I’ve been very absent. Very busy. Very busy bingeing.

I’ll do a quick résumé as quite a lot has happened on the eating front. Blood tests in December showed I had high cholesterol. Weirdly my triglycerides have been fine since my sugar-free year in 2021. No matter how much I binge on sugar, they remain stable. Instead, now it’s my bad cholesterol levels which are on the up and up.

I decided I should use this as a wake-up call like i had with the pre-diabetes in 2020 and that i should finally focus on my health and stop bingeing. I enlisted the help of a dietician/nutritionist. She was all about healthy swaps, balance and moderation which is all well and good for someone who isn’t an addict, but after she advised me to reintroduce milk chocolate and repair my toxic relationship with it, it went completely tits up! For two evenings i was able to eat two squares of Lindt milk chocolate mindfully and by day 3, the sugar beast was well and truly unleashed. Come the Monday, I was buying (and eating) a donut and cookie to eat BEFORE my healthy breakfast of fromage blanc/almond butter/oats/chia seeds/berries.

That was at the start of March and since then I’ve been on-off bingeing and my weight has been gradually creeping up. I had tried Elcella which was supposed to be like a natural mounjaro but it did nothing for this sugar addict. It supposedly makes you feel full so you eat less, but I don’t eat sugar because I’m hungry. I’m eating sugar because my brain is screaming out for it. I tried all sorts of natural medicine – Chrome, flaxseed, metamucil – but my brain was still screaming out and I began to quiz friends who were taking mounjaro about the quietening of the food noise. Even the worst sugar addicts said that they weren’t interested in it when on mounjaro. It held no interest for them. Could that really be possible?! Then i read an article about a woman for whom mounjaro hadn’t worked and I thought it would be typical if i would have the same experience on it!

Meanwhile, I kept trying to rein things in, prioritise food sobriety, focus on my health, connect with others about it, but just couldn’t get back in the zone. I was knee-deep in chocolate again.

Easter weekend was complete carnage. On Easter Monday, I decided i needed to really quit chocolate once and for all. Moderation would never be possible for me and I didn’t binge because i restrict it, i restrict it because I can only binge on it. So before i went to bed, in one last binge – having eaten loads during the day – I ate an Easter egg, a medium lindt bunny and a full mini egg chocolate bar. I felt sick, bloated and had palpitations. I couldn’t sleep, so got up and drank some hot lemon at about 3am and googled “can you poison yourself with chocolate”, downloaded a book called “how to eat like a normal person” (which i didn’t even remember until i got into work dazed in the morning) and felt like death for two days. It was scarily reminiscent of drinking. I went back to basics, took what had worked from OA, the nutritionist, getting sober, and seemed to be back on track (it lasted two and a half weeks).

One day i was chatting to a friend who had confessed to looking so great because she was on mounjaro and she explained how to get it in France and how she intended to stay on it forever as it was a miracle drug for her (she is not the only one who has described it in those terms) and how it has been the only thing that has taken away the obsession with food and enabled her to stay on track in that regard, even faced with all-inclusive dessert buffets!

After yet another binge, i took my weight and photos and logged on to get my hands on some mounjaro online but i hit a technical problem and decided maybe there was a higher power and this was it in action and that i had to put in the work not take a shortcut with a drug. However, higher powers don’t work like that and so I carried on bingeing and getting nowhere. In this period, i read something about weight-loss medication might be rolled out in the future to those with a BMI of 25 to 27 as preventative medicine – before they hit prediabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure – and i knew that was where i was heading if i kept eating the way i was and maybe i needed to do a preventative strike before getting there (I already have the high cholesterol and have had problems with blood sugar levels).

I came back from a stressful work mission absolutely exhausted and fell headlong into the leftover Easter chocolate and threw in the towel this week. In the last year I’ve been doing regular sport, I’ve overhauled my diet to get healthy fats and lots of protein, I’ve tried handing my problem eating over to a higher power in the past and i just keep ending up at square one (and not even as i get there with even more kilos in tow than the last time).

I got mounjaro online (way easier than i’d expected it to be) and told the Saint my reasoning and he agreed – surprisingly – with it and said i was undoubtedly heading for serious health issues the way i was eating so maybe a preventative strike was worth the risks associated with the drug. He has also agreed to help me with the jabs as I’m slightly freaked out by that bit of the procedure. (Also slightly scared about side effects but in my friend group the majority haven’t had any unpleasant side effects).

True to my addict self, i have binged spectacularly since getting it. (I’m planning my first injection tomorrow at the start of the long weekend in case of any unpleasant side effects). So today i have eaten my usual healthy breakfast (no cookie or donut beforehand but only because i had to do a blood test on an empty stomach – which showed my cholesterol had gone up since December :-(), a 100g bar of chocolate mid-morning, a fruit yoghurt before a gym session at lunchtime, couscous for lunch, a strawberry and rhubarb mousse tart for dessert, another 100g bar of chocolate in the afternoon, then some unexpected Caribbean delicacies – mostly deep fried – at my daughter’s gym, followed by breaded chicken, sautéed potatoes and salad for dinner, with melon served for dessert and more chocolate this evening. I can’t wait to stop this obscene eating! I feel bloated, shaky and totally fed up.

I guess this has unexpectedly morphed into a GLP-1 journey…