When the Food Noise Finally Stops: Relearning How to Eat (and Live) in the Quiet

There’s a strange kind of peace that follows years of chaos.
When I started my GLP-1 medication, I hoped I would be less hungry. What I didn’t expect was silence - not just from my stomach, but from the part of my brain that had spent decades negotiating with it.

Before this, I treated dieting like a hobby. I’d sign up for multiple diet plans in a single week… Weight Watchers on Monday, SlimFast by Thursday, something with ‘metabolic’ in the name by Sunday. Each new start hit like a dopamine rush. This one would be the fix. This one would make sense of my body. It never did.

I wasn’t just feeding hunger; I was chasing the high of hope. Psychologists call it intermittent reinforcement. This is the same mechanism that makes slot machines addictive.[^1] Every once in a while, a diet ‘worked’ briefly, and that tiny win was enough to keep me spending hundreds (if not thousands) a year trying to recreate it.

Then Mounjaro entered the chat and the compulsion vanished.