Why Two Nurses Started GLP-1s—and Why We're Still Talking About What Happened After
Written by Dan Cripe, RN, BSN & Marcia Cripe, RN
A Note on How We Tell This Story
What you're about to read is a personal experience, not clinical evidence. Marcia experienced everything she describes after taking tirzepatide—completely and accurately. But experiencing something after a medication and establishing that the medication caused it are not the same claim. We'll be very clear about the difference throughout GLP Logic. Sometimes personal experience will lead us to research a question. Sometimes the evidence will explain what happened beautifully. Sometimes it will suggest several possibilities. And sometimes we'll have to say: we don't know. That distinction matters here.
Dan and I started tirzepatide on the same day: May 10, 2024.
We were both nurses. We had both spent years taking care of other people's bodies. We understood medications, side effects, nutrition, chronic disease, and all the usual advice about weight.
And somehow, neither of us had any idea how much this medication was going to change our lives.
The Before
I certainly knew I wanted to lose weight.
I weighed about 230 pounds when I started. I had been overweight for several years, and by that point I had become very good at dressing so nobody really saw me. Dark clothes. Loose clothes. Nothing that drew attention.
That wasn't my normal personality.
I'm naturally outgoing. I like people. I like clothes. I like being noticed. But as I gained weight, I increasingly dressed to disappear and avoided going places altogether.
Then, in the fall of 2023, I saw my dad.
He had been taking Mounjaro, and the difference was dramatic enough that it made me start researching these medications seriously. By the following spring, I was ready.
Dan was starting from a different place.
He was around 220 pounds, wearing XXL shirts and about a 39-inch waist. He describes himself then as having a belly and love handles with “chicken legs”—or, in his words, looking “like an apple sitting on toothpicks.”
But his weight wasn't the biggest thing happening. He was working nights and drinking heavily. Alcohol led to late-night eating, hangovers made exercise less likely, and he ate at work to stay awake. He had tried to cut back on drinking before and hadn't been able to sustain it.
“The weeks leading to May 10th were dark for me,” he remembers. “I needed to quit drinking and start losing weight so I could start living my life again.”
What Happened Wasn't Just the Weight
The first thing that changed wasn't the scale. My sister had warned me about this. She told me not to pay much attention to the scale during the first four weeks—I might not see much movement there, but I might notice my clothes beginning to fit differently.
That's pretty much how I remember it. The first month wasn't dramatic. I had a little nausea here and there, but nothing significant. I don't remember needing medication to manage it. My clothes did begin to change—not drastically, but enough that I noticed.
Then somewhere around the time I reached 5 mg, something happened that I had never experienced before.
My drive to eat disappeared.
Not that I was better at controlling what I ate. Not that I wasn't craving junk food. Not even that I wasn't very hungry. The drive itself was absent.
There were times when the thought of food made me nauseated. I remember mornings when I would normally get up and drink a glass of water and realizing I had to be careful because even that could make me feel so full that eating for much of the day became difficult.
I had spent years thinking about food. Suddenly I could feel completely neutral toward it.
The term food noise gets used constantly now. At the time, I didn't have a neat phrase for what had changed. I just knew something in my brain and body felt profoundly different.
The Weight Loss
The weight came off. Then it kept coming off.
I didn't weigh myself constantly. That makes parts of my timeline less precise than I wish they were now, but at the time I wasn't trying to document a future story. I was living it. I noticed clothes. I noticed my body. I noticed how I felt.
By spring of 2025, I believe I was around 150 pounds. By summer, I had reached approximately 105–108 pounds.
I'm 5'7". That was too thin for me.
The Part Nobody Warned Me About
The strange part is that figuring out "too thin" wasn't as simple as seeing a number on a scale.
I love being skinny. I don't feel conflicted about saying that. I love clothes at this size. I love how I look in them. I love that I can wear the fitted clothes I've always preferred instead of trying to hide inside them.
But there was a point when I looked at my face and saw how gaunt it had become. The lines were dramatic. My face looked hollow. A size 00 could be loose.
People occasionally told me I was too skinny. Eventually, I agreed.
Today, the range where I personally feel best is roughly 112–117 pounds. My clothes fit the way I like. I feel most like myself there.
Getting to that range turned out to be much easier than learning how to stay there.
The Problem Success Created
Most conversations about GLP-1 medications focus on whether they work. Will I lose weight? How quickly? What happens if I plateau? What side effects will I have?
Those are important questions.
But eventually my question became almost the opposite: How do I keep enough of the effect without continuing to lose weight I don't want to lose?
And underneath that was another problem I hadn't paid enough attention to while the scale was moving downward: muscle.
Dan talked to me about protein. I did increase it—I went from eating a lot of processed food to making sure there was protein with essentially every meal. But when I look back at how little I sometimes ate, I don't think I fully understood what I was asking my body to do.
There were periods when my portions were tiny. Exercise felt almost impossible. I was exhausted.
I wish I had taken preserving my muscle and physical function as seriously as I took losing the weight. That's one of the reasons we're still talking about this.
Beyond the Scale
Some changes were obvious. My clothes changed. My face changed. I had loose skin. I lost hair for a period of time, although thankfully it grew back.
Other things were bizarrely mundane. My rings stopped fitting. My shoe size dropped. Hard chairs became uncomfortable. Sometimes my tailbone hurts. Cars aren't as comfortable as they used to be. I'm cold constantly.
And then there were the changes nobody talks about: Food tastes different. Restaurant food isn't particularly appealing anymore. Foods I used to love aren't necessarily foods I want now.
Somewhere along the way, Dan and I also realized that losing weight had changed something we hadn't considered: how we socialize. So much adult social life revolves around eating and drinking. Restaurant food became less compelling for both of us, but alcohol is where our experiences were especially different.
For Dan, alcohol wasn't simply something that became less interesting socially. Before tirzepatide, drinking had become a serious problem in his life. He had tried to cut back before and failed.
Then, within the first week or two after starting tirzepatide, he remembers noticing something unexpected: he didn't want to drink the way he had before. He could sometimes feel the craving return toward the end of the week as the medication seemed to wear off.
A few months later, he tried his usual cheap rum while we were at our cabin. He remembers that it tasted terrible, didn't seem to have the same effect, and left him sick the next day after drinking less than he normally would have. Even more unusual for him: he didn't want to drink again the following day.
That's Dan's experience, not proof that tirzepatide caused it. The relationship between GLP-1 medications, alcohol craving and reward is something we'll examine separately on the evidence side of GLP Logic.
But personally, it changed what “getting our life back” looked like.
We finally wanted to go places and do things again. We just hadn't anticipated that some of the things we'd previously associated with having a social life—dinner, drinks, going out to eat—might not feel particularly rewarding anymore.
We're still figuring out what replaces them.
Body Image Isn't What I Expected
This may be the part that has surprised me most.
I can love how I look and still have a moment when my thighs suddenly feel fat. I can wear a size 0 or 00 and intellectually know exactly what that means, yet put on the same pair of pants I wore yesterday and perceive my legs differently. I can be thrilled with my body in clothes and then put on a bathing suit and feel exposed by loose skin.
Those things apparently coexist.
I don't think the story is: I hated myself when I was overweight, lost weight, and finally loved myself.
I never hated myself. What changed was how much of myself I allowed other people to see. When I was heavier, I dressed to disappear. Now I don't. That has changed far more than my wardrobe.
Why This Story Needs Two People
We started on the same day. We lived in the same house. We took the same medication. We talked about what was happening constantly.
And our experiences were already diverging.
I remember the drive to eat nearly disappearing as I moved up in dose.
Dan remembers something else.
“I was skeptical because it seemed too good to be true,” he says. “A magic shot to fix the weight that had taken me years to gain and [that I was] unable to lose.”
His memories of those first few days are fuzzy. He sort of remembers being less hungry and staying full longer. He doesn't remember significant side effects early on.
What he remembers more clearly is realizing within the first week or two that he didn't want alcohol the way he had before.
He also remembers that he wasn't immediately convinced the medication was going to work.
“I don't remember a true ‘holy crap’ moment early on,” he says. “It wasn't until I started seeing the number on the scale go down that I was convinced that it was working. That and the lack of the cravings for alcohol and food.”
That's exactly why we're telling this story separately.
There are parts of Dan's experience I remember differently or could describe from the outside. There will probably be parts of mine that he remembers differently too. We're not going to reconcile those differences into one clean version just because we're married.
My memories belong to my story.
His memories belong to his.
And when our experiences overlap—or contradict each other—we'll show you that too.
This Isn't a Before-and-After Story
If you'd asked me when I started tirzepatide what success looked like, I probably would have given you a number.
Now I'd give you a much longer answer.
Weight matters to me. So does muscle. Energy. Strength. Nutrition. How medications affect me. What food means when you don't particularly want it anymore. What social life looks like when dinner and drinks lose their appeal. What happens to body image after the body you've wanted finally arrives. And how you maintain something that became surprisingly easy to lose.
Dan and I don't have all of those answers. Some of them we're still actively living.
That's why Two Nurses, One Journey exists. And it's why we built GLP Logic around something slightly different from a traditional health site. We'll tell you what happened to us. We'll investigate what the evidence actually says. And we'll be very clear when those are not the same thing.
Because losing the weight was only one part of this story.
The after has turned out to be much more interesting.
The Weight Loss Was Only the Beginning
We’re documenting the parts of GLP-1 treatment that don’t fit neatly into a before-and-after photo—from appetite, food and body image to muscle, maintenance, social life and the questions we’re still trying to understand.
