Why I Started Tirzepatide at 230 Pounds

Written by Marcia Cripe, RN

After our house fire, I bought four pairs of Adidas pants. Two black and two navy. For a long time, that was essentially my wardrobe.

Our house caught fire on April 10, 2023, starting in our master bedroom and closet. Between the fire itself and the smoke damage, most of what we owned was either gone, damaged or inaccessible. We moved into a smaller rental and wouldn't return home until early 2025.

I needed clothes, obviously. I just didn't want to buy clothes for the body I was living in.

By then, my weight was climbing toward 230 pounds. I bought a few T-shirts and those four pairs of pants and decided they would have to do. In my mind, this was temporary. I just didn't know yet how I was going to change it.

The Weight Didn't Come Back All at Once

I've been thin before. Very thin, actually. Being 230 pounds wasn't a body I had always known; it was a body I gradually arrived in.

The period after the fire made everything harder. We were displaced from our home, the rental was smaller, and our normal routines were gone. I was also working third shift as a nurse, which already does strange things to meals, sleep and energy.

Food became convenient, and it also became something to do. There was stress eating, boredom eating and a lot more processed food than had once been normal for me. There wasn't one dramatic period where I suddenly gained a huge amount of weight. It accumulated while life was happening.

That's probably one of the reasons I tolerated it for as long as I did. I was still functioning. I went to work, took care of people and spent time with my family. I wasn't sitting at home thinking my life had fallen apart because I was overweight.

But functioning and feeling good in your body aren't the same thing.

I Could Still Do Everything. It Just Took More Out of Me.

My first grandson became a huge part of my life during this period. I loved taking care of him, and I wanted to be the grandma who got down on the floor, carried him around, went places with him and said yes when there was something fun to do.

I could do those things at 230 pounds. They just took more out of me.

I was tired. Not the kind of tired where you physically can't move, but the kind where it feels like you're carrying an extra burden into everything you do. Work took energy. Stairs took energy. Playing took energy. Even getting dressed could feel like more work than it should have.

My grandson wasn't the sole reason I decided to lose weight, but he made the difference between functioning in my body and actually feeling good in it much harder to ignore. I didn't want my weight deciding what kind of grandmother I could be.

Somewhere Along the Way, I Stopped Wanting to Be in Pictures

This part happened quietly.

I'm not naturally someone who wants to disappear. I'm outgoing, I like people, and I like being involved. But when I was heavier, I stopped wanting cameras pointed at me.

At my daughter's high school graduation, there are only a couple of pictures of me. That's strange to think about now because it was an important day in our family. I was there and I experienced it, but I didn't particularly want photographic evidence of myself being there.

The same thing happened during the period after the fire. There are surprisingly few pictures of me from that part of my life.

I wasn't consciously thinking, I refuse to be photographed until I'm thin again. I just didn't like how I looked, so when someone pulled out a phone, I found ways not to be in the picture.

Over time, you can accidentally erase yourself from your own family history that way.

The Four Pairs of Pants Meant More Than I Realized

I think that's why I remember those Adidas pants so clearly. I refused to build a wardrobe at that size.

Part of that was practical. We'd just had a house fire, and replacing everything immediately didn't make sense. But there was something else underneath it: buying an entire wardrobe would have felt like accepting that this was my body now.

And I didn't accept that.

I didn't know exactly what I was going to do about it, but I knew I didn't want to stay at 230 pounds. So I wore the black pants, then the navy pants, then the other black pants. Wash, repeat.

For months.

The First Time Tirzepatide Really Got My Attention

Tirzepatide wasn't something I had been seriously considering until I saw my dad.

I hadn't seen him in several weeks, and when I saw him again, I almost didn't recognize him. He had lost so much weight that my brain didn't immediately register the person I was looking at as my dad.

That got my attention.

He had been taking Mounjaro for diabetes.

Until then, GLP-1 medications were something I knew existed. Seeing that kind of change happen to someone standing directly in front of me was different. This wasn't a clinical trial result or somebody's before-and-after picture online. It was my dad, and the difference was dramatic enough that I hadn't immediately recognized him.

That was the moment tirzepatide went on my radar.

After that, I started researching GLP-1 medications seriously.

Semaglutide was already available for weight loss as Wegovy. Tirzepatide was available as Mounjaro, but at that point it was approved for type 2 diabetes, not weight loss. As I dug into the research, though, the difference in the weight-loss results caught my attention.

If I was going to use one of these medications, I wanted tirzepatide.

So I made a very intentional decision: I would wait.

I could have pursued semaglutide. I didn't want to start one medication simply because it was the weight-loss option available to me and then potentially switch later. Based on what I had read—and what I had just watched happen to my dad—I wanted tirzepatide.

In November 2023, that regulatory piece changed. The FDA approved tirzepatide for chronic weight management under the brand name Zepbound.

But approval didn't mean I immediately had access to it.

That part came several months later.

Around March or April 2024, my sister told me she had access to tirzepatide through her med spa. Suddenly the medication I had deliberately waited for wasn't theoretical anymore. It was actually available to me.

At that point, my reason for starting still wasn't complicated.

I wanted to lose weight.

I wasn't thinking about food noise, reward pathways, changing food preferences or any of the things I would eventually become fascinated by. I had seen what tirzepatide could do, researched it for myself, decided it was the medication I wanted, and waited until I could get it.

I Didn't Have a Dramatic Rock-Bottom Moment

There was no doctor's appointment where someone gave me devastating news. There was no photograph that made me cry and immediately decide to change my life. There wasn't a single Monday morning when I woke up and announced that enough was enough.

It was quieter than that.

It was realizing I had essentially stopped buying clothes. It was avoiding pictures. It was noticing how much energy my body required and wanting to keep up with my grandson without thinking about my weight.

Underneath all of that was the simple realization that I didn't feel like myself anymore. Eventually, those smaller realizations added up to a decision.

May 10, 2024

On May 10, 2024, I took my first dose of tirzepatide. Dan started with me.

At that point, I thought I understood what was about to happen. The medication would decrease my appetite, I would eat less, and I'd lose weight. Hopefully, this time, I would actually keep it off.

That was basically the entire plan.

During those first few weeks, nothing happened that made me think my understanding was particularly wrong. There was no cinematic moment after the first injection. I didn't wake up the next morning as a different person, and I wasn't suddenly repulsed by food.

I was watching and waiting, trying to figure out whether the medication was doing anything at all. The first month was much quieter than the story that came afterward.

In retrospect, I'm glad I remember it that way because it gives me a very clear dividing line between the person who started tirzepatide because she wanted to lose weight and the person who would eventually become fascinated by what these medications can do to hunger, reward, desire and the experience of eating itself.

On May 10, I wasn't that person yet.

I was just a woman in four pairs of Adidas pants who was ready to lose the weight, and I took my first injection.

Continue the Journey

Starting tirzepatide was the decision. The next part was finding out what actually happened once the medication was in my system.

In My First Four Weeks on Tirzepatide, I walk through that first month—the waiting, the small changes, the lack of dramatic side effects, and the point where I began to realize the experience was going to be different from any diet I had tried before.

Continue reading: My First Four Weeks on Tirzepatide

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.