There used to be a window in my day — somewhere between 1pm and 3pm — that I would just write off. I’d eaten too much at lunch. Or I’d eaten the wrong thing. Or I’d been planning to skip lunch and then hadn’t. Whatever the specific failure, the window was the same.
I’d hate myself for it. Quietly. While answering emails. While trying to focus on whatever I was supposed to be doing.
This is the GLP-1 story I almost didn’t write because it’s the most personal one. The weight stuff is real and I’ll talk about that some other time. But the mental real estate I got back — the hours per day that used to be spent in a private guilt courtroom — that’s the change I would not have predicted, and that’s the change that has, more than anything else, made my actual daily life feel like it’s mine again.
The guilt was its own full-time job
I didn’t realize how much of my brain was doing this until it stopped. The constant background tally. What I’d eaten. What I shouldn’t have. What I’d have to do later to make up for it.
It wasn’t loud. It was just always running. Like a tab open in my browser that I couldn’t close. The CPU usage on that one tab, it turns out, was significant.
I used to wonder why I was so tired all the time. I thought it was hormones. I thought it was age. I thought it was being a parent. Some of it was, sure. But a real portion of it, in retrospect, was the energy I was spending on this constant, private, exhausting moral accounting.
What productivity gurus don’t tell you
All the time-management advice in the world doesn’t help if half your processing power is spent in a private courtroom about whether you deserved the muffin.
I tried every productivity system. Pomodoros. Time blocking. The one where you eat the frog. None of them addressed the actual issue, which was that I was, internally, on trial. For lunch. Every day.
This is the part where I get a little political. Most productivity advice is written for people who don’t have a difficult relationship with food, by people who don’t have a difficult relationship with food. It does not factor in the cognitive load of being a woman who’s been doing diet math in her head since middle school. That’s not a small load. That’s a lot of bandwidth, every day, forever, until something interrupts it.
When the guilt stopped, the focus came back
I noticed it first in the afternoons. I’d actually still be working at 3pm. Not just sitting at my desk pretending. Actually working. The shame haze that I had assumed was just what afternoons were when you’re a grown woman with a job — gone.
I couldn’t quite believe it at first. I kept waiting for it to come back. It mostly hasn’t.
My boss asked me, casually, what had changed. She didn’t know I was on GLP-1. She just noticed my output. I didn’t really know how to answer her. I’m not going to tell my boss that the medication that turned off my hunger also, accidentally, turned off the constant low-grade self-loathing that was eating my afternoons. So I just said, oh, I’ve been sleeping better. Which is true. But it’s also not the whole story.
I read books again
This is the small one but it’s the one that surprised me most. I’d been telling myself for years that I was just too tired to read anymore. That I’d grown out of it. That my attention span was shot.
Turns out my attention span was not shot. My attention span was fully consumed by an ongoing internal monologue about food. Once that monologue quieted, I picked up a novel for the first time in three years and finished it in a week.
I’ve read six since. I have a stack on my nightstand. I’m in a book club now, which feels like a thing other women do, and it turns out I am also one of those women, I just didn’t have the bandwidth before. I’d been telling myself this was a personality change. It wasn’t a personality change. It was a bandwidth change.
The cost of the binge cycle was never just calories
I want to say this carefully because I don’t want to oversimplify it. But for me, the eating-too-much-then-hating-myself-then-promising-better-then-doing-it-again loop was costing me hours. Real hours. Of attention, of presence, of just being in my own life.
Getting those hours back wasn’t on the brochure for any of this. It’s just what happened. And it’s the thing, more than anything else, I’d want another woman to know about.
GLP-1 is talked about in terms of pounds. Mostly because that’s what’s measurable. But the thing it gave me that I would not give back for any amount of money is the inside of my own head, returned to me, quiet and available, in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday afternoon. That’s the part I’d want on the brochure. Nobody’s going to put it there. So I figured I would.
