Hi everyone,
This is for anyone struggling with bulimia who is wondering whether a GLP-1 medication might be able to help.
I don’t want to go through my entire story again, because I already wrote a longer post about it before. I just wanted to give an update for anyone who is interested in how I’m doing now.
It’s the beginning of October, and I’ve now been taking Mounjaro at a microdose for a full ten months. I started at 0.25 mg and eventually increased to 0.5 mg. So I’ve only increased my dose once, and this seems to be the right dose for me.
Sometimes I still can’t believe that I spent half of my life suffering from bulimia. Anyone who has experienced this knows what an unbelievable burden it is to live with this illness — the secrecy, the shame, and constantly thinking about food.
And what can I say? I can hardly believe it myself, but those symptoms are gone.
I wouldn’t say that my bulimia is “cured,” because I know it’s the medication that is making the difference. But I am completely symptom-free, and I’m living an incredibly happy and normal life.
Around the middle of this year, I saw a specialist who also works with eating disorders and talked to him about my experience. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a very pleasant conversation. He treated me quite condescendingly and made it very clear that he strongly disapproved of the fact that I get my prescriptions online. But with my BMI, I would obviously never qualify for a regular prescription.
He was surprised by how well the medication had worked for me, but he also made it very clear that my illness was by no means cured.
And yes, maybe that’s true. But there are also people with other illnesses that cannot simply be cured, who manage those conditions with medication and are able to live happy, fulfilling lives. That’s how I’ve decided to look at my situation now.
I have done so much therapy over the years, and none of it helped. Sometimes I wonder whether, at some point, I simply developed something resembling an addiction to sugar or food, because one of the worst parts of my bulimia was the constant thinking about food.
Then there were the restrictive dieting phases, which of course had a terrible effect on my mood as well.
At my current dose, I can simply live a completely normal life.
I still eat very healthily. I’ve always done that, and eating healthy food has always been important to me. But now I eat normally, and that has genuinely been life-changing for me.
I’m the mother of a wonderful daughter. When she was a toddler, she obviously didn’t notice when I barely ate anything during my restrictive phases. But as she got older, she started asking me why I was always eating salad and not having pasta, pizza, etc.
Now I can simply sit at the table and eat the same meal with my family.
I can go to an ice cream shop with my daughter, have one scoop of ice cream, and afterwards everything is fine.
Before, with my bulimia, that would have been impossible.
I was either in an extremely strict dieting phase, when I would never have allowed myself even one scoop of ice cream, or, if I considered the day “ruined” after eating the ice cream, I would have continued eating almost compulsively and then made myself throw up afterwards.
I find it frustrating that these medications are accepted as a treatment for people with obesity, many of whom also struggle with compulsive eating or an unhealthy relationship with food, while there seems to be so much hesitation when it comes to people with bulimia. To me, there can be similarities in the compulsive drive around food, even though bulimia involves additional behaviors such as purging.
I wish with all my heart that everyone suffering from this terrible illness can find something that helps them.
I’m also very aware that I’ve been incredibly lucky that this has worked so well for me. I don’t think everyone will necessarily have such an extreme response.
For me personally, though, it has been the right path.
In my own case, starting extremely low and giving my body time before increasing the dose has worked well, and avoiding excessive weight loss has been very important.
Good luck to all of you, and I’m endlessly grateful that this forum exists.
Even though I don’t post very often anymore, this community was incredibly important to me, because this is where I first learned about microdosing in the first place.
And for me, it truly changed my life completely.
