SKM vs the Scales - the beginning.....

Start Weight in November 2023: 207.7 kg 457.9 lbs 32 st 7 lbs

Current Weight in January 2024: 194.4 kg 428.5 lbs 30 st 6 lbs

There’s possibly some rounding up or down, but to be honest I can’t seem to make my brain ‘math’ at the moment as I haven’t really slept, so those will do as the starting figures for the blog.

Why start now? Well, today marks ten weeks of being on Trulicity for my T2D and weight loss. I would be more than happy to keep going into week 11, but unfortunately Trulicity is out of stock for the foreseeable future. So here I am on injection day, with no injection.

I have a telephone appointmnent with the doctor’s surgery tomorrow morning and I have no idea what to expect. I have seen talk of Rybelsus which is in tablet form, Mounjaro, Zepbound – but literally until I have this phone call I have no idea what the doctor is going to suggest.

And I am bricking myself. I have lost weight in the past – I lost over seven stone doing the Cambridge Diet, as well as other VLCDs over the years. I’ve also done Slimming World and Weight Watchers. Each and every time I’ve failed. Some of it was willpower, some life circumstances, some just crummy luck. But without fail, the weight has come back plus some until I was super morbidly obese.

I followed the Weight Management programme for my area to quality for weight loss surgery on the NHS. I’ve done all of that successfully, but between qualifying and having the phone call with my prospective surgeon, life once again got away from me. I put on 10 kg over the course of 18 months and the surgeon warned me that if I hadn’t got back down to 193kg by the time of my surgery (or at least maintained) then it might not happen.

I had tried Trulicity with limited success, mainly caused by difficulties obtaining it. I would manage two weeks worth of injections only to find that the pharmacy were out of stock so I had to begin again at the lowest dose. At one stage, I made it up to 3mg but again, supply issues meant that I was injecting two of the 1.5mg each week and this wasn’t sustainable because there simply weren’t the pens available on the NHS.

This time, I had am amazing Endochrinology nurse (I’ll call her Violet) who convinced me that getting my diabetes numbers down would only be a good thing for the surgery and that I should give Trulicity another try. So, November 2023, I started. I already had enough pens for six weeks – two weeks on 1.5mg, 2 weeks on 3mg and then up to 4.5mg.

The difference was pretty much immediate. I suffered from a number of side effects: nausea, chronic fatigue, vomiting and constipation. But I wasn’t hungry – the noise in my head that was always on about food, what I’d just eaten, what I wanted to eat, what food I saw on the TV – it was just gone. And with it gone, as well as false hunger pangs, I was absolutely fine eating a small breakfast and a dinner. I was full (often overfull) from the smallest meals and felt amazing. And the scales! The scales were dropping at an amazing rate – I put new batteries in to be sure that I was getting an accurate reading! It was working.

I read a few things that gave me food for thought (pun intended). Like how for years, many fat people had been made to feel like failures and pariahs because they couldn’t control their eating (or wouldn’t control their eating), how weight loss was simply calories in, calories out and how it showed a lack of commitment to being healthy and fit to remain fat. Like it was something that people aim for rather than fight against. Like so many fat people haven’t tried every single diet out there (including all of the frankly ridiculous/dangerous ones) and failed each time.

Semaglutide and its’ ability to help people lose weight is revolutionary. And of course, that means it can (and is) being monetized. There are people paying hundreds per month to buy what they hope is the real thing on the black market. People taking ‘compounds’ and hoping that they’re safe but willing to take the risk in order to lose the weight. Which is kinda horrifying actually.

So here I am, Monday 22nd January 2024, hoping that the doctor is going to pull a rabbit out of their hat tomorrow and make it possible for me to continue this journey with this help. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that I am terrified about trying to continue to do this without this help. Because if I manage to lose another chunk of weight but put it all back on, I can’t imagine how impossible life could be weighing more than I did at the start of November.