gift link: The Great Ozempic Experiment 

in which I whine. and regret my lack of social skills.

Here is something I have been thinking about, because now that the weddings are over, and my volunteer stuff always slows down in the summer, I have maybe a little too much time to think. I seem to have become a disaster as a friend. Actually, that's probably over-stating the case, because "disaster" makes me sound important, and I'm pretty sure no one misses me (I warned you: whining). 

So anyway. A couple of years ago, I noticed with one of my groups of friends, no one instigated getting together unless it was me. Which of course makes you wonder, if I stopped trying to get us together, would anyone care?  

It was right in the thick of when my migraines were the very worst, so I just quit doing it. I'm not sure it was a conscious decision-- it wasn't like I was going for revenge, or even then they'll be sorry, I just didn't have the energy, so I didn't. And since I was the only one who was getting the group together (or at least I was the only including me in their get-togethers?), we didn't see each other for quite awhile. 

Then an event came up that was very important to one of the women. The event announcement was a group email, not specifically addressed to me, but I replied and said I would attend. And I did plan on attending, but I hadn't written it into my calendar and there was a lot going on during that two week period, and with one thing and another, I forgot about it. 

Which is totally on me, of course. I forgot about it so thoroughly that I didn't even realize I'd missed it until a week later when I was making my plans for Saturday, which included going to this event, and then looked at the event announcement and realized it had happened the week before. I felt awful about missing it, but we were leaving on a trip the next day, and I didn't do anything about it until two weeks later when we got back. I know. It was badly done on my part. I'm not trying to make you feel sorry for me, I'm just trying to figure out how to navigate my non-existent social life.

So anyway. When I sat down to figure out how best to grovel, I realized, wait a minute. No one called me or texted me and said, where are you? or even after the fact, what happened? we missed you! No one contacted me at all after the original group email. 

Maybe nobody cared that I had missed it. Maybe I was feeling awful for no reason. This was a group of women that I felt very close to a dozen years ago, but it had been a long time since we had met regularly. Maybe the time for us to be friends had passed. 

So now I haven't seen those women for at least a year, other than running into one of them at a large social event last winter--we chatted as if nothing had happened. And I guess it's fine. But similar things seem to be happening with all my friends. I have plenty of acquaintances, plenty of people who seem happy to see me if I run into them at church or the grocery store. We still get invited to things as a couple (everyone loves my spouse). But if I had something difficult happen to me, I think the only people I would call would be one or both of my sisters. 

Is this OK? Is it OK to not really have friends? I do miss it. I miss when we had kids at home and getting together happened naturally at sports practices or band concerts or school events. I miss when we lived in a neighborhood with a bunch of kids and they were all in and out of our houses all the time. But we don't have kids living at home anymore. Almost no one our age does. And as I've told you before, when I do get together with women friends, I can't figure out what we're supposed to talk about. 

I thought maybe typing this out would help me figure out what I want to do about it, but it hasn't. Or at least not yet. 

That's all I've got this week. 

p.s. I don’t think I have any local readers at the moment, but if I do, please don’t feel like you need to rescue me. I’m fine, just figuring things out. Thanks.