Let it go...

Suddenly not feeling hungry is a bizarre feeling. People in support groups and forums are calling it a supression of 'Food Noise', and for me in the past that noise was loud and clear! Although Mounjaro/Zepbound does alter the way that food transits through your body and the way your body uses energy, the mechanism to lose weight for most people is to eat less calories. If you can add exercise into the equation then it's certainly going to help, but to burn off a Mars bar you have to run at a decent pace for 23 minutes! 

I think in the past, part of the problem for losing weight is motivation. All too often I have felt that I am putting in a huge effort trying to shift the pounds and after weeks of concerted effort the dial on the scales hardly moves and I have given up. Sometimes it is important to also monitor what people are calling Non-Scale Victories (NSV's). I passed a string around the largest part of my torso and cut it to length. Other NSV's are dropping a hole on a belt or wearing an item of clothing that used to be tight now fitting comfortably. 

A pint of water weighs just over half a kilo, research also shows that a large poo can weigh just under half a kilo, acan of soda is about 330g... So you can see that what you've eaten (or passed!) can easily make a difference of a kilo or two in your overall weight which is why it is advised to only weigh yourself once a week. This way there is likely to be a bigger difference and it also helps average out the journey. To begin with, most people find the first few kilos easy, but then the weight loss slows down. I set off at 4kg a week, but that has now evened-off to a steady kilo a week. That might not sound a lot, but it's finding the equivalent stuff to two bags of sugar and saying goodbye to it. In weight loss, slow and steady wins the race.

We can easily see that fat is stored in different places around the body, but it also hides it away around your internal organs, and this kind of fat (visceral) is particularly bad for you. One of the factors that really gave me a kick up the arse to lose weight was not being able to breathe when I was tying my shoelaces, when bending over it squished everything up inside against lungs and diaphragm, for me this seemed to shift first. 

Scales are a very useful tool for weighing yourself, and nowadays there are all kinds of fancy whizz-bang ones that advertise fat and bone mass calculations. Most scales these days can weigh accurately enough (especially if you use the same set each time you weigh). However, clinical trials have shown that these are useful as a rough guide only for body composition. If you have these, don't get too hung up on their precise figures, more important is the overall trend.