Lisa Smith

How my daughter changed everything

I inject Mounjaro for a living. I did 11 months on it myself. It worked. Then the hunger came back at the highest dose and nobody could tell me why. Then 4 months with a £32 ring my daughter bought me for my birthday that I thought was the most pointless thing she could possibly have spent her money on. Here is my honest side-by-side. My name is Yvonne. I am 53, a registered nurse at a medical weight loss clinic in Leeds. GLP-1s are my entire workday. I draw them up, I teach injection technique, I take the nausea calls on Monday mornings. So let me say this first, because I will not trash a medication I administer with my own hands: Mounjaro works. I watch it work every single day. It worked on me. This is not that kind of post. This is about what happened when it stopped working. And what I found when I went looking for why. Why I went on it myself. Menopause found my middle at 49. By 52 I weighed 12 stone 4 with a 39-inch waist, and I was teaching portion control to women built exactly like me. The irony was not lost on anyone, least of all my patients. I qualified. My consultant prescribed. I started in January on 2.5mg. What Mounjaro did. Week 1. A small shift. The food noise got a little quieter. Not dramatic. I could still eat a full meal but I was not thinking about the next one before I had finished the first. I told myself it was a placebo and kept going. Week 3. The shift got bigger. I was leaving food on my plate without meaning to. My sister made lasagna on a Sunday and I ate half of what I normally would and felt full. Properly full. Not willpower full. Actually full. That was new. Week 7. The food noise went silent. I cannot describe this properly unless you have lived with it. The constant background hum of food. What is in the fridge. What is for dinner. Whether there is something sweet in the cupboard. Whether I have earned it. Whether I should wait. It runs all day from the moment you wake up. You do not notice how loud it is until it stops. It stopped. And that is when the belly started moving. By month three I was down a stone. The bloating softened. The hard round shelf that had sat over my waistband for three years started to go. I bought a pair of trousers I had not been able to button since before menopause. They fitted. By month five I was down a stone and a half. My colleague Sarah stopped me in the corridor and said Yvonne you look like yourself again. I thought I had fixed it. By month seven I was down two stone. 28 lbs. My waist had gone from 39 inches to 36. I was wearing clothes I had put in bags for the charity shop. I was sleeping better. I felt like a person again. I thought this was the rest of my life. And then the hunger started coming back. Not all at once. Just that quiet feeling of I could eat something creeping back in during the evenings. Then the mornings. Then all day. The background hum I thought had gone for good was back. I went to my GP. She upped the dose. The hunger went quiet for a couple of weeks and then came back again. She upped it again. Same thing. Quiet for a bit, then back. Each time the dose went up the nausea got worse and the quiet period got shorter. By the time I was on 15mg, the maximum dose, the nausea was so bad I was dizzy most mornings. I had to sit down between patients twice in one week. I had a morning where I held the wall walking from the car park to the clinic. And the hunger was still there. At the highest dose of the most powerful appetite drug on the market, the food noise was pushing back through. I could not keep doing it. The nausea was making it hard to work. The drug was no longer doing what it was supposed to do. And I was paying £200 a month for it. I stopped. Within three months, 21 of the 28 lbs were back. The belly came back first. It always comes back to the middle first. I chart this pattern every single week for my patients and I watched it happen to my own body. I stood at 11 stone 11 with a 38.5-inch waist. I was not even surprised. I was just tired. The £3,200 I spent. £2,200 on 11 months of Mounjaro across increasing doses. £480 on anti-nausea remedies, protein shakes and GLP-1 companion supplements. £320 on a dietitian reset programme after I stopped. £160 on two waist trainers I am embarrassed to type. Total: £3,160. And by Christmas, most of what I had lost was back on my body. Then my daughter gave me the ring. Jess is 25. She works in nutrition research. She had been sending me articles about cortisol and perimenopause for over a year — articles I kept saving and not reading properly because by the time I got home from a full clinic day I had nothing left. She gave me a small box for my birthday. Inside it a ring. A card explaining it was engineered on the inside to maintain continuous pressure on two specific acupressure points on the finger connected to the parasympathetic nervous system. That it sends a continuous stand-down signal to cortisol. That it addresses what the drug never touched — directly and continuously. I read the card. I looked at Jess. I said: I administer these injections every single day. I know what pharmaceutical appetite suppression does and what it does not do. I was on the maximum dose and the hunger came back anyway. A ring is not going to do what 15mg of Mounjaro could not. She said: Mum. The jabs suppress what the cortisol creates. This addresses the cortisol itself. They were never doing the same thing. She said: the hunger came back because the cortisol was never addressed. The drug was covering it over. The moment it reached its ceiling the cortisol pushed back through. That is not the drug failing. That is the drug doing exactly what it was designed to do and reaching the limit of what it can do. Because it was never designed to fix what is actually driving it. She had that expression she gets when she has made a decision and is not interested in debating it. I said: of course I will try it. And I put it in the box on my bedside table and left it there for two weeks. It was not that I did not appreciate it. It was that I had been trying things for three years and had reached the point where I genuinely could not face the specific feeling of something not working again. The deflation of it. I had spent over £3,000 and I did not have anything left in me for another disappointment. But Jess kept asking had I tried it yet. And eventually I felt worse about not trying it than about trying it and failing. So on a Thursday evening I took it out of the box and put it on. Then I did what I should have done first. I read the cortisol literature myself, trying to take it apart. I could not take it apart, because it is not a weight loss claim. It is basic endocrinology. GLP-1s quiet appetite signals. They do nothing about cortisol, and menopausal cortisol is what parks fat on the middle and holds it there. Our consultant says it in appointments all the time: appetite and stress are two different circuits. And here is what finally explained my last four months. When oestrogen drops during menopause, cortisol stops regulating properly. It stays too high. All day. All night. And cortisol does two things. It drives fat storage around the middle. And it generates the food noise — that constant background signal that tells your body to eat. Mounjaro suppresses the food noise from outside. It overrides the signal. And for a while it works. The noise goes quiet. You lose weight. You feel in control. But cortisol is still running underneath. Still generating the signal. Still pushing. And the longer you are on the drug, the harder cortisol pushes. Until eventually it pushes through even the highest dose. That is why the hunger came back at 15mg. Not because the drug stopped working. Because the cortisol underneath had never been addressed. The drug was holding it down. The cortisol pushed back up. And at the ceiling there was nothing left to push back with. Every woman on those Reddit threads asking why the hunger is coming back — that is why. The cortisol was never switched off. It was just temporarily covered over. And when the drug reaches its limit, the cortisol is still there. Exactly as it was. Waiting. A drug for the first circuit had given me 11 months of results I could not keep. A £32 ring claiming to calm the second circuit through continuous acupressure was at least aimed at the engine everything else ignored. My own hand could be the trial. My 16 weeks. Week 1 to 2. No appetite change at all, which felt like failure after Mounjaro. But I slept through the night by day 9, for the first time in four years. Week 3 to 5. Nothing on the tape. I nearly wrote it off as an expensive sleep aid. My 3am wake-ups stayed gone, and that was all I had. But then something happened that I did not expect. The food noise went quiet. Not Mounjaro quiet. Different. Mounjaro quiet felt like something pressing down on the signal from outside. This felt like the signal itself turning down. Like the source of it had gone quieter rather than something covering it over. I noticed it by its absence. The way you notice a sound when it finally stops. Week 6 to 10. The bloat drained. My scrubs sat differently by week 8. Down 9 lbs without a single food rule, still eating like a person. Still eating my sister's lasagna on Sundays. Week 11 to 16. The waist moved the way I tell patients honest loss moves. Slow, boring, and it stays. Total. 21 lbs, back down to 10 stone 4. Four and a half inches off my waist. No nausea. No dizziness. No ceiling effect. No food noise creeping back in at month eight because there is no drug to push back against. The cortisol itself is quieter. There is nothing to push back. The side-by-side I promised you. Same woman, same clinic, same job. Weight: 28 lbs down in 11 months on Mounjaro. 21 lbs down in 16 weeks with the ring. Waist: 3 inches on Mounjaro. Four and a half inches with the ring. Nausea: weekly on Mounjaro, dizziness at the higher doses. Zero with the ring. Food noise: quiet for 7 months on Mounjaro, then came back at the highest dose. Quiet with the ring and it has stayed quiet. Food: joyless compliance on Mounjaro, against eating dinner with pleasure again. Cost: £200 every month on Mounjaro, against £32 once. After stopping Mounjaro: 21 lbs back in 3 months. The ring: nothing to stop wearing. That food noise line is the one that matters. On Mounjaro the noise was suppressed from outside. With the ring it is quiet from the inside. And quiet from the inside does not have a ceiling effect. What my clinic says now. My consultant noticed at a staff meeting and asked what had changed. When I told her, she did not laugh. She looked at my numbers and said the cortisol component was physiologically plausible, then went back to her notes. From her, that is a glowing review. Two of our nurses now wear one. And some of our maintenance patients — the ones fighting the food noise coming back as they taper off — wear it for the piece the injections never covered: the cortisol, the sleep, the 3am wired brain, the stubborn last inches at the waist. The nurse truth. If you have 80 lbs to lose and your health is on the line, a supervised GLP-1 programme is a real tool. Talk to a real clinic, not an ad, and I mean that. But if you are on the highest dose and the hunger is sneaking back in, and nobody can tell you why, and your only option is to increase frequency or stay on it and hope — the hunger is coming back because the cortisol was never addressed. The drug is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It has reached the limit of what it can do. Because it was never designed to fix what is actually driving it. The ring did something Mounjaro never did for me. It addressed the source. And because nothing is suppressing my appetite from outside, there is no ceiling to reach and no cortisol to push back through. The food noise is quiet because the thing generating it is quiet. I rang Jess the morning I stepped on the scales at week 16. I said: the ring. She said: I know. I have been waiting for this call. I said: you should have given it to me three years ago. She laughed. Then she said: Mum I only found out about it myself this year. If you are sitting on a Reddit thread at midnight asking why the hunger is coming back on your highest dose — I was there. I was the one injecting them and I was there. The answer is not a higher dose. The answer is addressing the thing the drug was never built to fix. The HealthRing by Verdana. £32. Ninety-day money-back guarantee. Measure your waist today, then every two weeks for 12 to 16 weeks. That tape measure is the only side-by-side that matters. The link is in the comments. https://try.verdana-home.com/healthring/news P.S. Jess, if you are reading this — you were right. I should have tried it the night you gave it to me instead of leaving it in a box for two weeks. The two weeks I wasted not trying it are on me.