Issue # 18 So no one's asking about it anymore Hi Reader, A woman in the community, I'll call her Renee, told me she realized last week that nobody had asked her about her GLP-1 journey in almost two months. Not her sister, not her coworkers, not the friend who used to text her progress-photo emojis every few weeks. At first that felt like relief. Then it felt like something closer to loss. If nobody was asking anymore, who was this for. The Why That question, who is this for, is the real...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Issue # 17 "You must feel amazing now" Hi Reader, A woman in the community, I'll call her Priya, ran into an old friend at the grocery store last month. Her friend did a double take, grabbed her arm, and said, "Oh my gosh, look at you! You must feel amazing now." Priya smiled and said thank you. Then she spent the rest of the checkout line feeling strange, and couldn't figure out why. It took her a few days to name it. Her friend wasn't wrong to be surprised. But something in "you must feel...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Issue # 16 Reach out before anything asks you to Hi Reader, There's a detail in this week's Substack article I didn't spend much time on, and I want to circle back to it here, because it might be the most important part of the whole story. Carol had a hard moment at a family dinner. That's the part everyone focuses on. But the part that actually helped her wasn't managing the comment or deciding how much weight to give her sister-in-law's opinion. It was that on the drive home, she called...
about 2 months ago • 2 min read
Issue # 15 The body-confidence stat that says more about culture than about you Hi Reader, A woman in my paid community sent me a statistic recently: only nine percent of women between sixty-one and eighty describe themselves as very confident in their bodies. Among women in their twenties, that number is more than double. Underneath it, she'd written: "So it was never going to end, was it." She'd already done the harder work of this journey. Relearned her hunger. Grieved what food used to do...
2 months ago • 2 min read
Issue # 14 The word they reach for when they don't understand Hi Reader, Somebody's going to call your GLP-1 journey "the easy way out." Maybe they already have. Here's what I want you to know before it happens again: the sting you feel afterward isn't a sign you're too sensitive. It's a sign that the thing you used to use to absorb comments like that, food, isn't functioning the way it used to. You're being asked to build a new way of handling judgment at the exact moment your oldest tool...
2 months ago • 1 min read
Issue # 13 Before you take a single dose, read this Hi Reader, You've probably spent more time researching this medication than you've spent on almost any other decision this year. What you might not have spent as much time on is the conversation happening underneath all that research, the one where some part of you is already bracing for this to be one more thing you fail at. That conversation matters more than people tell you. How you talk to yourself before you start shapes how you...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Issue # 12 Off track is not off course Hi Reader, This week's Substack article talks about something almost every woman on this journey runs into: a habit holds for weeks, sometimes months, and then life happens, and the routine falls apart. Not because you decided to stop. Because something got in the way, the way something always eventually does. Here's the part that actually determines what happens next: the story you tell yourself about the gap matters more than the gap itself. I missed...
3 months ago • 1 min read
Issue # 11 The Skill That Predicts Whether This Sticks (It's Not Willpower) Hi Reader, If you read this week's Substack article, you already know what a punishing loop is, and why a stall in the present can activate the same dread you felt the last time a plateau turned into a slide backward. That's the why behind the fear. This email is about something the article didn't get into: the one thing that actually predicts whether a woman moves through a plateau instead of getting stuck in one. It...
3 months ago • 2 min read
Issue # 9 The voice that's doing the most damage isn't your aunt's Hi Reader, This week on Substack I wrote about Maya — a woman seven months into her tirzepatide journey who lost forty-one pounds and spent a holiday dinner eating less than she already had been eating, because her aunt made a comment loud enough for the whole table to hear. Maybe you recognized her immediately. Maybe you've been Maya at a table, or in a break room, or in a comment section, or in a doctor's office where the...
4 months ago • 2 min read