r/antidietglp1

[Additional CWs: "diet" food discussion, food industry discussion, discussion of how glp-1s are presented in media]

It happened again last night. A friend messaged me with a video about the food industry being awful (it is), and how food companies are mad at glp-1s because they make people eat less.

I get it. She's trying to be supportive. I'm not mad at her, but I am so mad at social media and the news. IT MAKES YOU EAT LESS, IT MAKES YOU EAT LESS, IT MAKES YOU EAT LESS AND THAT'S WHY YOU LOSE WEIGHT. Unless you go specifically searching for podcasts and publications that tell about the other effects of the drug, all anyone ever sees is "YOU EAT TOO MUCH, IT MAKES YOU EAT LESS!" Hell, ask google's AI search thing, and it will insist people are subconsciously eating less on glp-1s, even if they measure everything they put in their mouth.

I tried to be calm and measured in my response, telling her the girl in the video really hit the nail on the head about why "diet" food (low-fat etc) either isn't actually good for you or is a scam. About how the food industry sneaking sugar in to foods it shouldn't be in is absolutely evil, I agree. About how Olestra was the devil, I never touched the stuff when it was a fad, and none of my friends at the time could figure out why and some of them ended up hospitalized with the shits. This girl in the video really nailed it with the food section, I agree, friend.

But of course the video went on to cover how just downright mad glp-1 drugs were making food companies (also true) because what glp-1s do is make people eat less.

Full stop. No mention of any of the rest of the science. Hormonal balance, Visceral fat loss, metabolism increases, inflammation loss, nothing.

I told my friend listen, the girl in the video isn't wrong. Heck it really does stop food noise for people that have it and don't want it. It does help people eat less if they want to eat less. But the fact that she mentions just that and none of the other benefits, is why I was told I was lying for years about how little I was eating and still gaining instead of losing and just getting more and more sick with swelling and skin disorders etc. It's a big misconception people have, that TDEE calculators online are right for everyone. My disorders are what caused me to gain and gain, and even when I tracked calories by weighing my food in grams and mLs, everything that went in to my mouth, doctors still wouldn't believe me and told me I was just counting wrong or lying. It's why my tummy is shrunk now, trying to make up for the fact that I was "counting wrong", and now I struggle to eat *enough* since the med has fixed my metabolism, and that's why I'm dropping weight like a rock.

"Listen girl, I just wish she would have went over more of what the drug does for people than just make certain people eat less. The Holy Worship of Calories in, Calories out really messes things up for some people. Yeh, it's a real thing, but the equation can be thrown WAY far off for some people due to disorders. When media and youtubers cover this sort of thing, they should cover the rest of the medicine's effects, too"

I listed off some of the things my glp-1 did for me within a few days. Inflammation and nerve pain gone, period back and normal for the first time in my life, my HS getting better instead of worse, etc etc.

Of course she thought I was offended. I was not offended. I was able to bring things back around and get her to believe me, thankfully. I don't blame her or anyone else who approaches me and says, "Oh wow that med really helped you reign in those midnight snacks, eh?" because they're trained to think this way by the media and the overwhelming amount of people that want and have food noise reduction on the med.

Anyone else out there like me (with metabolism-fucking disorders, who ate by the books) have any suggestions of how to approach these things super delicately, so as to not imply that you're offended? I'm not going to keep my mouth shut because I want this misconceptions to go away, and I refuse to help be part of a problem I'm upset about. But I would like a much better way to approach it with people. Any advice appreciated.

My main reason for starting a glp-1 was help with chronic pain and inflammation. My doctor agrees but is mainly focused on IWL. He is convinced that losing weight will help my pain. My pain is in my hands and arms so...not really seeing how weight loss will help but ok.

I am now 8 weeks into Wegovy and it has been hell. The first month was tolerable side effects but once I went up to the next dose it has been rough. Especially the last two weeks. I've thrown up more in the last week than in my entire life. I've had to call out of work for an entire week. I've had diarrhea for 4 days non-stop. This is MISERABLE.

I am also not experiencing any positive results. I'm hungry as normal (when I'm not sick from puking.) Food noise remains high. Body pain and inflammation remains high. Does the inflammation and pain reduction kick in later? Will I be able to notice the decrease in pain if my head is in a toilet throwing up for the 3rd time that day? But my doctor says - but you lost weight so it's working.

How do you discuss your goals with a doctor who is focused on IWL? Are there specific markers you are looking at that can be tested?

Any advice on talking to my doctor?

At this point I'm ready to chuck this medication into the depths of hell. For me, it seems to "work" by making me violently ill and making it impossible for me to keep food down. I am deeply disappointed with this result and feel low-key tricked. Maybe it's bad luck. Maybe people are lying to me and feel like being sick all of the time is worth is to be smaller. It certainly is not worth it to me. I've missed out on work, social events, being there for family things. And I was miserable the whole time.

Has anyone dealt with this? How did you decide if this was a "rough patch" or if this medicine wasn't for you?

I have yet to see a single positive result from this medicine but I feel so confused when I talk to my doctor because he sees weight loss as proof it's working. Any advice would be much appreciated.

I took my first micro-dose of Zepbound this morning (0.25 mg), and I’ve been experiencing increased hunger all day.

I’m also extremely thirsty, but it seems to improve when I drink electrolytes with added salt or even just put some salt under my tongue.

Am I the only one? What has your experience been?

Hello, everyone!

I'm not sure if this has been asked before, and I don't know how to search for it...

I am hoping to begin Zepbound in ~ 1 week. One lingering question I have is whether food loses its emotional meaning/weight. Not only in situations like 'I'm really sad, so I'm going to eat this entire pint of ice cream, ' but also in situations like, "every summer we go to a cabin in this town, and I get chocolate chip pancakes at the diner down the street, and that brings me so much joy because of the tradition." Not sure if that makes sense, but that's the example that came to mind about the emotional impact food can have. Have you noticed any impacts in this regard? Or in any regard when it comes to emotional eating?

Thanks, all! 💚

I have been on GLP1s since the end of 2022. They have been life changing for me. I had no problems with side effects until the end of 2024. Since then it has been a nightmare. It is confusing because I tolerated both Zepbound and wegovy for several months with no problems.

I was on Zepbound from 2024-April 2025. I began having intermittent diarrhea that progressed to incontinence and diarrhea several times a week by the beginning of 2025. I even had a colonoscopy and was tested for gluten intolerance. Both were normal.

I took a break from meds until September and started wegovy. I went up on dose very slowly. I was tolerating 1.7mg well until 2 months ago. The diarrhea started again. At first i thought maybe it was just from greasy or fatty foods. Over the last month i have been meticulous about my eating and I’m still having diarrhea 2-4 days a week with much less frequency and no incontinence.

Just to be sure I got blood drawn and I’m getting a complete abdominal ultrasound to check my gall bladder.

I am now down to my last option of trying Saxenda (liraglutide) but am just tired at this point. I also just saw the new oral drug Foundayo that just came out.

TLDR I have had massive health benefits from taking GLP1s but am exhausted from the diarrhea. Do any of you have experience with liraglutide or know if the foundayo have less GI side effects?

Thanks for letting me vent.

What are we doing about bras?

So I’ve lost a bit of weight, and I’m starting to notice my bras having extra space in the cups.

Bras are expensive, so I don’t want to have to keep buying new ones every month or so.

I have some bralettes that are less structured which can conform a bit better to a changing body size. But I don’t know if I feel like they give enough structure to wear in a professional environment. Ditto for sports bras.

Most of my clothing can accommodate body at various sizes. But bras are annoyingly very specific in their sizing and don’t leave a lot of room for fluctuations.

Ladies, what have you been doing along your journey?

I was thin for years and I didn't realize how much loving to eat was part of my identity. I still love to eat, but when I started gaining weight I didn't notice how self conscious I was becoming eating around other people or just in public. It was weird how much anxiety I felt, like "oh if I eat too much I will be judged". But if I eat too little it felt like I was being fake and needed an excuse to justify it as always "trying to eat healthier, " even though I could eat a brownie at the same party I was just eating a salad at.

A little over a year later on ozempic and working out 3-4 times a week, I was especially hungry at a get together with some friends yesterday. I had done a heavier workout earlier in the day and was especially hungry by the time dinner came. I ate cookies and chips, and drank soda at the party. I ate two bacon cheeseburgers with tons of sauce on them and they were lovely, but then this same feeling came over me. Something I felt years before I gained the weight.

It was a feeling of freedom that it was now "socially acceptable" again for me to eat so much. That I had "earned" the ability to publicly enjoy food again. Like someone took my "pig out* license and I just got it back years later.

But also there was more a resentment of how much fatphobia/hating my body I internalized and became self conscious about. It was now "cute and quirky" again for me to be in a smaller body and eat like a bottomless pit. But if I was still bigger I would feel like others would see me and think "oh that explains a lot" despite no one talking to me about my weight or eating like that. Maybe a lot of judgement was in my own head.

I don't know if I'm looking for answers to solve this necessarily, I guess I'm more just sharing this feeling as a fragment in time on my journey and seeing if others could relate. It makes me wonder if most people notice this shift, or if it takes self reflection. I know a lot of this change requires inner work about my body image and how I present myself. On a conscious level I know I can eat whatever I want without giving af, but this will take time to fully adjust.

I am about to take shot #2 and my worst SE by far has been insomnia. I have struggled with insomnia in the past, so I know all the tricks and tools. Don't need advice on that, please. I'm really just wondering whether, like the other side effects, this one will settle down over time.

I’m 19 years old, and female. I was placed on Mounjaro in November. It’s been really great so far, for my weight and my lab results. My endocrinologist is happy. But I can’t help but be scared.

I’m worried once I’m where I should be with my labs that I won’t need it anymore. And of course, I’m young, I don’t want to rely on this medication till I die. Although I didn’t start it for weight loss I am still worried all the weight will come right back. Thoughts?

I am having a hard time keeping up with staying hydrated now that I've been on a GLP1 for four months. I am adding an electrolyte packet (sometimes two) in addition to drinking at least a gallon of water a day. Other factors that make it more difficult: I'm on a stimulant for ADHD and live in a desert. Anyone else struggling with this and have any advice?

This is my first post here so please feel free to let me know if I've broken any rules!

I just finished my 6th session with my (Aetna) insurance-mandated registered dietitian through the CVS Weight Management program, and I wanted to share a bit of my experience, which was positive. Before I began I was SO worried that they would make me follow a specific diet, weigh in every day, or generally be spouting off diet culture crap.

Thankfully, this was not the case. I was required to have a 30 minute meeting with my RD once a month for six months, I had to report a weigh-in in their app once per month, and during our sessions she would ask me to share what I ate the previous day to get a sense of my overall intake. My dietitian knew what I meant when I said Health At Every Size, she encouraged a balanced and non-restrictive approach to food choices, and she was totally supportive of my goal weight (which most people would probably think is too high).

One thing to note is that when you first start the program, they ask you to use their app to pick a style of diet that you want to try (I think the choices were Mediterranean, Low Fat, or Low Carb). I did have to choose one in the app but this wasn't something that they held you to at all, it was more like a jumping off point for discussion with my RD.

Now that I've done the six Zoom sessions, I just have to message her in the app once a month to check in and I need to log a weight in the app once a month. I can also message her any time if I have questions or concerns.

I know that it's possible that not every RD who works for CVS is going to be as good as mine was, but I just wanted to share my experience in case you are anxious or worried about being forced to do the CVS Weight Management program. I hope this helps someone!

in “those other subs” i see a lot of people gnawing at the bit to bring up “vanity sizing” , and the term has always drove me friggin nuts. vanity? for whom? were fat people in the room making this decision at the clothing companies? unlikely. A shift like that should be called “population reality” sizing, if anything, and reaffirms that when “cheaper” clothes like walmart or old navy are bigger sizes than most designer clothes, skinny has always been a class thing in America for the past few decades. and ofc there’s always been different sizing in the US than other countries too, because being a different race can give you a completely different body size, bigger or smaller.

It just irks me the way formerly fat people just jump at the idea to give the same toxic skinny shit back that they had to deal with, and i see soo many people ready to jump on the train that used to run over them. such a bummer. really starting to feel that like any major weight loss procedure, people need a therapy support of GLP1s too 👀

/rant

ETA since some people seem to be confused; i am not supporting different companies making different sizing. I am just saying using the term “vanity sizing” to describe something that can just be called “inconsistent sizing” is bad lol

I am obese and am considering going on GLP-1s. i like going to the gym but cannot atop eating. i have some questions:

• is this a lifelong thing, can you stop once you reach goal weight?
• do you all do something to prevent muscle loss?
• do you work with a nutritionist while in GLPs?

what I am hoping for is that if GLPs make my food noise go away, I can focus on actually planning and eating healthy meals. then when I get to goal weight and have also built some good eating habits, I can stop.

As my journey with Zepbound continues, I find myself at an inflection point with some of the people I follow who are in the anti-diet, fat activist, ED world.

I find myself angry as I still hear some of them speak about how food freedom “should” have given me freedom from food noise and how a GLP one medication isn’t the solution. Something about it makes me feel some shame and it just feels off.

It’s the same messaging I have received over the last two decade being in recovery and doing intuitive eating. Continuing to have the, “are you sure you’ve brought in all the foods? Are you sure you put weight loss on the back burner?”, when I kept talking about how my hunger, obsessive thoughts and planning around food never changed. No matter how much I tried, no matter how much food freedom I was doing, I still had food noise.

One of the women I follow, is also in eating disorder recovery, BED, which was also my diagnoses and talks about that the people who still have food noise just clearly don’t have food freedom. I just don’t know how to make sense of it all. It feels shaming and condescending to hear someone say I didn’t try enough when I diligently worked on bringing in all the damn food, eating all the food, not going back on diets and doing all the things… to hear that messaging again just makes me feel at a crossroads. It makes me feel sick. And it makes me feel like I am losing a community resource that I so love.

I guess at the core of it, it makes me feel like some of these people are saying I didn’t work hard enough and I should have worked harder. Isn’t that what some of this community has always wanted, fat not being seen as a moral issue or failure… but here they are saying a similar message. It’s the dissonance that seems peculiar to me. Help me out. What am I seeing, what am I missing? Am I hearing this correctly?

And I’m sorry if this message was very jumbled, I can’t even make sense of all of it and what I’m feeling.

So my first shot is in the fridge. I don’t feel ready though. I know I need to eat at least 100 grams of protein a day and weight train to head off muscle loss. Did ya’ll do meal planning, grocery shopping and all that before starting? What about having a plan for nausea? I asked for Zofran and my doctor said no. So what ginger candies/teas or anything else did/do you use? Did you jump right into weight training? I have weights and subscriptions but my motivation has been low. How much did you have lined up before taking the first dose? Am I overthinking??

I took my first dose of semaglutide (the brand available in my country) this morning and all day I've been feeling really dopey, like I've been mildly sedated. I used Saxenda and Ozempic for a while in the past, and I don't remember experiencing this with them. I feel fine other than that. BG is in normal range, I've been eating normally and drinking plenty of water. Has anyone else had this effect when starting a GLP-1?

What do I do if I struggle to lose weight without counting calories because I become obsessive about calories. I find when I count calories i find a lot of times I’d rather not even eat because it freaks me out how calorie dense things are…even things you wouldn’t think would have many calories do! But when I’ve tried to not count calories, I either don’t lose or I even gain weight! I’m on 12.5mg tirzepatide and even with the lack of food noise and less appetite, I can still easily overeat. Even on this dose it is also hard for me to tell when I am comfortably full from a meal. Before Tirz I would regularly binge eat so I think that really screwed up having what real fullness feels like versus uncomfortably full. Sometimes I can tell, but for the most part it is still a struggle to tell. I tried the past two months to not count calories and I kept hovering up and down the same 5-7 lbs. I am still morbidly obese, so my maintenance calories are not even a small amount. I need to keep losing weight for my overall health, I don’t feel good this size at all.

I just started 5 mg, 2nd shot 3 days ago. I did 4 weeks of 2.5 mg.

I find myself wishing I was hungrier. I am having to force myself to eat, and I want to enjoy food! I had very little hunger at the beginning of 2.5, but then seemed to get used to it and was experiencing some level of hunger.

Everywhere online seems to just be over the moon about having no hunger, but I want to have some appetite! Will I start to have more appetite as I get used to this dose? Do I just need to accept this lack of hunger?

I can’t go back to 2.5, my insurance doesn’t cover it after 1 month.

Thanks!

It drives me absolutely bonkers how in several of the other GLP-1 groups, whenever someone alludes to their goal weight stopping short of the absolute bottom of their weight range, (especially if it's still in the *gasp* "overweight" category), people will chime in with "don't sell yourself short as to how much you can lose on this med if you really try!!!" And that's on the NICE end of this genre of comment.

For health and practical reasons, I am trying to lose weight on this med (along with the fantastic mental health effects and inflammation reduction I'm experiencing -- hands down the best unexpected anti-depressant I've ever had), but there are plenty of reasons not to be aiming for the lowest weight humanly possible! My biggest one being, if I have to white-knuckle my way through, how is that going to be more sustainable than any other diet?

My goal isn't "get thin," it's less wear and tear on my joints and heart*. Whatever actual amount that ends up being.

*And now that I've actually been on it for a while, not being constantly ravenously hungry no matter how much I've eaten. Never realized that would ever be an option.