Written by Marcia Cripe, RN

My first four weeks on tirzepatide had been surprisingly uneventful. I knew something was happening, and I was paying attention to my appetite and the scale, but nothing about those first weeks felt completely outside my previous experience with weight loss.

Then I moved up to 5 mg.

That's when tirzepatide stopped feeling like a medication that simply helped me eat less. The change was so profound that it eventually made me rethink what appetite even meant.

I didn't just get full faster.

The drive to eat disappeared.

I Thought I Understood Appetite Suppression

Before tirzepatide, if you had asked me what an appetite suppressant did, I would have given you a pretty obvious answer: it makes you less hungry.

That was what I expected from this medication. Maybe I'd eat smaller portions. Maybe I'd be able to walk away from food more easily. Maybe dieting wouldn't require as much willpower because I wouldn't feel as hungry while doing it.

Those were all variations of an experience I already understood.

I've lost weight before. I knew what it felt like to be hungry and decide not to eat. I knew what it felt like to want something and tell myself no. I knew the mental negotiation of dieting: I shouldn't eat that. I've already eaten enough. I'll wait until dinner.

At 5 mg, the negotiation started disappearing because there was increasingly nothing to negotiate with.

That was different.

Sometimes Water Was Enough

One of the strangest things I remember from that period was what could happen in the morning.

I could wake up, drink water and move on with my day. Instead of breakfast naturally becoming the next event, the water could seem to settle whatever small amount of appetite I had, and eating simply stopped feeling urgent.

Then hours could pass.

It wasn't that I was deliberately fasting. I wasn't sitting there hungry and congratulating myself for resisting food. I wasn't using some new dieting strategy.

I just didn't particularly want to eat.

That distinction is difficult to explain to someone who hasn't experienced it because from the outside the behavior looks identical. A person doesn't eat breakfast. Hours pass. Eventually she eats something.

But internally, those can be completely different experiences.

One requires restraint.

The other barely requires a decision.

Food Was Still Food

I want to be precise about this because it's easy to exaggerate what happened.

Food didn't suddenly become disgusting. I didn't take 5 mg of tirzepatide and develop an aversion to everything in my kitchen. I could still eat, and food could still taste good.

What changed was the force pulling me toward it.

Before tirzepatide, food could enter my mind without my body necessarily being physically hungry. Something could sound good. I could think about what I wanted for dinner hours before dinner. Seeing or smelling something could create its own desire to eat it.

At 5 mg, that entire process became much quieter for me.

Sometimes it felt almost absent.

That was the part I hadn't expected.

I Had Never Realized How Much of Eating Happens Before the First Bite

When we talk about eating, we tend to focus on hunger and fullness because those sensations are easy to understand.

You're hungry. You eat. Your stomach becomes full. You stop.

But there is a tremendous amount happening before food ever reaches your mouth. You notice food. You anticipate it. You imagine how it will taste. Something sounds good. You decide it's worth getting up for, ordering, cooking or driving somewhere to buy.

There is a wanting component to eating that I had never spent much time separating from hunger.

Why would I?

For most of my life, all of those signals blended together into one ordinary experience: I want something to eat.

Tirzepatide started pulling those pieces apart.

This Wasn't Willpower

That realization changed how I thought about weight loss.

Before GLP-1 medications, I understood intellectually that body weight wasn't simply a matter of character. I'm a nurse. I knew appetite and body-weight regulation involved hormones, metabolism, the brain and a complicated collection of biological signals.

But knowing something academically isn't the same as experiencing the experiment inside your own body.

I hadn't suddenly become more disciplined at 5 mg.

I hadn't developed superior self-control over the course of a few weeks.

I was the same person.

What had changed was the biological pressure.

That was almost unsettling to realize. If eating less could suddenly become this effortless because a medication had altered the signals involved, then how much credit had I historically given willpower for something that was being heavily influenced by biology?

I didn't have the scientific language for all of this yet.

I just knew that something I had spent my entire life thinking I was supposed to control had suddenly become dramatically easier to control—because I didn't have to fight it nearly as often.

Less Hungry Wasn't a Big Enough Description

For a while, I probably would have described the effect the same way everyone else did.

"My appetite is gone."

"I'm not hungry."

"I get full really fast."

Those descriptions weren't necessarily wrong. They just weren't complete enough for what I was experiencing.

Physical hunger could certainly be reduced. I could also become satisfied with much less food.

But the most interesting change was happening somewhere upstream of fullness.

I wasn't constantly arriving at the point where I had to decide whether to eat.

The question itself wasn't appearing as often.

That's why, looking back, I think drive to eat describes my experience better than simply saying appetite suppression.

I Had to Start Thinking About Eating Differently

There is an obvious advantage to not wanting much food when your goal is to lose weight.

You eat less.

At first, that's exactly what I wanted.

But when the effect becomes strong enough, the problem can eventually reverse. Instead of asking yourself how to stop eating, you have to remember that your body still requires nutrition even when your brain isn't particularly interested in obtaining it.

I wasn't thinking far enough ahead yet to understand all of the consequences of that.

I wasn't thinking about preserving muscle.

I wasn't thinking about what would happen if the weight kept coming off after I reached the number I wanted.

I wasn't thinking about maintenance.

At that point, I was watching something I'd struggled with for years suddenly become easy.

The scale was moving in the direction I wanted it to move, and eating less no longer felt like a daily battle.

Why would I question that?

Then Food Started Getting Weird

The disappearance of the drive to eat wasn't the end of the story.

Once food stopped occupying the same place in my brain, I started noticing something even stranger: what I wanted to eat was changing too.

Foods I'd always loved could suddenly seem uninteresting. Things that had once sounded good didn't necessarily have the same pull.

And then there were the hard-boiled eggs.

Before tirzepatide, I didn't even particularly like them.

Then, for reasons I absolutely did not understand at the time, they became one of the only foods I consistently wanted.

Not for a day.

Not for a week.

For months.

That was when I started realizing tirzepatide wasn't only changing how much I wanted to eat.

Something was happening to what I wanted, too.

Continue the Journey

The next part of my tirzepatide journey is one of the strangest—and still one of my favorites to tell.

For about three months, I went from barely caring about hard-boiled eggs to wanting them constantly. I was eating at least four a day, sometimes more, while foods I had liked for years were losing their appeal.

Then the egg obsession disappeared almost as abruptly as it had arrived.

Continue reading: For Three Months, All I Wanted Was Hard-Boiled Eggs

Sources

This article is a first-person Journey account based on Marcia Cripe's recollection of her life and experiences before beginning tirzepatide on May 10, 2024. It does not make clinical claims about tirzepatide or establish that the medication caused subsequent changes.