The emotional release that comes with seeing how everyone else actually lives

kugelblitz

kugelblitz

Explorer
Joined
Jun 8, 2026
Messages
64
Reaction score
0
Location
European Union
This isn't my 1st rodeo with GLP-1 medication, though it has been quite a while since the last time — I had to stop liraglutide because of what it cost. Yesterday I injected 1 mg of retatrutide, and now it's 5 pm and I've gone the entire day without eating. I'm sure nobody in this community needs me to explain how huge that is for me, but honestly I couldn't explain it even if I wanted to, since no words I possess come close to conveying the scale of it.

For my whole life I've been at minimum overweight, and for the most part obese. Being viewed by the world as someone with a normal weight is something I have never experienced. That said, it has never been what defines me, and by and large I haven't had too hard a time being accepted by society. The mockery and derision that others — women in particular — have faced because of their weight is definitely not something I've ever felt. Being a man, apart from a handful of bros who don't actually mean me any harm, polite society is much too... polite, well, to make it obvious.

Even so, I have spent more days than I could count asking myself why I am the way I am. What stops me from controlling myself? Others can do it; is there something so lacking in whatever makes a person a person that I'm forced to stuff my face, give in to every craving, and eat both compulsively and without thought? This always stood out to me so sharply because, by my nature, I have almost no other vices at all. Smoking is something I've never done, recreational drugs are not something I use, I drink very little alcohol, and I've never gambled any significant sum. Every other part of my life has shown me what self-control feels like — except this one.

Control is something I have attempted. I have tried SO HARD. More nights than I can count were spent fighting myself over whether to get out of bed and eat whatever looked edible. More hours than I can count went into the gym; I dropped a great deal of weight purely through willpower and meticulous calorie counting, and the instant life drained away my singular focus, I was right back where I started, putting the weight on again. Every approach has been tried.

And then, 1 mg of a white powder sent to me by a somewhat questionable Chinese lab and... blessed silence. It's finished. As if someone flipped a switch. It's vanished. Is this really the way other people live? They aren't driven by some biological quirk to devote at least part of every waking moment to thoughts of the next meal? They simply go about their lives, eating to meet their energy needs rather than in a futile effort to fill some endless pit inside them that dooms them either to cramming food into their mouths or to obsessively dwelling on the next time they'll cram food into their mouths.

Honestly, now that the proof of my own experience has hit me this hard, I don't know what to do with myself. Perhaps — just perhaps — I need to think about setting down all the guilt that has pressed on me even more heavily than all the excess weight I've carried my entire life. Could it be that this isn't entirely my fault?

I hope you'll pardon all this rambling. A genuine moment of catharsis is happening to me right now, and the only chance I have of reaching anyone who might get it is you, my dear internet strangers.

If this moment I'm in right now is one you've had too, please say so. I'd like to hear it.

Thank you for putting up with me.
 
That was a beautifully articulate way to put it!

Your description resonates with me deeply — from the moment I first learned about GLP-1s, I've carried that exact same sensation, and it hasn't faded.

On top of that, I've found they take the edge off several of my other bad habits, which — in contrast to your situation — I happen to have plenty of.
 
Appreciate you posting this. Reading it, I kept thinking those could be my own words — though I’m too lazy a writer for that. My version would’ve been something like “yeah, bro, reta is cool.” You aren’t alone in this. About 2 hours after my 1st dose, it was as if a broken part inside me got repaired. These days life feels so peaceful.

Either way, wishing you the best as you keep going! May you savor each moment and every milestone.
 
Yeah, a lot of folks—maybe even most—still get nervous about injecting anything, or they've decided it's somehow wrong. Their answer is always 'just do it the natural way.' My response to that: 'Fine, if you're so into nature, move to a farm or the jungle—no power, no plumbing.'

Having these amazing APIs within reach is a huge privilege. Why pass that up? With fast food joints on every block in the modern world, keeping any kind of long-term food discipline is incredibly tough. These APIs/GLPs are a modern answer to a modern problem. They're a textbook case of better living through science. There's zero shame in using them—even if it's only to maintain.
 
On my 1st day of Tirz, a thought kept running through my head: "Is this really what it's like for regular folks when it comes to eating?" It completely blew my mind. And honestly, it frustrates me quite a bit, thinking back on all those years of comments from people about my weight that made it obvious they had zero idea that my brain and metabolism simply did not work the way theirs do. Their easygoing way with food was something they had lived, but it was never something I had. That is, until Tirz fixed it. These really are miracle drugs.
 
kugelblitz said:

This isn't my 1st rodeo with GLP-1 medication, though it has been quite a while since the last time — I had to stop liraglutide because of what it cost. Yesterday I injected 1 mg of retatrutide, and now it's 5 pm and I've gone the entire day without eating. I'm sure nobody in this community needs me to explain how huge that is for me, but honestly I couldn't explain it even if I wanted to, since no words I possess come close to conveying the scale of it.

For my whole life I've been at minimum overweight, and for the most part obese. Being viewed by the world as someone with a normal weight is something I have never experienced. That said, it has never been what defines me, and by and large I haven't had too hard a time being accepted by society. The mockery and derision that others — women in particular — have faced because of their weight is definitely not something I've ever felt. Being a man, apart from a handful of bros who don't actually mean me any harm, polite society is much too... polite, well, to make it obvious.

Even so, I have spent more days than I could count asking myself why I am the way I am. What stops me from controlling myself? Others can do it; is there something so lacking in whatever makes a person a person that I'm forced to stuff my face, give in to every craving, and eat both compulsively and without thought? This always stood out to me so sharply because, by my nature, I have almost no other vices at all. Smoking is something I've never done, recreational drugs are not something I use, I drink very little alcohol, and I've never gambled any significant sum. Every other part of my life has shown me what self-control feels like — except this one.

Control is something I have attempted. I have tried SO HARD. More nights than I can count were spent fighting myself over whether to get out of bed and eat whatever looked edible. More hours than I can count went into the gym; I dropped a great deal of weight purely through willpower and meticulous calorie counting, and the instant life drained away my singular focus, I was right back where I started, putting the weight on again. Every approach has been tried.

And then, 1 mg of a white powder sent to me by a somewhat questionable Chinese lab and... blessed silence. It's finished. As if someone flipped a switch. It's vanished. Is this really the way other people live? They aren't driven by some biological quirk to devote at least part of every waking moment to thoughts of the next meal? They simply go about their lives, eating to meet their energy needs rather than in a futile effort to fill some endless pit inside them that dooms them either to cramming food into their mouths or to obsessively dwelling on the next time they'll cram food into their mouths.

Honestly, now that the proof of my own experience has hit me this hard, I don't know what to do with myself. Perhaps — just perhaps — I need to think about setting down all the guilt that has pressed on me even more heavily than all the excess weight I've carried my entire life. Could it be that this isn't entirely my fault?

I hope you'll pardon all this rambling. A genuine moment of catharsis is happening to me right now, and the only chance I have of reaching anyone who might get it is you, my dear internet strangers.

If this moment I'm in right now is one you've had too, please say so. I'd like to hear it.

Thank you for putting up with me.
Click to expand...

100% went through the identical experience at the start of last year, right after my first R10 kit arrived. The moment I took 1mg of it, my urge to eat and to drink alcohol just vanished. I had been doing both of those things at a competitive level for roughly 20 years, and all at once my mind had a huge amount of free room. No more cpu cycles burned on beer and cheeseburgers. I could finally concentrate, and even though I've hit my goal weight, I'm continuing it regardless, for mental health reasons. To me, reta is Jesus in a bottle — it takes away the desire to sin.
 
There was a point for me too when it hit: oh, so this is what it's like when food isn't constantly on your mind... and right after that came some resentment about how hard it had been to actually get the medication.

For years I was on Kaiser through my job, and they refused to even talk about glp-1 meds with me. I left them, switched to a different plan, and the new doctor just said sure, I'll write you a script for that.

The first 4 wks of zep cost 1500 US, so I sent that shit back and started hunting around. Then I found this awesome forum and I'm so happy 😊
 
Only after starting GLP medications did I see how far from normal I had been. I believed the constant eating and food noise were failings that other people managed fine, while I simply couldn't. Every effort I made went nowhere; hunger never left, and my mind kept yelling at me to eat, anything at all. Then came that initial dose of Tirz, and suddenly I felt normal — no shouting in my head, no stomach rumbling. It was unbelievable, and nothing in my life has ever made me feel more thankful.
 
Alright, here's where I'm at right now, everyone. Food noise was something I'd managed to keep 80% in check for a long time, but that remaining 20% was still driving me to overeat. On top of that, hunger never really left me, even right after finishing a meal.

I figured it had to be stress eating or something along those lines, because pressure has been a constant in my life for as long as I can recall.

Fast forward to week 5 of tirz, and honestly, it's like a burden got lifted off me. The food noise is gone, the hunger is gone, and all that's left is my normal meals... 6 months of gym progress (I mean fat loss and looking lean) happened in just the last 5 weeks, and now it all makes sense.

I'm aware that eventually I'll come off this, and it would serve me better to work on my mindset so I can tune out those noises and keep living without the food disorder.

For me, this changes everything, because food just isn't something I stress over anymore.
 
Yes. And yes. And yes. 50 years spent asking myself WHY and WHAT is wrong with me. After 1 first tirz injection in December, presto; THIS IS WHAT NORMAL feels like. We totally get you.
 
kugelblitz said:

This isn't my 1st rodeo with GLP-1 medication, though it has been quite a while since the last time — I had to stop liraglutide because of what it cost. Yesterday I injected 1 mg of retatrutide, and now it's 5 pm and I've gone the entire day without eating. I'm sure nobody in this community needs me to explain how huge that is for me, but honestly I couldn't explain it even if I wanted to, since no words I possess come close to conveying the scale of it.

For my whole life I've been at minimum overweight, and for the most part obese. Being viewed by the world as someone with a normal weight is something I have never experienced. That said, it has never been what defines me, and by and large I haven't had too hard a time being accepted by society. The mockery and derision that others — women in particular — have faced because of their weight is definitely not something I've ever felt. Being a man, apart from a handful of bros who don't actually mean me any harm, polite society is much too... polite, well, to make it obvious.

Even so, I have spent more days than I could count asking myself why I am the way I am. What stops me from controlling myself? Others can do it; is there something so lacking in whatever makes a person a person that I'm forced to stuff my face, give in to every craving, and eat both compulsively and without thought? This always stood out to me so sharply because, by my nature, I have almost no other vices at all. Smoking is something I've never done, recreational drugs are not something I use, I drink very little alcohol, and I've never gambled any significant sum. Every other part of my life has shown me what self-control feels like — except this one.

Control is something I have attempted. I have tried SO HARD. More nights than I can count were spent fighting myself over whether to get out of bed and eat whatever looked edible. More hours than I can count went into the gym; I dropped a great deal of weight purely through willpower and meticulous calorie counting, and the instant life drained away my singular focus, I was right back where I started, putting the weight on again. Every approach has been tried.

And then, 1 mg of a white powder sent to me by a somewhat questionable Chinese lab and... blessed silence. It's finished. As if someone flipped a switch. It's vanished. Is this really the way other people live? They aren't driven by some biological quirk to devote at least part of every waking moment to thoughts of the next meal? They simply go about their lives, eating to meet their energy needs rather than in a futile effort to fill some endless pit inside them that dooms them either to cramming food into their mouths or to obsessively dwelling on the next time they'll cram food into their mouths.

Honestly, now that the proof of my own experience has hit me this hard, I don't know what to do with myself. Perhaps — just perhaps — I need to think about setting down all the guilt that has pressed on me even more heavily than all the excess weight I've carried my entire life. Could it be that this isn't entirely my fault?

I hope you'll pardon all this rambling. A genuine moment of catharsis is happening to me right now, and the only chance I have of reaching anyone who might get it is you, my dear internet strangers.

If this moment I'm in right now is one you've had too, please say so. I'd like to hear it.

Thank you for putting up with me.
Click to expand...
I'M DECEASED! 😂

This post is everything, and I'm thrilled for you. It resonates so deeply with me. Sure, I've squeezed into straight sizes a handful of times over the years (roughly every 10 years, lasting a few months — most recently a few years), but the vast majority of my life has been spent obese. Exactly as you put it: the moment my attention drifted from obsessive tracking and 5-10 hours of weekly exercise, every ounce of that grueling effort evaporated. It felt like a character flaw…why is this supposedly basic human function — eating just to fuel myself — so impossible for me? Metabolic testing put me in the bottom 5%, and later came a metabolic disorder diagnosis. Yet even with that validation, I still carried the feeling that I was pathetic and fundamentally broken.

February 2026 is when I began tirz, and honestly? It's like sorcery. I eat at mealtimes, not whenever I'm joyful/miserable/bored/anxious/inhaling air LOL! I can stop at 3 cookies rather than demolishing the entire box. Yes, it's science, but it's also a goddamn miracle.

Huge high fives!!
 
headward said:

Yeah, a lot of folks—maybe even most—still get nervous about injecting anything, or they've decided it's somehow wrong. Their answer is always 'just do it the natural way.' My response to that: 'Fine, if you're so into nature, move to a farm or the jungle—no power, no plumbing.'

Having these amazing APIs within reach is a huge privilege. Why pass that up? With fast food joints on every block in the modern world, keeping any kind of long-term food discipline is incredibly tough. These APIs/GLPs are a modern answer to a modern problem. They're a textbook case of better living through science. There's zero shame in using them—even if it's only to maintain.
Click to expand...

When our ancestors fashioned spearpoints, gaining an edge over the other predators roaming the planet, did that count as cheating?

If the answer is no, then peptides are no form of cheating either. And if the answer is yes, then cheating it is.
 
kugelblitz said:

This isn't my 1st rodeo with GLP-1 medication, though it has been quite a while since the last time — I had to stop liraglutide because of what it cost. Yesterday I injected 1 mg of retatrutide, and now it's 5 pm and I've gone the entire day without eating. I'm sure nobody in this community needs me to explain how huge that is for me, but honestly I couldn't explain it even if I wanted to, since no words I possess come close to conveying the scale of it.

For my whole life I've been at minimum overweight, and for the most part obese. Being viewed by the world as someone with a normal weight is something I have never experienced. That said, it has never been what defines me, and by and large I haven't had too hard a time being accepted by society. The mockery and derision that others — women in particular — have faced because of their weight is definitely not something I've ever felt. Being a man, apart from a handful of bros who don't actually mean me any harm, polite society is much too... polite, well, to make it obvious.

Even so, I have spent more days than I could count asking myself why I am the way I am. What stops me from controlling myself? Others can do it; is there something so lacking in whatever makes a person a person that I'm forced to stuff my face, give in to every craving, and eat both compulsively and without thought? This always stood out to me so sharply because, by my nature, I have almost no other vices at all. Smoking is something I've never done, recreational drugs are not something I use, I drink very little alcohol, and I've never gambled any significant sum. Every other part of my life has shown me what self-control feels like — except this one.

Control is something I have attempted. I have tried SO HARD. More nights than I can count were spent fighting myself over whether to get out of bed and eat whatever looked edible. More hours than I can count went into the gym; I dropped a great deal of weight purely through willpower and meticulous calorie counting, and the instant life drained away my singular focus, I was right back where I started, putting the weight on again. Every approach has been tried.

And then, 1 mg of a white powder sent to me by a somewhat questionable Chinese lab and... blessed silence. It's finished. As if someone flipped a switch. It's vanished. Is this really the way other people live? They aren't driven by some biological quirk to devote at least part of every waking moment to thoughts of the next meal? They simply go about their lives, eating to meet their energy needs rather than in a futile effort to fill some endless pit inside them that dooms them either to cramming food into their mouths or to obsessively dwelling on the next time they'll cram food into their mouths.

Honestly, now that the proof of my own experience has hit me this hard, I don't know what to do with myself. Perhaps — just perhaps — I need to think about setting down all the guilt that has pressed on me even more heavily than all the excess weight I've carried my entire life. Could it be that this isn't entirely my fault?

I hope you'll pardon all this rambling. A genuine moment of catharsis is happening to me right now, and the only chance I have of reaching anyone who might get it is you, my dear internet strangers.

If this moment I'm in right now is one you've had too, please say so. I'd like to hear it.

Thank you for putting up with me.
Click to expand...
I've been through that exact realization, and it still comes back around every so often. Guilt and shame are almost my factory settings — I have to consciously pause and ask myself, "What exactly are you ashamed of?" Like you, willpower and discipline aren't things I'm missing elsewhere in life. But since I carried some extra weight as a kid — my mom put me in WW when I was 9 — being fat and powerless around food became who I was.

There's grief for that young girl, who got so much criticism and so little understanding. To my mother, my weight was a narcissistic injury, and she never let up about it. When that pattern gets established early, it can shape your entire self-image in a massive way.

I hope the relief you felt sticks around, and that you shake off that guilt for good. In my case it hasn't been a single event; I keep having to face my own self-image again and again, and I can tell it isn't finished yet.

NO, it was not all on you! Not a single bit of it was your fault. Your metabolism plus the standard American diet were never going to work together. Wishing you peace.
 
kugelblitz said:

This isn't my 1st rodeo with GLP-1 medication, though it has been quite a while since the last time — I had to stop liraglutide because of what it cost. Yesterday I injected 1 mg of retatrutide, and now it's 5 pm and I've gone the entire day without eating. I'm sure nobody in this community needs me to explain how huge that is for me, but honestly I couldn't explain it even if I wanted to, since no words I possess come close to conveying the scale of it.

For my whole life I've been at minimum overweight, and for the most part obese. Being viewed by the world as someone with a normal weight is something I have never experienced. That said, it has never been what defines me, and by and large I haven't had too hard a time being accepted by society. The mockery and derision that others — women in particular — have faced because of their weight is definitely not something I've ever felt. Being a man, apart from a handful of bros who don't actually mean me any harm, polite society is much too... polite, well, to make it obvious.

Even so, I have spent more days than I could count asking myself why I am the way I am. What stops me from controlling myself? Others can do it; is there something so lacking in whatever makes a person a person that I'm forced to stuff my face, give in to every craving, and eat both compulsively and without thought? This always stood out to me so sharply because, by my nature, I have almost no other vices at all. Smoking is something I've never done, recreational drugs are not something I use, I drink very little alcohol, and I've never gambled any significant sum. Every other part of my life has shown me what self-control feels like — except this one.

Control is something I have attempted. I have tried SO HARD. More nights than I can count were spent fighting myself over whether to get out of bed and eat whatever looked edible. More hours than I can count went into the gym; I dropped a great deal of weight purely through willpower and meticulous calorie counting, and the instant life drained away my singular focus, I was right back where I started, putting the weight on again. Every approach has been tried.

And then, 1 mg of a white powder sent to me by a somewhat questionable Chinese lab and... blessed silence. It's finished. As if someone flipped a switch. It's vanished. Is this really the way other people live? They aren't driven by some biological quirk to devote at least part of every waking moment to thoughts of the next meal? They simply go about their lives, eating to meet their energy needs rather than in a futile effort to fill some endless pit inside them that dooms them either to cramming food into their mouths or to obsessively dwelling on the next time they'll cram food into their mouths.

Honestly, now that the proof of my own experience has hit me this hard, I don't know what to do with myself. Perhaps — just perhaps — I need to think about setting down all the guilt that has pressed on me even more heavily than all the excess weight I've carried my entire life. Could it be that this isn't entirely my fault?

I hope you'll pardon all this rambling. A genuine moment of catharsis is happening to me right now, and the only chance I have of reaching anyone who might get it is you, my dear internet strangers.

If this moment I'm in right now is one you've had too, please say so. I'd like to hear it.

Thank you for putting up with me.
Click to expand...
Happy that Reta is working out for you. There's another angle to consider: for a lot of people, the struggle is overdoing something — whether that's drinking, substances, betting, porn, shopping, and so on. With some folks, food is simply the thing it lands on. In my case, food was never the issue; it was other things. We're all on a path, hoping to overcome our worst habits.
 
Beautifully put! Whenever glp's/weight loss comes up in conversation, I share how calm I became once the food noise went quiet. To me, that is the greatest miracle these drugs offer.
 
Right. I've been thinnER at points, yet never truly thin. Apart from a handful of occasions in my whole life, I never even reached normal weight — and each of those times took complete focus and dedication, I'd slip a pound or 2 into the bottom edge of the normal range, then promptly regain the majority of it. These days, by the numbers, I am thin. (I phrase it that way since I sit under the midpoint of the normal BMI range, even though I don't see myself as thin and can't truly be certain.) Getting rid of these final 5 pounds is a struggle, but keeping the weight from returning is not. And the fact that 1 weekly injection gave me the ability to manage what I eat proves that my eating being fucked up was never my fault; something inside me was broken, then I took the good medication, and that broken thing was fixed. Imagine that.
 
Honestly, experiencing actual fullness for a change completely stunned me. I genuinely can't recall when I last reached a point where eating even 1 more bite was impossible. That constant mental chatter about scheduling my upcoming meal or snack was exhausting, so having it quiet down—or disappear entirely—feels great. Since I'm using reta, the hunger reduction isn't as intense as it might be, meaning I haven't reached that "going an entire day without remembering to eat" stage.
 
Appreciate you posting this.

My own introduction to GLP was a bit different, since I'd already dropped the weight by then, but at that stage I'd gone close to 2 years dealing with constant hunger. Still, I clearly recall sitting down to a modest portion, the kind I'd been eating throughout those 2 years, and finding myself too full to clean the plate, whereas in the past that same amount would have left me wanting more. I'm pretty sure that had never happened to me before. Simply feeling content with a regular or small serving of food.
 
Back
Top