My doctor shamed me when I asked about weight loss drugs. But they've helped me lose 80 pounds and stop binge eating.
For years, Elyse Schroeder had a secret routine. She would wake up with constant thoughts of food playing on loop in her mind. Schroeder would deny her cravings, delaying her first bites as long as she could in an effort to limit her daily calorie intake. But once she was alone, the binging would begin. 'The second my kids would go to school, I would be eating,' she tells Yahoo. 'I would go get fast food and hide the evidence at the bottom of the garbage — there was this cycle of shame that I couldn't get control of.'
But not for lack of trying. Schroeder says she tried 'every fad diet that exists.' She joined gyms and worked with dietitians. It would work, for a while, and she would lose some weight. Ultimately, however, 'I couldn't get over the obsession with food, and eventually I would undo every good choice I had made,' she says. 'I couldn't get control of my disordered eating.' She was desperate not to pass her toxic relationship with food onto her children, and knew that diets weren't the solution.
Then, the 39-year-old content creator and social media marketing specialist saw people talking about GLP-1 weight loss medications on TikTok. After finding out she was prediabetic, Schroeder asked her doctor about the drugs. 'Her verbatim words were 'I don't believe in those medications, and I really think we can help you with diet and exercise'' — the same ineffective methods Schroeder had tried for years. 'She didn't help me, she shamed me,' says Schroeder.
So she struck out on her own to get compounded tirzepatide. Over the course of two years on the medication, Schroeder has lost more than 80 pounds and restored her relationship with food. When she met with a new doctor, 'The first thing she said to me was, 'I hope you are so proud of yourself,'' says Schroeder. 'I burst into tears.' And she is proud of herself, not because of the weight loss but because 'I feel so at peace with my life and where I am in my relationship with food,' she says. For this edition of Yahoo's On My Weigh series, Schroeder shares in her own words all the positive changes 'one little weekly injection has brought' to her life: 'Yay science!'
The Weigh-in
Name: Elyse Schroeder
Age: 39
The method: Compounded tirzepatide, 12.5 milligrams
The goal: Before I started tirzepatide, I had bloodwork done, and my doctor told me I was prediabetic. So when I decided to try the medication, truly my only goal was to get my bloodwork back to normal. I didn't care about losing weight, though I hoped I might. As a mom of three kids, I didn't want to die early or to pass on my disordered eating to them. I was 220 pounds when I took my first dose of tirzepatide, and I was just trying to get under 190 pounds. That's not even a healthy body mass index (BMI) for me, but I didn't think I'd be able to lose more than that.
Progress report card: I couldn't even tell you the last time I've had an episode of binge eating. It's definitely been at least a year. I eat when it's time to eat, not to soothe myself. My blood work is passed-with-flying-colors stellar. My doctor is so happy. I go to the gym four to five times a week, happily. Once I surpassed my 190-pound goal, my new goal weight became 150 pounds. After I hit that, my doctor suggested that, because of my relationship with food, we should focus on my body fat percentage, rather than weight. My body fat has decreased, and my muscle mass has increased. I now bounce between 138 and 140 pounds, but I don't really care because I'm focused on being strong and healthy.
Food noise volume: Before tirzepatide, my food noise volume was at a 10. I would be eating and thinking about what I was going to eat after that. I would force myself to go to sleep early just to stop thinking about food. It was all-consuming. And there was so much shame that went along with that: Why can't I feel full or pack up leftovers like other people? I thought it was an issue of self-control or motivation, but now that I have the medication, I realize that my brain handles food noise differently than that of a person without the disease of obesity. Now, my food noise volume is at about a 3. I basically only experience it when I'm hungry!
Day in the Life
Rise and shine
Before taking tirzepatide, I felt like a slug. It was so hard getting my body out of bed, and I didn't feel excited for the day. I would just think, Another day of struggling, of self-loathing, of wondering why I can't fix this.
My sleep and morning mood have been so affected by tirzepatide. I wake up excited and ready for the day. I love a good cup of coffee, but often I don't even really need it in the morning. I just drink it because it's yummy. And I look forward to going to the gym first thing in the morning now. If you told the old me that the gym would become one of my favorite parts of the day, I would've been like, 'You're high.'
First bites
I used to try to delay breakfast and starve myself in the morning, thinking I would eat fewer calories that way. But I've learned that that was dumb because then I'd get to Starbucks after my kids went to school, and my brain would be in this ravished state. I'd get their double-smoked bacon, cheddar and egg sandwich. Honestly, that sandwich still slaps, but it's just two flimsy pieces of bacon, so it's really not doing that much protein- and nutrition-wise.
Despite trying so many diets, my knowledge of nutrition before tirzepatide was really not great. I thought protein came from peanut butter, the end. Now, I eat a very protein-heavy diet. I start my day with a protein shake of some sort while I'm getting the kids ready for school and before I head to the gym. When I get home, I usually make some eggs with some fruit and maybe some sausage. I'm a creature of habit and, as long as I'm not sick of eating it, having the same thing every day eliminates the stress of coming up with something new.
Get ready with me
Before starting tirzepatide, I truly had like five outfits. I thought there was no point in spending money on clothes when I didn't like how anything looked on me.
Now, to my husband's dismay, I love getting dressed and buying new clothes. When you can fit in anything that feels exciting to you, it's fun to get dressed. I used to only wear black, but now in the morning I get to ask what colors I want to wear today — and sometimes it's bright pink. I love doing my makeup and hair now too. It feels like I love myself enough to get ready.
Make a move
I'm now an Orangetheory girlie, and I like to go to the 7:15 a.m. class, because if I don't do it in the morning, my body says 'no' to the gym. I love the mixture of cardio and lifting weights on the floor. I never thought I would like lifting weights, but now I'm starting to see definition, which is exciting, and I just really enjoy it.
I waited until about a month before I entered my maintenance phase (and was no longer trying to lose more weight) to start going to the gym. Orangetheory is really hard, even at a healthy weight — it would have really hurt when I was carrying 80 additional pounds. And I didn't feel like I belonged there. I imagined everyone would think, Oh, there's the fat girl, trying to lose weight … what did she eat before this? Earlier on in my journey, I told myself that any movement is good movement, so I walked every day with my dog for at least 30 minutes. And then one morning — maybe because it was winter and cold in Wisconsin — I just woke up and decided to try Orangetheory. I was so scared to go to my first class, because I had no idea what to do in a gym. But the structure of Orangetheory — where someone is like, 'Here's how you hold a weight, here's how you lift it, now do it 10 times' — has been great for me.
Dose time
For the first six months I was taking it, I had pretty much all of the side effects of tirzepatide, except constipation and vomiting (though I tried semaglutide a year before tirzepatide, and it made me throw up so much I quit after three shots). So I had to make sure I got plenty of electrolytes and ate very clean and protein-heavy the day before I took my injection. And I started taking psyllium husk to help with diarrhea. I always try to take it in the morning, so that I have the rest of the day to recover if my tummy is a little wonky. If I try to take it in the afternoon or evening, I just wake up feeling a little hungover and uneasy the next day.
Since entering the maintenance phase in March, I'm a little more flexible on my shot schedule. Sometimes I wait nine or 10 days to take it instead of a week, if I hit day 7 and don't feel like my food noise is coming back. I typically take my shot on Tuesdays. That way, when the weekend comes, if I decide to have a glass of wine, it doesn't upset my tummy. I don't really get side effects now, except that I'm cold a lot, and like some others on GLP-1s, I get a little allodynia, a kind of skin sensitivity that makes it feel like I have a mild sunburn on the backs of my arms or legs. But it's all manageable, and I've never considered quitting tirzepatide.
Let's do lunch
Lunch before tirzepatide was always some kind of packaged or fast food. And I would overeat at lunch, feel like crap and need a nap every single day.
I'll admit: I don't love cooking. It stresses me out because I can't forward-plan. But my husband is the best. He meal preps for me so my lunch is set to go. I love the salads and wraps he makes me. My current fixation is his Mediterranean bowls with chicken, rice, hummus, olives, pita — I could eat them every day! It's crazy how much my cravings have changed. I wanted burgers and fries; now I really crave protein and fruit and veggies. I never craved stuff like that before.
Happy hour
Happy hours and social outings used to be such a point of stress for me when I was doing these very rigid diets, like Whole30, paleo and WeightWatchers. I wouldn't want to go to happy hour because I knew that that would be a free-for-all where I would want to over-consume food and alcohol. I can be honest about it now that I'm on the other side: I was drinking too much before I started taking tirzepatide.
I really wanted to be free from all the shame and worry I felt in social settings. Now, with the medication, those things don't stress me out at all. I know that the medication will naturally moderate how much I take in. I have about a glass of wine a month. I know I'm not going to eat healthily like I do at home when I go to these events, and that's OK. I can lean into it now and have fun and know that tomorrow I'm going to go back to my routine. Before, it felt like every outing meant I was falling off the wagon and had to start over again. These days, going out feels stress-free.
Plus, being on weight loss medication has opened up a whole new world of outdoor activities I do with my family. Before, my husband would take the kids for a hike on a weekend afternoon. I would stay home and take a nap. I didn't feel like I could keep up, and it didn't sound fun. Now I'm the one planning hikes. We just got back from the Badlands in South Dakota, where we were hiking and climbing for days, and it was so much fun! Before tirzepatide, that would've sounded like torture to me. It makes me sad to think about the things I chose not to participate in and how much I missed out on when my kids were little because I just didn't have the energy to do things with them.
Dinner bell
One of my favorite things about this process is how dinner has changed: My whole family eats at the table together. It's difficult now that the kids are at the age of after-school activities, but it's important. In the era of my crash dieting, I was always eating something different from them because I had been 'bad' during the day, so I felt like I had to undo the damage. What message was that sending to the kids, that I couldn't eat what they were eating?
Now that my kids are older, it's so important for them to have a healthy relationship with food. I want them to understand that just because I'm a woman, that doesn't mean I need to only eat leaves. I don't want to put a thought in their heads that they have to diet, which is part of why, for the time being, they don't know that I'm taking weight loss medications. Now, we all eat the same thing. Often, that's something nutritious that my husband cooked on the grill. My daughter loves to make salad; she calls it 'her specialty.' So we'll have a salad she made, some vegetables and some kind of carb. And sometimes we have a frozen pizza — and that's OK.
Let's get the bill
I'm telling you, if I had to get a second job to make enough money to pay for this medication, I would do it in a heartbeat. I pay for a $79-a-month membership to my telehealth provider, and it's $99 for a month's supply of tirzepatide, no matter what the dose.
When I think about how much I used to spend on groceries and drive-throughs — it was just so much food — it was insane. My husband and I laugh now because we'll put together an Instacart order and he'll be like, 'This total is so low!' And it's because I'm not ordering 12 bags of Doritos; that's expensive! Yes, produce and whole foods are expensive too, but I'm eating a normal amount now. So, I feel like, financially, it all comes out in the wash now.
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