Jennifer Miller

Does losing it fast change what you lose?

Does losing weight fast change what you lose? It can. If your scale has been dropping about ten pounds a month, the number to watch isn't your total. It's how many months that total took. Get a pencil and work yours out before you read the list. I ran bone density scans for 22 years, and I'm down 46 pounds on a weekly weight-loss shot myself. Here are six signs I watched for on my table, and then found in my own house, when the weight comes off fast. My name is Jennifer Miller. I'm 59, and I live in Ohio. For 22 years I was a radiology technologist at a hospital outpatient center. Most of those years I ran the bone density scanner, the DEXA. More than 30,000 women lay down on my table. I retired in the fall of 2024. A tech isn't allowed to read you your scan. When a woman asked what the grey on the screen meant, I said, "Your doctor will go over the results with you." At the door, if she asked what she should do, I said, "Calcium. And walk more." But I read every order top to bottom before a woman came in, including the line that says "reason for exam." In my last eight years, more and more of those lines said some version of the same thing. "Recent weight loss." Then a number, and a number of months. 41 pounds in 6 months. 38 in 5. 52 in 10. In 2016 I stuck a yellow sticky note inside my locker door and started making one pencil mark for every woman whose order said she'd lost a lot of weight fast. I never told anybody why. When I retired in the fall of 2024 there were 212 marks on it. It's behind my driver's license now. --- In August of 2025 I started a weekly weight-loss shot myself. My doctor and I decided on it together. He runs my prescription and he sets my dose. I'm still on it, I take it Wednesday mornings, and I'm grateful for it every week. Nothing I'm about to tell you is against the shot, or your doctor, or anybody's medicine. Here's how fast mine came off. Ten pounds the first month. Twenty by Halloween. Thirty by Christmas. Forty by the end of January. Forty-six by late February. That's about ten pounds a month, five months running. I run a private Facebook group for women on the weekly shot, about 3,100 of us. Every Wednesday the numbers come in. Down 4. Down 6. Down 51 since March. Women ask each other how much. How much this week, how much total, how much to goal. I have never once seen a woman in my group ask, "How fast?" I didn't ask it either. Not about myself. Not with 212 marks behind my driver's license. --- Before the list, you need to know why the speed matters at all. Your weight is two kinds of tissue, roughly. There's fat. And there's everything else: muscle, organs, the water they hold, and bone. That everything-else is called lean tissue. When you lose weight, especially fast, the weight you lose can include lean tissue as well as fat. The scale can't separate them. It gives you one number. And it never tells you how many weeks that number took. Now think about when the weight comes off fastest. For most of us it's the first months on the shot. That's when the quiet in your head about food is newest and loudest. It's when the plate is smallest. Mine was half a yogurt, a few bites of chicken, some crackers and coffee. That was a whole day in November. So the months when the most weight was leaving were the same months the least food was coming in. And everything your body builds, it builds out of food. Your bones are part of that. Bone is living tissue. One set of cells takes old bone away and another lays new bone down, every day of your life. Most of your adult skeleton gets replaced about every 10 years. The hip you'll walk on at 70 is being built right now, out of what you send it this week. My friend Bev Tran ran that scan room beside me for 19 years. She's 60 and still runs it. In April she drew bone for me on a strip she tore off the paper roll on the table. Crossed lines first. "That's the collagen frame." Then dots of ink along the lines. "That's the mineral." Collagen is about 90% of bone's organic framework. It's the woven protein the minerals settle onto. Your body can't form it normally without vitamin C, and it needs copper to cross-link the fibers so they hold together. The mineral is the hard part. Calcium helps build and maintain strong bones. Magnesium is part of bone's mineral structure, and about 60% of the magnesium in your body sits in your bones. Vitamin D3 helps you absorb calcium, and without enough D you absorb only a small fraction of the calcium you take in. Vitamin K2 activates a protein called osteocalcin that helps bind calcium into bone. Every one of those comes in through your mouth. When you eat that little, there's less room for the nutrients food used to supply. Less protein. Less calcium and magnesium for the dots. Less vitamin C for the lines. The pace isn't mine to judge, or yours. Your doctor decides your dose, the same way mine decides mine. But the pace is the one thing on your bathroom scale nobody ever writes down. None of the six signs below proves anything about your muscle or your bones. Only your doctor and a scan can tell you that. But I watched them on my table for years, mostly on the women whose orders had a big number over a small number of months. Then I watched every one of them show up in my own house, in the five months I was losing ten pounds a month. --- 1. The stairs. There were four concrete steps up from the patient lot to the side door of our outpatient center, with a pipe rail. Women who'd lost a lot slowly, over years, came up them like anybody else. Women whose orders said 40 pounds in 6 months came up with both hands on the rail, or went the long way around to the ramp. One woman, 61, down 44 pounds in 7 months, stopped on the second step and said, "Go ahead, hon, I'm admiring the landscaping." There was no landscaping. There was a dumpster. Mine started the Monday after New Year's. Thirty pounds in five months. I was carrying a basket of clean towels up our 14 stairs and found my second hand on the rail. I stopped on the landing. I told Rick it was my knees. Nothing was wrong with my knees. 2. The jar lids. Women brought their pill bottles in a sandwich bag so we could check their medication list. More and more of them handed me a bottle before they handed me the bag. "Could you get this one, hon? It's the child cap." One woman, 58, down 39 pounds in 5 months, had wrapped a rubber band around the lid of every bottle in the bag so she could grip them. She showed me like it was a clever trick. It was. In January it was a jar of dill pickles. I ran the lid under hot water, banged it on the counter, put a dish towel over it, and handed it to Rick. Forty pounds by the end of that month. I told myself it was arthritis. 3. Cold all winter. Everybody's cold in an Ohio January. That's not what I mean. I mean the woman, 64, down 46 pounds in 8 months, who came in for a February scan in a parka, a scarf and a hat, and asked if she could keep her socks on and her scarf in her lap on the table. She was still holding it when she sat up. I mean me, in my own kitchen, with the thermostat at 74 and Rick's flannel shirt over my sweater. And I mean the Tuesday in late February when I was so cold at a quarter to four in the afternoon that I ran a hot bath to warm up. Getting out, I put my left foot on the bath mat, and the mat slid. I'll come back to that floor. 4. The couch. Our waiting room had a long low couch by the window. The women who lost weight slowly sat in the chairs. More and more of the ones with the big number over the small number sat on the couch, because it looked comfortable. Then I'd call their name and watch them get up. Rock forward once. Rock forward twice. Hand on the armrest. Push. One woman, 63, down 50 pounds in 9 months, rocked three times and then held her hand out to her husband without looking at him. He took it like he'd done it a hundred times that winter. In January I was lying on our couch under the afghan after supper. I tried to sit up and couldn't. I rolled to my side, pushed up on my elbow, and rocked three times on the edge of the cushion to stand. Rick was watching the news. He didn't notice. 5. The stall. Somewhere in the first year, almost everybody's scale stops for a week or two. In my group we call it the stall. Watch what a woman does at the stall, and you'll know how fast she wants it. "Stalled 12 days. Cutting out lunch." "Stuck at 38 down. Going to one meal till it moves." I've read posts like that every week since the group started, and I've cheered for every one of them. Mine came in early December, around 28 pounds down. Twelve days the scale didn't move. So I cut the half yogurt to three spoonfuls and skipped the chicken at supper. On day 13 it moved. I posted it. "Broke the stall!" Everybody cheered. I'd broken it by sending even less food in, in the month I was sending in the least of the whole year. 6. The three-bite plate. This is the one the other five come from. Women in my group post their plates. A beautiful piece of salmon, three bites gone. A chicken thigh with a fork laid across it. "This is all I could do tonight!" With a heart. I posted mine too. Three bites of the pot roast Rick made on Sunday, and the rest of the plate under plastic wrap for Monday. Three bites is a whole supper on a lot of days on the shot. I know. That's how I lost ten pounds a month. Your bones get their share of three bites, after everything else has taken its share. --- Here's what I did about all six that winter, before I knew there were six. In December, somebody in my group said calcium. So I bought calcium chews, the caramel ones, two a day. Then protein shakes. I could finish about a third of one. In January my hair started coming out in the shower, so I bought a pink tub of collagen with a woman's glowing face on the lid. Two heaping scoops. It clumped in my coffee like wet flour. Skin, hair and nails. Nothing about bone. Then a "joint" pill with collagen on the front. About 1,000mg of collagen in a two-capsule serving. By the end of January I had four bottles on the kitchen windowsill. Chews, a D, a magnesium, the joint pills. By Thursday every week I'd forgotten all four. In late February I lay on my bathroom tile for 70 minutes, after the bath I ran because I was cold. I couldn't get a foot under me. Rick came home at 5:10. I didn't break anything. I was down 46 that morning. In March my doctor kept my prescription exactly where it was and ordered a bone scan. In April Bev ran it after hours. My hip came up grey. Osteopenia. That was the night she drew the lines and the dots. And I sat at my kitchen table and read the windowsill against her strip. The chews were dots. No lines. The joint pill had about 1,000mg of collagen. Studies on collagen peptides commonly use 2.5 to 15 grams a day. And four separate bottles were four separate things to remember, on days I couldn't remember to eat. Wrong half. Too little. Too many bottles. Then I doubled the chews and added a K2 and a vitamin C. Two more bottles. Forgotten by Thursday. --- On a Saturday in May, Bev came for lunch. She saw the bottles lined up on my kitchen windowsill. She picked up the pink tub and held it up like a dead mouse. "Jen. What is this." I started to say something about my hair. She set her own bag on the counter. It was called DensiaPlus. She's taken it every morning for a year and a half. She stirred one scoop into my coffee and slid the mug back to me. "Stop arguing with me." I turned the bag over. 22 years in that job and you read the back of everything like a requisition. Line by line, against her strip. 9 grams of collagen peptides in one scoop. Nine times the joint pill. Calcium. Magnesium. Vitamin D3. Vitamin K2 as MK-7. Vitamin C. Copper. Zinc. Boron. Her lines and her dots on one label. One scoop, in the one thing I never skipped on the shot, even on a three-bite day. My coffee. It tasted like coffee. I ordered that afternoon. My bag came the following Wednesday, the same morning as my shot. One thing I tell every woman in my group, because I had to learn it myself. Collagen isn't a complete protein, and it doesn't replace protein-rich meals. It doesn't fix a three-bite plate. I eat protein first, before anything else. The scoop goes in the coffee on top of that. --- Here's what I do now, every day, on the shot. Two eggs first. Rick cooks them every morning, and I eat them before the coffee is gone. One scoop of DensiaPlus in the first cup. Every morning since that Wednesday in May. Five months now. I haven't missed one. Two cans of soup lifted at the counter while the second cup brews. The quilt on the living room rug every night. Down and up, while Rick counts. The first week I needed the couch arm and his knee every time. In August I got up with one hand while my daughter Kayla counted out loud. That's practice. Every night, for months. I credit the quilt. Ten step-ups on the bottom stair every morning, one hand resting on the rail, not pulling on it. I started those in June. At the stall now, I eat the chicken. In September, at my checkup, I asked the nurse not to read my weight out loud. Then I asked my doctor, "What am I keeping?" He said the scale can't answer that, and that's what the spring scan is for. Then he went through the calcium timing with me, read the back of my bag, and wrote it on my list. My shot stayed exactly where it was. That's his call, and it always will be. On the way out I took the sticky note out of my wallet and looked at it in the parking lot. 212 marks in pencil, gone soft at the edges. Most of those women I scanned once and never saw again. I don't know how many of them ever worked out their pace. I'd guess almost none, because I never told them it mattered. I've held at 46 since February. I don't know what's happening inside my bones. Nobody can tell that from the outside. Bev will run my rescan next spring, and I don't know what it'll say. --- Here's the check I'd give you tonight. It takes a pencil and two minutes. Write down how many pounds you've lost. Under it, write how many months it took. Divide. That's your pace. Write it on the same page as your weight, every time. Then go down the six. Stairs. Lids. Cold. Couch. What you did at your last stall. How many bites were on last night's plate. Take the page to your next appointment. Show your doctor the pace and the six, not only the total. He decides the dose. He can only decide it with everything in front of him. In October I asked my group to post their pace instead of their total. Pounds over months. More than 800 women answered. Most of them had never done the math. One woman wrote, "Seven a month. I thought I was slow." --- If you know your total to the half pound and you've never worked out your pace. If you're holding the rail on the stairs and blaming your knees. If you're handing jars to your husband. If you're cold in a warm house. If you rock to get up off the couch. If you broke your last stall by eating less. If three bites counts as supper most nights, and the only thing on your counter for your bones is a calcium chew. I made 212 pencil marks for women like you. I never said a word to any of them. Then I lost ten pounds a month and didn't make one for myself. Nobody told her. I'm telling you. Your doctor runs your shot, the way mine runs mine. Celebrate every pound. Then work out how fast. I wrote the whole thing up on one page. It's the link under this post. DensiaPlus is 9 grams of collagen peptides with calcium, magnesium, vitamin D3, vitamin K2 (MK-7), vitamin C, zinc, copper and boron. One scoop a day, stirred into coffee, tea or water. It's the Fall Sale. Right now it's up to 70% off: buy 2 bags, get 1 free, or buy 3, get 2 free. Every bag comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee, empty or full. Count what you keep. Jennifer Miller, 59, retired radiology technologist, Ohio P.S. If you take a blood thinner like warfarin, talk to your doctor before starting anything with vitamin K, this included. Calcium can affect how some medications are absorbed, so ask your doctor or pharmacist about timing. Keep taking everything you've been prescribed. P.P.S. My pace was 46 pounds in about 7 months, ten a month for the first five. I worked it out for the first time this October, on the back of an envelope, with the sticky note out of my wallet beside it. 212 marks. P.P.P.S. Up to 70% off: buy 2, get 1 free, or buy 3, get 2 free. 90-day money-back guarantee, empty or full.