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For decades, Jacqui Cook lived in a cycle many women know all too well: losing weight, gaining it back, and starting over… always wondering why nothing seemed to stick. Food was her love language, life kept getting in the way, and no matter how hard she tried, maintaining her progress felt impossible.

Everything changed after a wake-up moment that led her to try a GLP-1 medication. 

Now, 115 pounds lighter, Jacqui shares the real, honest side of her journey: navigating maintenance, facing the fear of regain, letting go of guilt, rebuilding lost muscle, and learning to live fully in her body. 

The Wake-Up Call that Changed Everything

Jacqui didn't start a GLP-1 medication because of how she looked.

She started because of how she felt, and because of what she was afraid she might miss.

On a family trip to Los Angeles, she found herself struggling to walk across the sand at Santa Monica Beach. It wasn't a long distance, but it felt unmanageable.

And somewhere in the middle of that walk, a thought hit her:

If this is this hard… how am I going to do Ireland?

For years, her family had dreamed of visiting the Irish countryside where her grandmother grew up. But standing there on that beach, she realized something uncomfortable: she might not physically be able to do it.

That moment became her turning point. In December 2021, after decades of dieting and starting over, Jacqui decided to try Ozempic. She had reached the point where she knew something had to change.

Weight Loss Was Just the Beginning

By the time Jacqui came to work with me, she had already lost most of her weight.

But the number on the scale wasn't her biggest concern anymore. What she really wanted to know was: what comes next?

Three things brought her in:

• A deep fear of regaining the weight. After years of losing and gaining, the thought of going backwards still felt very real.
• No clear idea what maintenance actually looks like. After decades of dieting, she had never made it to this stage before.
• A surprising discovery about muscle loss. During her evaluation, we found she had lost about 17 pounds of muscle (something her previous provider had never addressed).

That's where obesity medicine looks different from traditional dieting. Instead of focusing only on the scale, the conversation shifts to muscle mass, nutrition quality, hydration, and sustainable habits. For Jacqui, this phase became less about losing more weight and more about learning how to live in her body in a way that actually lasts.

The Fear of Regain Doesn't Magically Disappear

A lot of people assume that once the weight is gone, the anxiety goes with it. But that’s not usually the case.

Jacqui admits she still occasionally dreams about gaining the weight back. If her jeans feel a little tight, her brain sometimes jumps straight to worst-case scenario thinking.

But over time, one mindset shift helped more than anything else: she stopped viewing obesity as a personal failure and started viewing it as a chronic medical condition.

That shift changed everything.

Instead of trying to "win" against her body, she focuses on managing it long term. Her relationship with food naturally evolved along the way. Today she eats when she's hungry, stops when she's full, and still enjoys good food, just in smaller portions. A steak dinner is still a steak dinner. The difference is she might order the petite filet and eat half - and she's completely okay with that!

The Diet Habit She Finally Walked Away From

For years, Jacqui tracked everything. Calories, macros, fat grams, fiber.Like many long-time dieters, logging food had become second nature. But eventually she realized all that data wasn't actually helping her. She'd look at her daily totals and think… okay, but what does this really tell me?

So she deleted MyFitnessPal and stopped tracking completely. Instead, she started paying attention to more meaningful signals: 

• how she felt after eating
• if she had energy throughout the day
• whether she was getting enough protein

Her InBody scale gave her real data on muscle mass and hydration. Those signals turned out to be far more useful than any calorie count.

Tracking works for some people. But if it starts to feel like a cage instead of a tool, it may be worth stepping back.

Letting Go of Guilt

When friends reach out to ask how she lost the weight, Jacqui always starts with the same thing:

It is not your fault.

For so many women, weight is wrapped up in ideas about discipline, effort, and personal worth. But obesity is a medical condition. And like any medical condition, it may require treatment.

If your doctor told you that you needed medication for high blood pressure or a thyroid condition, you probably wouldn't spend months questioning whether you deserved it. You would just treat it.

Let’s not forget: GLP-1 medications have been used to treat diabetes for over 20 years. The intense scrutiny only started when they entered the weight loss space. That says a lot about how society still views obesity.

Jacqui's Best Advice for Anyone on This Journey

• Give yourself more grace than you think you need. 

GLP-1 medications change how your body works. Your appetite shifts, your hunger signals change, and your relationship with food evolves. That adjustment takes time. Some days you'll eat balanced, nourishing meals. Other days you'll manage half a muffin for breakfast and that's all you've got. That's okay. Think in months and years, not individual meals.

• Pick a big, slightly ridiculous goal. 

For Jacqui, it was zip lining. Years earlier, she'd been turned away from a zip line because she was over the weight limit. That moment stuck with her, so she made herself a promise: if I ever lose this weight, I'm coming back to do this. Years later, on a family trip to Arizona, she did exactly that: five zip lines across the mountains. And she loved every second!

When Jacqui first visited Ireland during her weight loss journey, she managed the trip, but it was exhausting. The hills, the walking, the stairs. Everything took effort.

When she returned later, something had shifted. At the Cliffs of Moher, she walked the entire path without even thinking about whether she could do it. 

That's when the full weight of the journey hit her. Not because of a number on the scale, but because she could simply live her life without constantly wondering whether her body would let her.

That's what this work is really about.

Want to hear Jacqui’s full story? Check out the full podcast episode now and the articles she's written over at midlifebestie.com, including her personal GLP-1 weight loss story and her tips for navigating clothing changes along the way:

My GLP-1 Weight Loss Story

GLP-1 Weight Loss Clothing Tips

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Disclaimer: The transcript below is provided for your convenience and may contain typos, errors, or grammatical inconsistencies, as it has not been professionally edited or proofread. Please enjoy it as-is and read at your own discretion.

Please note: The content shared in this podcast and blog post is for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Always consult your healthcare provider for personalized medical guidance.    

 

Welcome back to another episode of the podcast. Today I am really excited and honored to have on Jackie Cook. She is a patient of mine. She's given permission for me to say that. And the reason I ask Jackie to come on, it's that she has an incredible journey from the start. How things have gone, where she's at now, different experiences that she's had.

I really think it's inspirational and she's nice enough to come on today and really talk about this because I think that people out there need to hear these experiences because I was just talking to you ahead of this interview, how I still get messages daily that people are scared to go on the medications or worried about things.

And so I'm really glad that you're on today. We can talk about a lot of variety of stuff. Can you start out first with just introducing yourself and letting everybody know a little bit about you? Sure, and thank you so much for having me on this podcast. I love talking about this and I love talking about my journey, so I'm absolutely delighted to be here.

My name is Jackie Cook. I live in the Chicago area. I am a communications professional by trade, and I also have four grown children in their twenties. So I have been on some form of a diet, I think, since my teenage years, and I am now in my mid fifties. That is a really long time, I have tried it all.

I have experienced it all. We have all done any number of diets throughout the years. I'm sure many of your listeners can identify with that. And so I'm just so happy to be here to talk about what finally worked for me after literal decades of trying. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. I think so many people that are listening can relate to that.

Can you paint us a little bit of a picture before this chapter, when you started to figure out things differently, what did it look like, your relationship day to day with food, your body, how your brain felt, your thought process, like how did it all look for you?

I grew up in a very traditional, large Irish Chicago family. The kind on TV is the kind I grew up in. We always had food, we always had parties, we always had family gatherings. Food was a huge part of my life from the time that I was a kid, it was our love language. It still is to a certain degree throughout the years.

When you're young and you're active, you can eat a cupcake and a cookie and a brownie, and it doesn't make a difference. And as time went on, of course I noticed your body changes and so does your relationship with weight. And I gained and lost and gained and lost and gained and lost just all during my teens and my twenties.

I can remember. Hours spent with my friends talking about, well, what diet are we gonna try? And I read that if you cut out all carbs, this will happen. Or if you eat this will happen. We just spent so much time agonizing about this and exercising and, step aerobic classes that would hurt my feet and my legs.

But I would keep going because this was the. So time went on and I had my family, and with each child I gained a little bit more weight and lost a little less weight. But after my third child, I had lost quite a bit of weight and was feeling pretty good. And then when I had my fourth baby, she's now 20, so this is 20 years ago.

So I was in my late thirties. My body just didn't. Come back. I hate that phrase. I hate when we say about new moms, bouncing back. But I just, I had a lot of extra weight and it had, it got to that tipping point where it was no longer just, yeah, I could probably lose 10 or 15 pounds to the point where it was really beginning to affect me.

Subsequently, I would say for the next, 10 years or so, I continue to gain weight. Just the chaos of raising kids and working and life, and then there was a pandemic thrown in there and all of these things together. By the time I made the decision to do the GLP one, I would use the word chaotic to describe how I approached food.

I just ate what I felt like eating, didn't really exercise. I was in this post pandemic haze still, I just didn't feel good. I would. Look at pictures of myself and sometimes think, is that really me? Is that actually me that because I looked unhappy and I wanted to say something before we go any further though, and that is that this is my experience of how I felt in my body.

I absolutely believe that every woman is beautiful at every size they are, and we have to start believing that this was solely a medical decision for me to do this. So a couple of things happened that were really the tipping point for me. One of them was that we took a family trip to Los Angeles and this was again, post pandemic, our first big family vacation, and we went to LA and I just didn't feel good the whole trip.

I was hot, I was sweaty. Of course, LA is full of people who are gorgeous and beautiful. They pay a lot of money to be gorgeous and beautiful, but I just felt awful. And it started to actually bother me the most because I could see it affecting how I was interacting with my family on this vacation.

We went to, Santa Monica Beach, which is a gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous beach in California. Everybody goes there, it's beautiful. And we were there and I will never, ever forget, I just had to walk back to the, where the restrooms are, through the sand. And I was walking there and I like literally felt.

I might not make it like physically, I may not have the stamina to get through the sand to walk to there. And I thought, what am I doing? This is not healthy. I am barely into my forties and this is happening so. I knew that we were planning a trip to Ireland the following summer, and that was our family dream since my kids were little, to take them to Ireland.

See, the home my grandmother grew up in. This had been planned forever and I started to really think, well, if I can't walk across the sand in California, how in the world am I going to navigate Ireland? It's not going to happen, and I'm going to miss out on these memories, and around December of 2021, which I can't believe it was five years ago already, I saw a commercial for an online company that was promoting these new medications called GLP ones, and I thought.

I have nothing to lose. I'm going to just give this a try and we're gonna see what happens because I've reached the, I have to do something point. Yeah. And so that's what happened in December of 2021, I started using Ozempic and I am grateful that I was, I had two things. Number one, I had excellent insurance coverage, so I pay $20 for it every month, which.

I know now that seems like a dream. It's miracle, but at the time, it really is. I realize how blessed I was to have that. And then the second thing is that it worked for me, for, there are people, as you well know, it doesn't always work great. I was a really quick responder to it. And so from there. It just took off.

The only regret I have is that you weren't my doctor for it. I wish that I had been working with you. And so here I am 115 pounds lighter than I was in December of 2021. Wow. Thank you for sharing all of that with us. There's so many parts of what you shared. I really like how you gave honor to, this is really not a size thing.

It was how you were feeling in your body, I always say we're not just trying to like shape shift, right. It's not just about trying to have the weight come down. It's absolutely right. Like, are you able to fully participate and when it starts to get in the way of.

Family events and how you're feeling. I remember when it was, when my son was born, those few months, I said, life has to change. I will not be able to do this. It's just these like really pivotal moments that occur. And I was gonna ask you how you initially first found the med, because I just didn't remember that part, but So it was a commercial.

I know. That's so interesting. So you had a lot of success rather quickly. Now when you found me, you had actually, I wanna say, lost all the weight, like you were already Pretty much, yeah.

Mm-hmm. And what made you say, hey, uh 'cause you could have just continued to kind of work with who you were with. What made you say, I wanna come to my clinic or you want to, see a different way? There's a couple of things, and one of them is that I realized that I have a deep fear of regaining the weight.

Hmm. There is. That is something I still have dreams about it, like I will dream that I've gained the weight back or I will if, my pants are a little tight in my head. I've gained 20 pounds, which I know I did not. So I knew that I had to think about maintenance and what was that going to look like?

I had never, ever, ever, through all my years of dieting, gotten to maintenance. It just never happened. It was this feeling of like, well, what do people do when they get to maintenance? I have no idea. And around that time, the company that I was working with had pretty much gone belly up. They were one of the earliest online, companies, and they.

Kind of self-destructive, laid everybody off, and so I was left with my doctor, my actual primary doctor. Agreed to prescribe it, but it was just the prescription. And at that time I happened to discover you on social media and I saw you on TikTok and I saw you on Instagram and I just became an instant fan girl.

I was like, oh my gosh. I love her. I love what you were saying. I love that you were on the medication yourself and you shared your own journey. There's a lot of GLP one creators out there, but you are an actual physician and that made such a difference to me because there is a lot of space for. Bad information here, and there was a lot of potential for bad information, and so I trusted you, and so I came to you really with number one.

How do I maintain, how do I keep this going? I've probably lost about 10 pounds since we started working together, but I'm definitely at where I wanna be. And then the second piece where you've been so valuable is when I was losing the weight, the people I was working with did not really pay attention to anything outside of that number on the scale.

They did blood work, I think, every six months or something just to make sure that there wasn't anything weird going on. But they didn't really look at like muscle mass or anything like that. Being very honest, by the time I came to you, we discovered that in my weight loss I had lost about 17 pounds of muscle.

And that's unfortunate. And at the age that I am, you can't really afford to do that. And so really phase two, kind of 2.0 was working with you to figure out. How do I build up some of that muscle strength and how do I get my arms around what this looks like every day? You talk a lot about doing things that fit into your day and your schedule, so much of diet culture has been, you have to change.

If you want it bad enough, you'll do it. If you want it bad enough, you'll sacrifice if you really want it, you'll get up at four 30 in the morning and, go run two miles. I will never, ever, ever get up at four 30 in the morning to exercise. Unless maybe you're giving me a million dollars, I'm not going to do that.

When you have all of these kind of diet gurus telling you that's the solution you are left with like, well then I guess I'm going to stay like this. So that is how I end up coming to you, is really to figure out what does it look like to live in this body in a healthy way, and how do I keep going? I see this as a chronic.

Condition and a medication that I will probably take for the rest of my life, or at least close to it. But what does that going to look like? It's not just a shot every week. It has to be so much more than that. Yeah. I'm so glad that you shared this maintenance part and what it's looked like.

'cause I think people have this assumption that you get there and then you never think about anything again. You're done. Right? You're not done. In some ways, I, I heard this the other night. There was a therapist that came into a group of mine and she said, in some ways, when the scale stops moving, that's when the work begins.

And I thought, Ooh, that's a really good one yeah. Because you can't rely on that dopamine hit anymore, but there's still all of this health that matters, what do you think has helped you with lowering that fear of regain? What had to actually change in your life, whether it be physical or emotional?

What do you think helps, maybe not solved? It didn't solve it because I still have dreams about gaining weight, but one of the things is that I have. Truly, I believe in this medication. I am all in on GLP ones, and I know there are a lot of people who have a lot of opinions, but I, myself, from the start, have been all in on this, and so I recognize that obesity is a chronic condition that I will wrestle with my entire life.

This is the only thing that keeps it at. And so I am okay with looking ahead and maintaining this way. It's fine with me. So that once, and I think I always felt that way, but once I really came to that conclusion that this is just how I'm going to eat the rest of my life. And you over time on a GLP one, it's really interesting how your brain changes too.

Now. I am very used to eating just half a sandwich. If I go out or, half the slice of pizza, I've wasted a lot of food. Restaurants still haven't caught up with letting you order half a portion, but I have really come to accept that this is just how I eat. And in the beginning, after all of those years of food being so many things to you, food is comfort.

It's, you celebrate with it and you are bored. And so you eat something. With a GLP one you eat because you have to it, it's not, it doesn't provide, it still provides joy I still enjoy a really good meal, but you, there is a point where everybody asks themselves, am I ever going to enjoy food again?

In those first couple months you're not hungry at all and you're thinking, well, I ever enjoy like a steak dinner again. I have really come to believe and understand now that absolutely, I love a good steak and baked potato, but I can't eat. Full size filet. I can order the petite filet and probably eat half of it, but that's okay.

That is okay. I have accepted that just because you're not eating every single thing on your plate and having an appetizer meal and dessert, you're still enjoying your life. Totally. It what you describe. I see that with with everyone that goes on this journey, which is reframing the relationship with food and then other parts of life have to get built out.

It's not implying that other things were not amazing in life, but there is a negative space that starts to occur, when you're maybe not meeting with friends for a meal. And that was something that you did before. I like that you share this sort of how the moment had to come where you just realized like, it will be different from here on out, the way that things are looking.

Mm-hmm. And also that you keep coming back to this. 'cause I agree with you how this is a chronic disease and it just, the acceptance of I might always need to adjust some things, change some things, that it's not and I'm on the med and then, never again have a struggle that's just, I just don't see that being life long term. So, mm-hmm. Do you think that there were, that there was any, pivot moment when something you thought would work, didn't work? Because I think a lot of the time everyone assumes maybe they're hearing you and they think everything you did was perfect, right? Gosh, no. Not at all. There were a couple of things I, I thought about this a lot throughout this journey, and I have given up a lot of this sort of old diet habits, but one thing that I really realized that I could get rid of, and apologies to all the people who love to do this, but tracking my food.

Because it is such a diet culture, behavior of writing it all down, calculating the calories, and now with online tools you can calculate all the macros too. So you and I am not, as doctor, I am not a math person. When you give me my dosage, I often have to then message you again and say, could you tell me again what that was?

I am not good with numbers. I'm a writer of not numbers, I would have all this information about how much fat I had today and how much fiber I had today, and then I'm left with, okay, what does that all mean? Why do I need to know all of this? I really started to just. Eat when I'm hungry and stop when I'm full.

One of the things I did in the beginning of the journey was I did write down what I was eating to make sure I was eating enough. Yeah. And that is something that I have, had to make sure of from time to time. There are moments like over the holidays this year I was really busy and I wasn't really staying hydrated, and I started to feel kind of crummy and I realize that's because I'm not eating.

Good food and I really wasn't eating much food. So in that it works okay, but I decided that I was done tracking my food. I deleted my Fitness pal and I did not look back. I love that you share that because I think it, it puts people in a cage 'cause it's like, okay, let's say you have a number, if you aren't physically hungry, beyond that.

Are you not gonna eat? Are you gonna keep telling your body, we can't trust the signaling? Or then if there are extra calories, are you gonna force that in? It literally makes no sense. Was that hard for you though, to make that decision? I'm gonna stop doing this. A little bit.

I think it was a, it happened gradually too. I was forgetting to write things down because I wasn't eating very much and so I just would forget to do it. But then I would think, okay, I'm gonna try. 'cause I, especially after I'd meet with you and you would talk about making sure I was getting all these different nutrients and I would think, okay, I'm gonna make sure that I'm getting them, but actually the proof that I'm getting them isn't how I feel.

Yeah. If I'm not getting enough protein, you're going to see that, you know. I have an InBody scale, which is one of the things that you use in your practice. And I can see when I'm not getting, when my muscle mass is teetering a little bit. I know when I'm not getting enough hydration, I know I need to get protein.

And you have to ask yourself too, is this a realistic way to live? Am I going to write my food down every day? And there are people who do, there are people who genuinely keep track, and that's wonderful for them. But I just realized that I couldn't do that anymore. It was not for me. I like that you bring up the, how you were feeling. I remember, there was a period when. You because you'd been okay with nutrition during the day. You weren't as hungry at night, but then you were so exhausted. The lack of fueling was causing a problem. So a hundred percent the, it's not really writing this stuff down, it's how you're feeling.

I think that's actually a tip if anyone's listening to actually focus on how you feel throughout the day. And not just what the feeling. Absolutely. Yeah. Right scale food. Yes. If you wake up and you're dizzy and you feel like you know you don't have any energy, maybe take a look at what you're eating.

Absolutely. And that's why I have to do, I know when I haven't had enough to eat. And that was like I was telling you over the holidays where I just had these couple of days where I felt terrible and then I realized I'd eaten so much over the holidays that I think I just wasn't very hungry. Post Christmas.

Yeah. And I thought I need to start getting some good nutrition back in. Enough with the cookies and cake, we need to go back to measuring and making sure that I'm getting, getting a little bit of protein every day. I find once you get more compassionate, the answers present themselves more.

Instead of it being like, oh, it's up and down, it's working. It's not, it's you're very calm about it. There's no, urgency with anything that's happening. Do you think if someone is listening and they are in that spot of feeling ashamed, they're struggling, what do you think you would tell the old you

maybe if you had doubts before you'd gotten on it. 'cause it sounds like you were all in. But if you think that person's really in a spot that's hard for them. I'm so glad that you asked this question because I have many friends who have reached out to me over the years, after obviously with social media.

One thing about weight loss is you can see it and I have had friends reach out to ask me what I'm doing and I've told them. I tell people, number one, stop beating yourself up. This is not your fault. Especially as women, we are raised in so many ways to believe that our appearance and how we appear to the world is somehow our fault, or we owe the world a certain type of appearance and we don't.

If you are happy in the body you are in, stay in that body and enjoy your life. If you are feeling like it's getting in the way of what you want to do. Get help for it. It is no different than if you have high cholesterol and you take medicine or you have high blood pressure, or you have thyroid issues, whatever it is.

If your doctor said to you, you need to take this medication to control your thyroid, you're probably not going to spend time thinking, should I really though? Is it really good for me? You're going to do it. And so if you are working with a good medical professional who understands obesity, who tells you that the benefits of this medication far outweigh any of the concerns that you have about it.

You owe it to yourself to try. The great thing about a medication versus a bariatric surgery, you can stop taking medication and once somebody reroutes your stomach, you can't really do much about that, but you can stop taking a medication if it's not for you. And many people do that and that it's just not for them, and that is okay.

I would encourage people to please just stop feeling like this is your fault. We put so much guilt on ourselves if I just didn't eat that piece of cake, if I just would've said no to those chips if I didn't go out to dinner tonight. No, that is not it at all. There. We could talk for hours about this, about how the food industry has created foods that are made to entice us and keep us going back, all of that stuff.

But the bottom line is that there is help and it's right there, and if you're able to take advantage of it. Why not give it a try? All of the studies are, and you are so on top of these things. All of the studies are showing so much positive from these medications. It's worth a try. It's really worth a try.

Yeah, I love that you bring up,, the, not blaming yourself because that was actually something that I, being a doctor, being Obesity Medicine Board certified. Sure. I still struggled with that. Because I was like, I need to work harder. And literally my friend that was a physician, she said, Matea.

Get on the med, I've heard you for years. You've been investing in this stuff and doing stuff, it was not for lack of trying. It's so interesting how ingrained that is, but I'll tell you, I find when people get on the medication, the fact that within a few days things are radically different, they realize, oh, it's not like suddenly, they grew discipline in a willpower.

Physiologically things got helped. And then they're able to, sometimes I find it helps them to get there that maybe even before, if you can't let go of that shame, you can't let go of, what you've been, believed to be true. That sometimes once you're on the medicine you realize, oh, that was all a lie.

Then you can sometimes come to that afterward. I agree. I agree completely, and I feel like we're getting more and more there now. I think it's become, when I first started taking this medicine, I remember I didn't really tell too many people because I wasn't, no one had heard of them, and I didn't want it to sound like I was, popping diet pills because that's not what I was doing.

And then I got over that really fast. And even now, I will tell anybody who will listen that that's what I'm doing, because I, there's nothing to hide. It's just, it's a tool to help me with this. Yeah, I have a newer patient that they said to me, well, you know, they're doing amazing, but they said, I hope that it doesn't end as badly as some of them say it's gonna end.

And I said, what do you mean by that? And they were like, well, you know, like that with it being so new and not knowing the long-term things, I said, we've had these for over 20 years. Like I've literally used these my entire clinical career. And they said, oh, because there's still this conception. Yes.

Um, and what I brought up that I think everyone needs to hear. We did not, villainize GLP ones in this way when it was being used for diabetes. It was only when it came into the weight management space, when it came to obesity, that suddenly all those comments came in. None of that existed before.

It's always, it just shows where the biases, when you had it for 15 years, no one commented on it, and then now suddenly it becomes a problem. So it's just interesting when we think about these things. Okay. I wanna, uh, switch gears just a little bit because I think that whenever, whenever someone's, successful, everyone always wants to just know a few tips and tricks

okay. So I want you to do, I'm gonna call this like, like rapid fire questions. I think I've what, like seven or eight here? Okay. Okay. All right. Everyone's gonna love this. First question number one, what's your current favorite lazy protein win Protein milk in my Starbucks hot chocolate. Oh my God.

I love that. It's delicious. Delicious. And I feel good about it because it's protein. I've never heard someone have that combination. That is perfect. Number two, coffee order. If you're having it, what's the way that you have it? I am a dedicated Diet Coke drinker, and you will never get me to stop Dr.

Renta. So don't try. I don't try. I don't drink coffee. I don't drink coffee. I drink Diet Coke. Oh, ice cold from McDonald's. That's my order. Oh, I know. Everyone has like a preference for where it comes from. Oh, yeah. I feel like in school I love diet Coke, like high school, college, medical school, and then I turned to coffee however many years ago.

I don't know where that came from. So maybe one day, maybe you'll, maybe, I dunno, number three, what do you think is the most overrated wellness trend? Probably could be multiple low carb food. Who wants life without bread? I just wanna know who in this world wants to give up.

So absolutely no low carb for me. Just balance out your food. Yeah that's so true. Number four. What's one food you refuse to give up ice cream. When I was first starting this journey, when I had stomach upset and things and I wasn't sure what I wanted, and ice cream cone from McDonald's just always hit really well.

I think it's. Barely any calories. It's barely any money. It's a great little treat. But ice cream is one thing that I will go back to for a treat. Yeah. Ice cream is amazing, so. Mm-hmm. Number five, are you someone that would go to the gym or walk outside, something like that? I prefer outside, but it has to be about 70 degrees and sunny with maybe a light breeze. And then I will gladly take a nice long walk outside.

I love that. What do you think, is an easy five minute meal cereal with a banana? I am an empty nester. I have to say I'm an empty nester so I can come home from work and have cereal for dinner. I know for all the young parents out there, maybe you can't do that.

Although my kids used to love it when I would say we're having cereal tonight, but for me, that's a great meal at night after work. What cereal do you like? Are there any brands. Oh man, you're gonna make me say this. Last night I had a bowl of corn pops. I also like golden Grahams, I forgot to say

bad cereal with a banana or not bad, that's why I'm taking it back. It's not bad. But I do like a good a, a good, fun cereal and so I don't eat it very often. And. Three or four months ago, I just had this taste for corn pops. When I was a kid they called them sugar corn pops, but we did away with the word sugar and they are still so good.

I have a bowl of that with some whole milk and a banana and it's delicious. It sounds amazing. The thing with cereal, I know it gets a bad wrap, but it's like you get a lot of protein from the milk and so it's really interesting. It's like just how do you feel with that meal, right? Because some people, and it's vitamin fortified.

Yeah. And they put vitamins in cereal. I think as long as you feel good for a few hours, anything's fair game., Okay, let's see. Number seven. A tool that helped more than you expected. So maybe like an app, a scale, a journal, anything like that? Actually, I would say TikTok.

Which really surprised me. That's how I found you. That is how I have found so many GLP one people. There are a number of really good creators out there, all at different parts of their journey, and I absolutely love to see. Their successes. I love the tips that you share about, protein or going to the gym or whatever recipes you've tried.

I think it is such a good tool for discovering this whole community. There is a giant community of GLP one people out there, and. We all need to stick together and learn from each other. And there was a woman about three or four months ago who I started following and she posted from the first day of her GLP one and she was quite overweight and she was so excited.

And I just love following her. I'm just like, I am invested in how she's doing. So I am really surprised at what a good tool TikTok has become for that. It's interesting that you bring up TikTok 'cause I feel the same way. I think that. Some of these platforms more than others allow people to actually be who they are.

The Instagrams and the YouTubes of the world, before that, people made it really curated. You're seeing this, here's the top 10 list, and it's just, fake you're not really seeing like the real moments. And so I agree with you that. The, community is so close on TikTok.

I feel like in 2021 it started to take off. And it's funny because at first I'm assuming you were around from the beginning. At first it was we were weird, the ones that were talking about it. And now everyone can talk about it and it's totally normal, but it's really getting to see from the beginning, so powerful more the day to day, not just, like a once a week of a highlight reel, but really a little bit more in the weeds.

Exactly. People in their car are talking about how they're feeling today and their GLP one's not hitting well and I think it's just a really good community. I highly encourage anybody who is thinking about starting, just go to TikTok and search for GLP one and you'll find some really good stuff.

Okay, last question, sort of corny, but I'm gonna do it. What do you think the theme song for this season of life would be? I would say. Bon Jovi's. It's my life. Probably the winner. I thought about a couple of different ones, but that would be the one that always seems to resonate with me at different points in my life.

And right now at this phase with my kids being grown and out of the house and with this, health journey that I've been on, this is my time and this is my life. I, I'm literally singing it in my head right now. It's the best song. Do you think if people are listening, what would be your top one or two tips that when you remind yourself of this, it's really encouraging or just that you think they need to hear? Number one is to go easy on yourself. You are taking a medication that is altering everything about your body. And you have to give yourself time. There's no way around it.

If one morning you feel like eating half a chocolate chip muffin, go ahead. You don't always have to have the protein drink with the creatine mixed in, it is okay to do that. Give yourself permission to sometimes just eat what you have to get through the day. Don't, if you look at it as a lifelong journey, what you ate for breakfast on Tuesday is not going to derail you for the rest of your life.

And the second thing is something that I wanted to share that I had posted to my social media, because you need to think about. What is your reward here? And I have a quick story about that. About 15 years ago, we were in Michigan and my older kids were like eight and 10 and they wanted to go zip lining and we got in line to go.

We got up there and I was over the weight limit and I couldn't go. And so I had to make up this, well, I'll stay with the younger kids. Dad's gonna do the zip lining. And I was dying inside. Truly like I could, I still remember how that felt. And anybody who has kids or is part of a child's life, I, and through it, it's dev.

It's sodevastating disappointing a child. Yeah. Hurts. And in that moment, I stood there and I thought, if I ever lose this weight, which I didn't think I ever would, but if I do, dammit, I'm going zip lining. So this past Thanksgiving we were going to Arizona where my oldest lives, and I told my kids, this is it.

We're going zip lining. And I think they all were like. Okay, we'll see if we really end up going. And I did the research and I found this place that had five courses through the Arizona Mountains. This was not zip lining for babies. This was big time, zip lining. You went all the way. We went to the top of the mountain and we did it, and I had a blast.

We had so much fun. So we went on a Friday and I remember waking the day after Thanksgiving. I woke up on Wednesday and I remember laying in the Airbnb and thinking. What am I doing? What if I get there and I'm terrified and I don't like this, but I've told my kids I'm gonna go, I've promised myself for 15 years I was gonna do this.

And so we did it. We had the best time. And when we were done, even my kids were like, so sure, we're really gonna do this. But the point is please set a goal, set some ridiculous, gigantic goal, whether it's, to go to Ireland or it's to do a marathon or whatever. Go zip lining something because when you achieve that, and you will, it feels.

Really, really, really good. I actually emailed you as you remember, Dr. Maria. I was gonna bring the folks up. Yes. I was like cheering when you sent it to me. Yes. It was best email. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So we were in Ireland this past summer. It was our second time there. So we had gone when I'd started losing weight and then we went this past summer and the first time we went, it was great.

We had a wonderful time. But Ireland and Europe in general is all hills and steps and you have to be able to walk when you're there. So we went up the clips of Moore and it was fine. Tired. We did it this time around. We went to the tops of the Cliffs. Cliffs of Moore, which everybody knows is that famous scene.

Everybody sees it from Ireland and there's a path up there that you can walk all along the cliffs and I did the whole thing. We were downstairs, we were upstairs, we were over hills. We were on. Downhills. We were all over the place and I was standing there and I had this moment where I thought of you standing on the top of the cliff some more, and I was thinking, this is why the work you're doing is so important though, because I can actually stand here on this cliff in Ireland and absorb.

Beauty beyond something I've never even imagined. And I did it and I didn't even think like, oh, I hope I can do this. When you're all those years of being overweight and and outta shape, you have to always ask yourself, oh, can I do this? Am I fit enough? Am I will I fit here? Whatever. I did it and I emailed you and I said, I sent you pictures and said, this is why the work you're doing is so important because you can actually do these things that you thought you never could.

So for everybody out there, please, please, please pick something that you wanna do and you'll do it. I'm so moved. I almost wanna cry right now. It's so powerful, the being able to fully live your life and what you're talking about, the not questioning if you can do things and being able to go back and do things you couldn't do.

Thank you for sharing that. And anyone who's listening, they're gonna feel understood and like it's worth it, because this work is not nec, it's really not easy to do and to every day continue to choose to do the work.

Mm-hmm. Can we tell everybody how can they connect more with you? I know that you've done some writing for there's a blog that you write for it, right?

There is a website. It's, several different collections of of essays. It's called midlife bestie.com, it is actually the brainchild of the people behind Girls Gone Hallmark. If anybody listens to that podcast, one of my favorites, aside from yours of course.

This website was launched with just essays about what it's like to be in midlife. A section of it, though, is all about GLP ones, my Journey, as well as one of the creators, Wendy, her journey as well. So it has tips in there. I wrote a post about my whole story, but it also has tips on like how to manage as you're going through sizes.

You know how to handle the fact that you're sometimes very cold on a GLP one and what does that mean? So there's some really good information there, and at the bottom of my post is my contact information. My email is there, so you can definitely find me there. And I'm always, always, always happy to talk about this topic.

I encourage anybody to reach out if you have questions, and anybody should. If you're not, they should be engaging with you as well on all of your channels. You're very kind on that. Okay, we're gonna make sure in the show notes, everybody, rent tia clinic.com, click on podcast. We have all of this written out.

We'll have links to everything. Make sure that you go there or underneath right where you're listening, and we'll have the link to, hopefully we can link specifically to the one where you tell your story and then that way they can find the blog. And I have to say, because you sent it to me in the past.

The blog is excellent. I mean, the stories, when you're reading all the different, scenarios that you're describing, it's what everyone's going through, what happens with clothes, what happens with this, what happens with that? And I don't know about you, but I have been returning back to reading more blogs.

But there's something about reading a book, reading a blog post that. It's, it's more nourishing. It's, I don't know if it's that you get to do it slower, you get to think some about it. Um, mm-hmm. But I just really encourage people to look into reading something like this.

'cause I think they might feel very different. You get to tell the longer story. I was able to tell the story from the beginning to the end, instead of 30 seconds here and there, or a ten second TikTok video. And it is important to talk about the good and the bad. I have said to everybody who will listen to me that.

This was not easy to lose weight, but this is the easiest I've ever lost it. And I think when we share these things, there's also a blog post about my first colonoscopy too, so you can read about that. I am very open to sharing all kinds of things, but the more we talk about these things, being in midlife.

Is hard and we are all going through so many things and weight is a huge one. We could do a whole nother episode on menopause and what does that mean for weight gain? We are going through all these things and when our, when our parents were growing, like when my mom was my age, they never talked about this stuff.

Of course not, ever. But now we're finally taking the mask off and we're taking the secrecy away from this and saying, this is part of life. All of this stuff. Losing weight, gaining weight. Menopause, all that stuff. It's all part of our lives. Why are we not sharing and helping each other and supporting each other and saying, yeah, I went through that too and here's what worked for me.

Yeah, completely. It changes people's lives because, so I had someone that, history with depression, but they were currently going through brain fog and experiencing all these things. Mm-hmm. And we got down to this is perimenopause starting. This is not a depression flare happening. This is none of that.

And that's so relieving to think, oh my gosh, this is just hormones and what's happening. It's not. Something where I need to go back to therapy or go do other things. Mm-hmm. It's just really interesting to just know the physiology and other people's lived experience. So thank you so much for coming on today.

It's wonderful to be here and I am just so grateful that I have become one of your patients and one of your followers and one of your fan girls. I am just so delighted for the work that you're doing and the success that you're having. I'm happy to be part of it.