GLP-1s May Change Your Appetite, But What Happens to the Reasons You Eat?
GLP-1 weight-loss drugs have changed the conversation around weight. For many people, they have been extraordinarily effective at reducing their appetite and accelerating weight loss. What you eat matters, though, because unless you stay on GLP-1s forever, you will one day need to eat on your own.
Here’s a guest post from the author of The Mindset Diet, and it really got me thinking. This blog isn’t an argument for or against them, but another conversation to have alongside:
What is the long-term plan?
We often assume weight gain is simply the result of eating too much from lack of willpower. From that perspective, something that reduces hunger and cravings appears to solve the problem. But willpower was never the whole problem.
We don’t eat just because we’re physically hungry. We eat because we’re tired, stressed, bored, celebrating or seeking comfort. We eat because it’s lunchtime, somebody else is eating, food is there, or we walked past the bakery and smelt the bread.
Some of our behaviours have been repeated for so long we barely notice ourselves doing them.
So sustainable weight loss needs to include an understanding of what was driving your weight gain in the first place. Your relationship with food is unique, shaped by your experiences, environment, beliefs and habits.
GLP-1s may change your appetite but long-term success requires awareness of what else has been influencing your eating.
A useful way to start uncovering your patterns is through six influences on your eating: what, how, who, when, where and why.
What do you eat?
GLP-1 medication can make it easier to eat less, but it doesn’t teach you what to eat. Eating less and nourishing yourself aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Nourishing yourself is easier when you shift the focus from eating for weight loss to eating for a purpose. Instead of another list of foods you can’t eat, calories you need to count or things you ought to restrict, you can instead consider what food to add and how it benefits you.
For me, eating for a purpose was about brain health; I researched foods and lifestyle habits to add to my life. For the first time, I was focused on wellbeing rather than convenience, soothing myself or trying to make myself smaller. That changed my relationship with food.
To work out your starting point, ask yourself what you want to gain from eating instead of what you should stop eating to lose weight.
How much and how quickly do you eat?
GLP-1 medication does the hunger and fullness signalling for you so it’s important to become aware of the eating patterns you had up to now.
Perhaps you automatically cleared your plate, finished what was left in the pan because there wasn’t enough to save, went back for seconds or ate until you felt uncomfortably full. Maybe you ate so fast that you’d barely noticed the meal before it was gone.
These aren’t failings; they’re habits, and some may have been with you for years.
I grew up hearing messages about not wasting food and being expected to clear my plate. As an adult therefore, I still ate until my plate was empty rather than paying attention to what my body was telling me. Eating in a hurry also meant I would overeat as my brain and digestive system didn’t communicate as quickly as I ate!
GLP-1s don’t unlearn those patterns for you. Becoming aware of your pace, your enjoyment and your fullness may be particularly valuable when you eventually stop taking the medication and your appetite changes again.
The long-term plan is to have learned more about how you eat so you can eat less
on your own.
Who do you eat with?
Eating is social. The people we live, work and spend time with influence our eating, often without us consciously recognising it. Your partner may buy foods you wouldn’t choose to keep in the house, someone may routinely serve a larger portion than you would choose, or meeting particular friends may automatically mean drinks and dinner.
When you change your eating, these patterns become more visible. When you no longer want the large portion they’ve served you or don’t fancy the dessert everyone else is having, you may notice how much of your eating has been about joining in, keeping someone else happy or avoiding feeling awkward.
Changing your relationship with food can affect your relationships with yourself and other people.
Others may deliberately sabotage you as they don’t like change or perhaps food is how they show love.
And you may notice that you have people-pleasing tendencies. I recognised in my own food story that I would eat what I was given because I didn’t want to appear ungrateful. Leaving lovingly prepared food or declining food offered by a friend can feel surprisingly uncomfortable when we’re used to putting other people’s feelings before our own.
When do you eat?
Our eating develops a rhythm, and some of that rhythm may have little to do with physical hunger. At 1 pm, it’s lunchtime, so you eat whether you’re hungry or not. Or perhaps you’re too busy to stop for lunch so you arrive home ravenous and overeat. Three o’clock may trigger the desire for coffee and cake. Walking through your front door may be associated with opening the fridge.
Then there’s late-night eating. An advert for chocolate or takeaway food appears while you’re watching television and suddenly you fancy something. You make a cuppa and automatically reach for the biscuits. Or perhaps sitting down in the evening has become associated with wine or snacks.
For me, one change was deciding to “close the kitchen” after dinner. I was interested in eating over a shorter time frame each day and giving my body time to digest. From a mindset perspective, “the kitchen is closed” interrupted my old evening pattern and helped me learn genuine hunger vs habitual eating.
A GLP-1 may quieten the response to eating cues, but the neural wiring of old associations has not disappeared. Recognising your patterns and interrupting the habit now means it doesn’t have to take you by surprise later.
Where do you eat?
Sitting at a table and making eating an ‘occasion’ creates a different experience to eating in front of the television, at the computer, in the car, at the kitchen counter or from the fridge.
The key is attention. When our mind is somewhere else, eating can become almost invisible. We can reach the end of a programme, a piece of work or a journey and barely remember that we’ve eaten, let alone how much we ate or whether we enjoyed it.
Eating consciously doesn’t mean turning every meal into a formal event, just becoming more present with your food and noticing where you tend to switch to autopilot.
Sometimes changing where you eat is enough to interrupt a pattern that has been running unnoticed for years.
Why do you eat?
Physical hunger is only one reason we eat. Food can fulfil a range of needs and this may be where some of your most important patterns are hiding.
You may recognise eating that is:
- Reward: when you tell yourself I’ve had a difficult day or I deserve this.
- Comfort: when you eat to soothe uncomfortable feelings like stress or
disappointment. - Boredom: when eating gives you something pleasurable to do.
- Energy: when sugar or caffeine gets you through another exhausting day.
- Avoidance: when eating distracts you from something you don’t want to tackle.
- Mindlessness: when you eat while working, watching television, cooking or
scrolling. - Convenience: when you get a takeaway instead of cooking the meal you planned.
A behaviour exists because at some point it did something useful for you. Criticising yourself for developing it doesn’t help you understand it. Becoming curious about what food is doing for you can.
The longer-term question is what happens to our behaviours if or when the medication is no longer doing that work.
What looks like a problem with food may be a habit, a trigger, an emotion or a belief that food has been helping you manage.
And there’s one more influence: what you tell yourself
Running through all six areas is the voice in your head. Eating something you hadn’t intended may trigger I’ve blown it now, followed by eating more because you might as well. Years of dieting may have left you believing you have no willpower or can’t be trusted around certain foods. Monday becomes the day you’ll be “good” again, reinforcing the familiar cycle of restriction, judgement and starting over.
Our language reflects beliefs we’ve accumulated about food, dieting and ourselves, sometimes since childhood. If you’ve spent years thinking of yourself as someone who is “bad at diets”, “has no self-control” or “will always struggle with her weight”, losing weight doesn’t automatically rewrite that identity.
Your body may change faster than your thinking does.
That’s why I believe the long-term conversation around GLP-1s needs to include understanding the triggers, habits, environment, beliefs and stories that have shaped our relationship with food.
Sustainable weight loss isn’t about becoming an expert at restriction or developing superhuman willpower; it’s about understanding the influences on your eating so that more of your choices become conscious rather than automatic.
That’s the work I explore in The Mindset Diet: understanding your food story, triggers, habits, beliefs, values and language so that you can change your relationship with food.
The longer-term shift is about becoming someone who understands what influences her eating, trusts herself to make choices that support her and no longer makes choices from the identity of the person who was always trying to lose weight.
Author
Caroline Tyrwhitt wrote this article kindly for Just Average Jen to help readers to recognise anything they could change in their diet to escape the trap of yo-yo dieting and look at root causes and possible solutions.
Caroline is also the author of The Mindset Diet: Escape the Trap of Yo-Yo Dieting and go from Disillusioned Dieter to Empowered Eater
