What If I Buckle?
14 st 2 lb today. Two days running under the 200 lb mark now, which makes it harder to call a fluke. I'm pleased. I'm also quietly terrified of what happens if I can't keep this up.
14 st 2 lb today. That’s 198 lb, one pound down from yesterday’s 199, which makes it a bit harder to wave away as a one-off dip. Two days running under 200 now. That’s starting to look like a direction, not a bounce.
I’m pleased about that. I’m also doing the thing where I immediately start worrying about losing it.
I started this expecting Mounjaro to make weight loss the easy part. In one sense it has — appetite’s changed, portions have changed, the scales keep moving in the right direction. What it hasn’t done is switch off the part of my brain that wants food regardless of whether I need it. I can be completely full and still fancy breakfast. That bit’s still entirely mine to manage.
So every day still involves actual decisions. Not logging calories, not banning meals, not turning the house into a diet clinic. Just a lot of small conscious choices about things that used to happen on autopilot. Both halves of it are work: resisting the food I fancy in the moment, and reshaping the habits that have been mine for years — the evening drink, the treats, the routines. It’s both, properly, not one or the other.
No wonder it still feels like effort.
From roughly 16 st 10 lb to 14 st 2 lb is 2 st 8 lb gone. Thirty-six pounds. About 16.3 kg. Written out like that it’s a genuinely substantial amount, and it’s hard to argue I haven’t achieved something real.
And yet there’s a voice that doesn’t care about any of that. It just wants to know what happens if I buckle.
I think the trap is treating every single decision as a test, and every indulgence as the first domino. Have the bacon, sausage and black pudding sandwich, enjoy a Sunday roast, have one evening that runs over — none of that undoes thirty-six pounds on its own. Weight fluctuates. Habits wobble. What actually matters is the direction over months, not whether every single day hits some imaginary standard of perfection.
I’ve already found a version of this that doesn’t rely on total denial. Cutting the rum measure down rather than giving it up. Deciding a teaspoon of peanut butter is enough rather than banning chocolate outright. Turning down a treat without it feeling like punishment. None of that guarantees I won’t regain anything, ever. But it’s evidence I’m building something that doesn’t depend entirely on gritted teeth.
There’s also the medication itself sitting in the back of my mind. I’m on 2.5 mg because 5 mg very nearly broke me. It hasn’t rewritten the mental side of eating, just quietened the physical urgency behind some of it. And regaining weight after coming off tirzepatide is a documented, ordinary thing that can happen, not some personal failure waiting to be exposed. I don’t need to solve that today. It’s a future problem, not a present one.
What I’m actually trying to do isn’t prove I can white-knuckle this forever. It’s build a way of living where keeping the weight off takes less effort than losing it did. I’m not there yet.
Tonight, though, I’m 198 lb. I’m going to let that be enough for one evening, without immediately moving the goalposts to don’t you dare lose this.