“Something happened,” I told my wife. She is a veteran who watched me try to fix my body. I said to her: The place where before my brain was screaming, screaming, at air strike volume – suddenly silenced. It’s really hard to understand. Will it last?
That night, I went alone to an old-fashioned Chinese restaurant with tables, and ordered General Tso’s. I ate broccoli, some chicken, and thought: wow. I left unfinished, went home bewildered, a different kind of sleepwalker. I passed the bodegas and shrugged. At one office, I observed stacks of candy and junk food with no particular interest.
Decades of struggle — crashes. It’s clear that the Mounjaro molecule targets the same hormone as Ozempic, plus the latter, so it not only stimulates insulin production but also increases energy output.
“I desperately need,” I thought, “an analog synthesizer.” Something to fill the silence where there used to be food. Every night for weeks, I spent four or five hours turning the Moog knobs. Don’t make music. Just drone, repeat and beep. I need something to obsess over, to watch YouTube videos. I need something to fail every night to feel normal. And I also had mania, dysarthria, and eyes wide open, sleeping 5 hours a night, walking, talking awkwardly; My friends, happy for me but confused, call me “cocaine Paul.” I bought more synthesizers from a guy from Craigslist, met him in Bushwick, Brooklyn, for a large sum. A body is not designed to lose 25 pounds in eight weeks, starting with the days off. Beep sound. Pop.
With relief came new worries. What if it stops working and I slide back into the valley of endless noise? Plus, these drugs are hard to buy, both because of supply chain issues and because they’re prescribed off-label for weight loss instead of diabetes. I can’t get a steady prescription from the pharmacy. I’m developing a delivery plan, which ranges from injections every seven days to every eight or nine days to build a stockpile.
I could see my anxiety reflected in the wave of reactions that began to emerge — the commentary, the TV clips, people explaining why it was good, the vast majority actually. people using this drug lost a quarter of their body weight. On social media, fat activists are pointing out that our lives are worth it even without this drug. The tide of public opinion will not be high for many years.
And that’s fair because this is a new product—not just a drug, but a drug idea. There’s no API or software to download, but it’s a technology that will rearrange the social order nonetheless. I am the living embodiment of the deadly sin of gluttony, judged as greedy and weak since I was 10 years old—and now the sin has been washed away. Baptism by injection. But I am not as virtuous as I was a few months ago. I just prefer broccoli over moody chicken. Is this me?
How long before there’s an injection for your appetite, bad habit? Maybe they’re not as conspicuous as mine. Do you vaccinate yourself against mercenary weekly? Can Big Pharma cure your laziness, lust, anger, jealousy, pride? Is this humanity’s way of tackling climate change—by creating harmony, instead of hoping for it in Davos? Certainly my carbon footprint is much smaller today. Will we bring together our brightest scientists, examine hormonal pathways, and eventually create a cure for billionaires?
When I let the domain for my diet blog expire, I accepted that no technology could change my own biological response to satiety. Now there is, and the part where I keep track of every meal, look for solutions in apps and programs, write code and take notes is outdated. Was that time wasted? God, yes. But I learned a lot – about nutrition, about exercise, about myself. All of those lessons are a joy to apply now, without having to panic from self-destructive hunger.
Lately I’ve finally calmed down. Still losing weight, but much slower. Exercise more. At night, I play the synthesizer and watch online classes on music theory. Wear headphones, handle all those years of futile efforts. When I fiddle with buttons, I’m sometimes angry, sometimes embarrassed, and often grateful. I don’t know how long this post-appetite period will last, or how it will end. It’s just that, once again in our lives, things have changed.
