My first 60 days on a GLP-1: the honest truth about starting

When people ask me how my GLP-1 journey began, I have to be honest with them: it didn't begin with a number on a scale. It began with four years on prednisone for an autoimmune disease, a hysterectomy, and forty-plus pounds that arrived and refused to leave. Along with that weight came high blood pressure, high cholesterol, spinal issues, and a thoracic aneurysm that my doctors monitor every single year.

I had spent years trying to fight it the way most of us do — one diet after another. Low carb, low fat, whatever was new that month. The most formal plan I stuck with was Weight Watchers, and I did have some success. But I always fell off the same cliff: the late-afternoon cravings. No plan I tried ever helped me with those, and eventually they won every time.

So when I started thinking seriously about a GLP-1, my real question wasn't whether I could lose weight. It was bigger than that.

Why I decided to try

There wasn't one dramatic moment, no single advertisement or headline that flipped a switch. It was a quieter realization. My health issues were stacking up, and at my age, time feels thinner than it used to. If I was going to do something, I needed to do it now. Watching a couple of friends — women who had the same weight struggle I did, even without my medical complications — succeed on these medications gave me the nudge to look into it for myself.

My biggest hope was simple: I wanted to be more mobile. I knew losing weight couldn't undo my spinal problems, but I believed it could give me more freedom to move at this point in my life. And yes, I'll admit it — I missed my pretty clothes. I've always taken pride in being nicely put together, and I wanted to feel good about myself again.

Doing my homework

I am a researcher by nature, and I am a skeptic. I don't trust social media, and I don't take medical advice from a stranger's Facebook post. I researched GLP-1s heavily before I let one anywhere near my body. I even read the drug manufacturers — though I took those with a grain of salt, since of course they're selling something.

I'll be honest about my fears, too, because I think they're the same ones a lot of you have. The biggest was cost — how on earth would I afford this? Right behind it: will it even work, and how long will it take? The answer I kept hearing was that this is, in all likelihood, a lifetime medication — perhaps at a lower dose once you reach your goal, but a commitment all the same. I am not a medication person. I don't like taking prescriptions, and changing that mindset took real work. In the end, I weighed the benefit against the fallout, and the benefit won.

I didn't trust an ad or an online pharmacy to get me started, either. I went to my own doctor first. He was very much in favor of me losing the weight, but at that time he wasn't sold on the prescription, and he sent me home to think about it. So I took the initiative and saw another doctor in a different practice. She listened, and she ran tests that actually made sense — she checked my A1C and found I was prediabetic, and she screened me for sleep apnea, which turned out to be mild. Those weren't just box-checking. They gave me real, medical reasons to feel good about moving forward.

The reality of the first dose

My first prescription was Wegovy — a compounded version from a local pharmacy. I want to be straight with you: starting out was tedious. The pharmacy wasn't convenient, and I had to do the injections myself, something I had never done in my life. I asked the pharmacist to walk me through it, and even then it took me a few weeks to get the hang of it.

The hardest part was the injector and drawing from a vial. With a compounded drug, you're measuring your own dose, and the needles can differ. It's surprisingly easy to misstep — to draw a little too much or a little too little — and that's a learning curve nobody really warns you about.

I went through all of this alone. I hadn't told anyone except my sister — not my husband, not my friends. I just wasn't ready to admit it, and I wanted to see for myself what would happen before I said a word. That first injection itself was fine. No swelling, no drama. I switched sides of my abdomen week to week, the way I'd been told. The first day, honestly, I felt no difference at all.

What those first weeks were really like

The fatigue, though, was rough. I lacked energy, I lacked enthusiasm, I just felt beat-tired. It eased up after a month or two, and adding a high-quality B-complex supplement for energy genuinely helped me.

Then there was my digestive system. I had nausea and diarrhea, and I was truly miserable. I called the doctor, and she prescribed an anti-nausea medication — so now I was taking a second drug, a couple of times a week, just to counteract the first one. Into my second month, the nausea still hadn't let go.

And the cravings? They barely budged. I was on the lowest possible dose, and I simply wasn't on it long enough to feel the appetite changes everyone talks about. Which is exactly why the scale barely moved. After two months, I had lost next to nothing.

Knowing when to stop

I had about decided at the six-week mark that this wasn't working for me. But when you're paying this much for a medication, you don't walk away easily — that little voice says maybe you just haven't given it enough time. I had two doses left, so I told myself I'd finish out the pack. I gave it those last two weeks for that reason alone.

At the two-month mark, I stopped. Not because I'd given up on the idea of a GLP-1, but because this particular path — compounded Wegovy, the vials, the side effects, almost no results — just wasn't right for me.

If you take one thing from my first sixty days, let it be this: starting is messy, and your beginning doesn't have to look like anyone else's. Stopping was the beginning of figuring out what would actually work — which is exactly where my story goes next.

This is my personal experience, shared in the hope it helps you feel less alone in yours. It is not medical advice. GLP-1 medications affect everyone differently, so please talk with a doctor you trust about what's right for you.