Jennifer Wilson Facebook ad: “I Forgot What Quiet Felt Like. Here's Why”

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I think about food during intimate moments with my husband sometimes and I have not told anyone until right now. ⁣ I have been afraid to write that sentence for a long time. ⁣ But I am 36 years old and I think it might save someone if I do. ⁣ The first time I noticed it I was in my late twenties. ⁣ We were on vacation. Mexico. The kind of trip you remember for years. ⁣ And I was lying in bed with my husband and somewhere in the back of my mind I was running the math on what I had eaten that day and whether I would be able to fit into the dress I had brought for dinner. ⁣ I remember being horrified at myself in real time. ⁣ I remember thinking: what is wrong with you. ⁣ I did not tell him then. I have not told him now. ⁣ --- ⁣ Most days the noise is not that loud. ⁣ Most days it is just a small calculation running underneath everything else. ⁣ I have been keeping a tracking app open on my phone for nine years and I think it is what has been making me sick. ⁣ Not in some dramatic way. Specifically. ⁣ I noticed it about six months ago. ⁣ I was at a friend's wedding rehearsal dinner. Beautiful restaurant. My husband next to me. Everyone else laughing about something the maid of honor had said. ⁣ And I was sitting there mentally calculating whether the dinner roll on my bread plate was 90 calories or 110. ⁣ Not enjoying the dinner. Not present with my friend. Calculating. ⁣ I had been doing this for nine years. ⁣ Through two pregnancies. Through my mother's funeral. Through my husband's promotion celebration. Through my own thirtieth birthday party. ⁣ A small, quiet, constant calculation running underneath every single meal of my adult life. ⁣ That night I drove home from the rehearsal dinner and I cried in the parking garage of our building before going upstairs. ⁣ Not because of the dinner. Because I had just realized that I could not remember the last meal I had eaten without thinking about it. ⁣ Not one. ⁣ Nine years. ⁣ --- ⁣ I am 36 years old. I have a successful career. I have a marriage I love. I have a four-year-old daughter who is the best thing that has ever happened to me. ⁣ And I have a constant background calculation in my brain about food that runs through everything else, all the time. ⁣ My husband doesn't have it. ⁣ I asked him once, very casually, what he had been thinking about during dinner. ⁣ He said he had been thinking about a podcast he wanted to recommend to his brother. ⁣ I waited for the rest. There wasn't any. He had been enjoying his dinner and thinking about a podcast. The calories of the meal had not crossed his mind once. ⁣ I went into our bathroom that night and stood at the sink for a long time. ⁣ --- ⁣ I have tried everything to make this stop. ⁣ I deleted MyFitnessPal in 2019. I reinstalled it in 2020. ⁣ I tried intuitive eating with three different books. The books were beautiful. I cried reading one of them. None of it stuck. ⁣ I tried therapy. My therapist was wonderful. She helped me with many things. The food calculation did not stop. ⁣ I tried mindfulness apps. Headspace. Calm. Insight Timer. I have a 312-day streak on Calm that has not made the food noise quieter by a single decibel. ⁣ I tried Ozempic for two months. The noise stopped almost immediately. I cried the first week because I had not realized how loud it was until it was gone. Then the nausea got bad and the cost got worse and I came off it. Within ten days the noise was back, louder. ⁣ About a year after that, something started happening that made all of this worse. ⁣ --- ⁣ Every month, for about a week, the noise would get even louder. I would feel out of control around carbs in a way I never felt the other three weeks. I would binge — actually binge, the way I had not done since college — for five or six days. Then my period would arrive and the cravings would just... lift. ⁣ I thought I was losing my mind. ⁣ I tracked it for four months to make sure I was not imagining it. ⁣ I was not. ⁣ The week before my period, every month, the volume on the food noise tripled. Carbs especially. Bread, pasta, anything sweet. I would eat them standing up in the kitchen at 9pm and then hate myself for the next four days. ⁣ I went to my OB-GYN. I told her everything. ⁣ She listened patiently. She did some bloodwork. She told me my hormones looked normal. She said many women experience increased appetite premenstrually and that I should "try to be aware of it and plan ahead." ⁣ That was the entire medical conversation. Be aware of it. ⁣ I cried in my car after the appointment for twenty minutes. ⁣ --- ⁣ That night I sat on my kitchen floor with my laptop open and started reading research papers. ⁣ Not blog posts. Actual research. PubMed. Medical journals. Things I had not done since college. ⁣ I was looking for an answer to a very specific question: why do my cravings get worse the week before my period? ⁣ What I found at 1:30am changed how I understood the last nine years of my life. ⁣ Serotonin levels drop in the late luteal phase. The week before your period. ⁣ Not slightly. Significantly. Studies have documented serotonin function decreasing by measurable amounts in the seven to ten days before menstruation, especially in women who are sensitive to hormonal fluctuations. ⁣ And serotonin does not just regulate mood. ⁣ It regulates satiety. The signal your brain sends after a meal that says "you are done, you do not need anything else." That signal is serotonin-mediated. ⁣ When serotonin drops, the signal does not fire properly. ⁣ Your stomach is full. Your body has eaten. The off-switch that is supposed to say "we are good" never arrives. ⁣ So the program that is supposed to quiet down between meals — the one my husband seems to have running for free — stays loud. ⁣ For the seven days before my period, the off-switch was essentially broken. ⁣ --- ⁣ But the next part is what made me stop breathing for a second. ⁣ The same research showed that for some women, this serotonin-satiety pathway is chronically underperforming — not just premenstrually. The premenstrual week is when it gets dramatically worse, but for women who score high on certain markers, the off-switch is muted all the time. The volume just gets cranked up further in the late luteal phase. ⁣ That was me. ⁣ That was nine years of my life, finally explained. ⁣ The noise was not a character flaw. ⁣ It was a serotonin-satiety signal that was firing too quietly in the background and getting cranked even quieter once a month. ⁣ --- ⁣ The next morning I started looking for what supports this pathway. ⁣ 5-HTP is the direct precursor your body uses to make serotonin. Unlike SSRIs, which manipulate existing serotonin, 5-HTP gives the body the raw material to make more. ⁣ The research that has accumulated on this is genuinely staggering. Studies showing measurable reductions in carbohydrate craving in premenstrual women. Studies showing improvements in satiety signaling. Studies showing better sleep onset, because serotonin converts into melatonin overnight, which I had also not known. ⁣ I went to CVS the next day and bought a bottle. ⁣ Two weeks of nothing dramatic. Slightly better sleep. The afternoon brain fog was softer. ⁣ Then my period week came. ⁣ For the first time in I cannot remember how long, the carb noise did not triple. It was still there. It was louder than the other three weeks. But it was manageable in a way it had not been manageable in years. ⁣ I cried at my kitchen sink while my four-year-old ate Cheerios at the table behind me. ⁣ --- ⁣ I have since switched to a more complete formula — one that combines the 5-HTP with the co-factors my body needs to convert it properly (B6 is the main one, without it half the dose is wasted) plus the daytime craving support that addresses the blood sugar side of the equation. A single drink mix once a day. It is the only thing I have ever taken that hits both the constant background noise and the premenstrual spike. ⁣ That was eight months ago. ⁣ I am not going to tell you how much weight I have lost because honestly that is the smallest part of this story. I will tell you something else instead. ⁣ Last Tuesday night I ate dinner with my husband. Roasted chicken, potatoes, a salad. I did not count anything. I did not photograph my plate. I did not enter it into MyFitnessPal. ⁣ I ate the meal. ⁣ I talked to him about his day. ⁣ When I was done I put my fork down and I was done. The program that has been running in my brain since I was 27 years old simply did not start. ⁣ It is the most ordinary sentence I can write and it is also the entire point of this post. ⁣ --- ⁣ And — I will say one more thing. ⁣ The first sentence of this post is true. I have been thinking about food during intimate moments with my husband for years. ⁣ Three weeks ago, for the first time in I cannot remember how long, I was not. ⁣ I was just there. With him. Present. The way I assume most people are most of the time and the way I had not been since my late twenties. ⁣ I cannot put a price on that. ⁣ --- ⁣ If you have been thinking about food in the background of your life for years — if the volume goes up the week before your period — if you have tried everything and made your peace with the idea that this is just who you are — ⁣ You are not who you are. You are a serotonin-satiety pathway that has been quietly underfiring for years and getting worse once a month. ⁣ There is a missing piece nobody told you about. ⁣ I wish someone had told me when I was 27. ⁣ So I am telling you now. ⁣ EDIT: A lot of people are asking what the drink mix is. It's called Mastara. The full breakdown of what's in it and how it works is on their site — link below 👇

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I Forgot What Quiet Felt Like. Here's Why 👆

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