(2023-02-03) Ford A New Drug Switched Off My Appetite Whats Left

Paul Ford: A New Drug Switched Off My Appetite. What’s Left? A decade ago I lost 100 pounds. I did it in my web-nerd way—by building a custom content management system using the Django framework in the Python programming language. Every day I would enter calories ingested

It became a job. I produced charts and compared the results of different kinds of exercise

It worked very well

Of course, I knew that scientists had found, in study after study, that basically everyone who loses weight gains it back, and then some. But there was no chance I would eat my way back to misery. I had a system! And a PostgreSQL database! And I could buy pants in a normal department store! Guess what happened.

Obviously genetics were a factor.

But it’s a side effect of what I am, which is insatiable. (diet and exercise)

While it is possible—more possible than many think—to be fat and healthy, and sometimes I managed that, I could feel my health slipping, prescriptions adding up in the cabinet.

Then one day my endocrinologist was reviewing my A1C blood sugar levels as we Zoomed. He had me on Ozempic.

I’d been on it for a while and lost a few pounds, and I appreciated it, but the shrieking satiety siren had never ceased.

“Well,” my doctor said, “if you’re not losing weight with Ozempic, try Mounjaro.”

“Something’s happened,” I told my wife. She is a veteran of watching me try to fix my body. I told her: Where before my brain had been screaming, screaming, at air-raid volume—there was sudden silence. It was confusing. Would it last?

Apparently the Mounjaro molecule targets the same hormone as Ozempic, plus a second one, so it doesn’t just stimulate insulin production but also boosts energy output.

“I urgently need,” I thought, “an analog synthesizer.” Something to fill the silence where food used to be. Every night for weeks I spent four, five hours twisting Moog knobs. Not making music. Just droning, looping, and beep-booping. I needed something to obsess over

And I was also manic, dysregulated, and wide-eyed, sleeping five hours a night, run-walking, with pressured speech; my friends, happy for me but confused, called me “cocaine Paul.”

With the relief come new anxieties

There’s no API or software to download, but this is nonetheless a technology that will reorder society. I have been the living embodiment of the deadly sin of gluttony, judged as greedy and weak since I was 10 years old—and now the sin is washed away

Would you self-administer a weekly anti-avarice shot? Can Big Pharma cure your sloth, lust, wrath, envy, pride? Is this how humanity fixes climate change? (huge invention)

Lately I’m finally less manic. Still losing weight, but much more slowly. Exercising more.

As I fiddle with knobs I am sometimes angry, sometimes ashamed, and often grateful. I don’t know how long this post-appetite era will last, or how it will end. Just that, once again in our lives, everything has changed.