Deborah Rustad Facebook ad: “I finally started a GLP-1 and nobody warned me what…”

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Everyone around me is using a GLP-1 and losing tons of weight and I don't know how to feel. I'm embarrassed to be posting this. I'm embarrassed I feel this way. It feels like everyone in my life is on a GLP-1 and dropping tons of weight and looking amazing. I feel like I'm going to be the last fat woman left in my image-conscious city. — A bit of background: In college I weighed ~165. My friends and I all did Weight Watchers together and I dropped down to 140-145 and looked incredible. But it was a pretty miserable experience. I thought about food constantly. All day every day I was calculating what my next meal would be, how many "points" it would cost me, what I could eat if I got hungry, how I could adjust my dinner if I — god forbid — ate a fucking banana in the afternoon or something. I ate a lot of gross frozen meals that displayed points on the package just to save myself some brain space. The second I stopped tracking, all the weight came back instantly. I wasn't gorging myself or bingeing on treats or anything. I ate until I was full. And my weight went right back to where it had been before. A few years later, I got married and we decided to start trying for a baby. To facilitate that, I went off a medication I'd been on since I was a teenager. When I went to my next psychiatrist appointment 3 months later, I was 15 pounds heavier. My doctor was like, ohhhhh, yeah, that's a really normal side effect of going off that medication. He hadn't felt the need to mention that beforehand. Again, I hadn't felt like I was stuffing myself or eating all that differently. I ate til I was full and I guess it was taking me a little more to feel full. That was a decade ago. My weight has settled at 182-187 ever since. It's stayed in that range through years of infertility treatment (male factor), a devastating second-trimester miscarriage, the pandemic, then two successful pregnancies. Both of those times I was back at this exact weight by 6 months postpartum without any intentional dieting or exercise program. I typically wear 12-14 pants/dresses and L/XL tops. I don't have a terrible junky diet. I eat a lot of whole foods. I have oatmeal every morning, snack on things like fruit and granola, and cook dinner from scratch most nights even with two toddlers underfoot. Occasionally we bake together or make pancakes on the weekend but otherwise we don't keep a ton of sweet treats in the house. My diet is objectively better now than when I was eating icky frozen food all the time. As I approach 40, I've made a number of small lifestyle changes. I upped the protein in my normal breakfast. We cut way back on the weeknight wine and now I only drink maybe 1-2 nights a week when we're with friends or out to dinner. I drink tons of water. I cut out my daily Diet Coke. After my youngest was done breastfeeding around 18 months, I started going to a boutique fitness class once a week. At the start of this year, I started lifting weights more often, though that routine was derailed by an injury. My weight has not budged an ounce outside of my normal zone. It seems pretty clear that this is where my body is happy. I get a physical every year and, apart from BMI, my health is perfect — excellent blood pressure, cholesterol on the high end of the normal range, no indication of diabetes or any other problems. It took forever to get pregnant, but once I was there, my pregnancies, births and postpartum stages were picture-perfect. I had kind of made peace with being a little chubby. I don't have to restrict my eating at all to stay this weight, I never starve, I never count calories. I feel like I have a genuinely good relationship with food, which seems rare for women these days. And then GLP-1s came out. We are really hoping to have one more baby, and there is not a lot of research about GLP-1s and pregnancy. Plenty of women have gotten pregnant on them and been fine but the issue has not been closely studied. I had such wonderful pregnancies that I am really hesitant to "rock the boat" with my biology. I also feel a lot of hesitation about them as a parent. What am I saying to my kids? "YOUR body is perfect, you are perfect just the way you are — but I'm not! Mommy has to take shots to conform to what other people think will look better." I don't know that that's a message I want to send. But now multiple women in my close circle of friends are on them. They look amazing. The first person I know who tried one, when we had met, she weighed about the same as me. She has dropped to a size 0/2. Another friend said she was around ~160 pounds to start and is down to a size 4. My coworkers barely pick at their lunches and joke about "surviving" holiday meals when you don't have an appetite anymore. The moms at school pickup are noticeably thinner. Now I worry about my kids in the opposite direction: How will they feel if they have the only "fat mom"? Am I sending the message that their mommy is the only one who can't control her appetite like everyone else? Am I going to embarrass them? My very best friend started one earlier this year. We were also similar body types. She just sent me some photos from a family trip she's on… I hate to say it, but I could have cried looking at them. Her face is looking so slim and angular. I should have written "you're looking so great!" but I didn't. I also work a public-facing job. I am occasionally on TV/video podcasts/social media video interviews, maybe once a month, and frequently on stage speaking at conferences and in online classes and seminars. It was one thing when there were still lots of women around my size (I believe I'm the typical pants size for women in America) but I live in a HCOL, image-focused city and the women around me are vanishing before my eyes. Now I'm starting to wonder what career opportunities I'm missing, what bookings I'm not getting, what professional events I'm not being invited to because they don't want the fat girl there when they have 10,000 increasingly thin women to choose from. I came across a study today that showed men start negatively judging women for their weight at 157 pounds. I'm 30 pounds over that. No one has ever said "you're a fat pig" to my face, or even commented it on my TV appearances, but I look at that statistic and wonder how many are thinking it. I just don't know. It's one thing to see actresses on the red carpet with eating disorders, but another to see, at this point, just about everyone in my life slimming down except me. I'd consider a GLP-1 if I was prediabetic or had negative physical impacts from my weight, but I don't. My knees feel fine. I don't get winded walking up stairs or chasing my kids. I don't even think I'm in perimenopause — no brain fog, no trouble sleeping, no exhaustion or irritability outside the norm for a mom of young kids. I really don't relate when I see some millennials talking about aches and pains or feeling getting older. I don't feel all that different physically than I did a decade ago. But I want to know what my life would look like if I was at a "normal" weight. I've even wondered if we should skip having a third baby, something I have always always wanted!, just so I can start a GLP-1 now and get to be a little thin while I'm still a little young. My husband really wants to try one — he's also on the chubby side — but I told him I would want us to do it together. At this point I think once I have the third baby and am totally done with breastfeeding, I'll try it. But who knows how long that could take. I don't know. If I medically needed to take one, I would, without hesitation. If my weight genuinely interfered with my life — if I didn't fit into airplane seats or restaurant chairs, if I couldn't fit into clothes at the mall — that'd be a different story. But I'm just on the fat end of normal. I truly don't shame or judge people for using GLP-1s. I envy them! It just feels so shallow and narcissistic for me to take one when the ONLY reason is to be thin too. Now I'm circling around to cope. What if my health is about to turn bad because of my "unhealthy" weight and I'm missing my last chance to prevent it? What if I wait until I do have joint pain or sleep apnea or something and it's too late to fix? But really, I just want to know what it's like to go through life as a thin woman. — [UPDATE: So I wrote all of that about eight months ago. A lot has happened. We had our third baby. Another beautiful pregnancy, another smooth delivery, healthy baby, all of it. I feel incredibly lucky and I know that. Especially after everything we went through with the infertility and the miscarriage. Three healthy kids. I don't take that for granted for a second. And then, about five months after I stopped breastfeeding, I did the thing. I got the prescription. My husband and I started together, like I said we would. The first couple months were kind of surreal. The weight just... started going. No tracking, no points, no frozen meals with a number stamped on the box. I'd eat dinner and put my fork down and feel finished. Actually finished. Not performing finished. Not bargaining with myself about whether I was allowed to feel full. Just done. It was the relationship with food I thought I already had, but simpler. Quieter in my head. By month three I was down about 19 pounds. I hadn't been this weight since my early 30s. People at work were noticing. My best friend (the one from the vacation photos that made me cry) texted me "okay NOW you get it" with a bunch of exclamation points and I laughed because yeah, I got it. I finally got it. I thought I'd feel guilty about starting one, especially after everything I wrote about what kind of message it sends to my kids. I don't know. Maybe I'll process that later. But in the moment I was too busy feeling like I'd been holding my breath for fifteen years and someone finally said I could exhale. That lasted about two more weeks. I don't know how to describe what happened next except that it felt like my body started falling apart in slow motion while still looking better and better from the outside. Which is this sick joke that nobody warns you about. The cramps started first. In my calves, mostly, but sometimes my feet. Always at night. I'd wake up at 2 or 3AM and my whole lower leg would be locked up and I'd have to get out of bed and pace around the hallway trying to walk it off while being quiet enough not to wake the baby. Some nights it happened twice. My husband slept through it because of course he did (love you babe but come on). Then the sleep thing got weird even on the nights the cramps didn't wake me. I'd fall asleep fine and then just... be awake at 3AM. Not anxious exactly, or not in a way I could identify. More like this feeling of something being wrong but I couldn't point at it. Just this low, heavy, buzzy thing in my chest. I'd lie there and my brain would cycle through every stressful thing in my life and I couldn't turn it off. This never happened to me before. I am not an anxious person. I've never had trouble sleeping, not even with a newborn in the house. This was new and it scared me. And then the fatigue. God, the fatigue. I have three kids under six. I know what tired is. Tired is normal, tired is life. This was different. This was waking up feeling like I hadn't slept at all even on nights where I technically got seven hours. This was sitting in the school pickup line and realizing I couldn't remember driving there. This was my five year old asking me to play with her and me thinking I genuinely might not be able to get off the couch. My hair started thinning. Not dramatically, not like bald patches or anything, but enough that I noticed it in the shower drain. Enough that my daughter picked a clump off my sweater once and said "mommy why is your hair everywhere" and I had to pretend that was a funny observation and not something that made me want to cry. I told my doctor about all of it. She said it was normal, that these things tend to level off, to drink more water and maybe try some electrolyte packets. I wanted to be like, I drink so much water I'm in the bathroom every forty-five minutes, I don't think hydration is the issue here. But I just nodded because what else do you do? She's the doctor. Here's the thing that was messing with my head the most though: I looked great. People kept telling me I looked great. I was fitting into clothes I hadn't worn in ten years. My best friend was thrilled for me. My mother-in-law, who has had opinions about my body since approximately the moment she met me, actually told me I looked "wonderful" at a family dinner. WONDERFUL. From her that's like getting a standing ovation. And I felt terrible. I felt terrible and I couldn't tell anyone because who wants to hear "I'm finally losing weight and I'm miserable"? That's not a thing people feel comfortable being sympathetic about. It's like complaining about your beach house. You just sound ungrateful. My husband was going through it too, by the way. He was getting the cramps, the fatigue, all of it. But he's the kind of person who just powers through stuff and doesn't really want to talk about it. So we were both quietly suffering and not wanting to be the first one to say "should we stop?" I didn't want to stop. I need to be really clear about that. After everything I wrote in that original post, after years of watching everyone around me shrink while I stayed the same, after finally, FINALLY being on the other side of it? Stopping felt like giving up the one thing that had ever actually worked. And I knew exactly what would happen if I stopped because I've been through it before. The weight comes back. It always comes back. And then everyone watches it come back. No. But I also couldn't keep going like this. Something had to give. I ended up posting in one of those Facebook groups for women on GLP-1s. I don't even remember exactly what I wrote, something like "is anyone else dealing with cramps and weird anxiety and not sleeping or is it just me, my doctor keeps saying it's normal but I genuinely feel like I'm losing it." I almost deleted it immediately because I felt dramatic. But then I checked back a few hours later and there were hundreds of replies, which, I don't know if that made me feel better or worse? Like okay cool so we're all falling apart, great. But there was one comment that kept getting pushed to the top. It wasn't long or preachy or anything. It was just this woman, I think she said she was in Michigan or something, no profile photo, clearly not selling anything, and she described exactly what she'd been through and then what she did about it. She said these medications drain your magnesium. Like, that's a known thing. It happens because you're eating less so you're taking in less, and then on top of that whatever GI issues you're dealing with (and I was dealing with them, I just didn't even bother mentioning it because it felt like such a given on these meds) are flushing out even more. And when your magnesium bottoms out, you get the cramps, you get the sleep disruption, you get the anxiety, you get the fatigue. It's all connected. It's all the same deficiency showing up in different ways. And she said the thing that changed it for her was a specific kind of magnesium. Not the stuff from the drugstore that made her stomach worse. She said the form matters more than most people realize and that bisglycinate is the one your body actually takes in, and it doesn't wreck your stomach, which when you're already nauseous on a GLP-1 is kind of the whole ballgame. She specifically recommended SPNutrition. I spent probably forty minutes that night looking into them because I wasn't about to put something in my body without at least doing the bare minimum of research (I'm already putting a GLP-1 in my body, the least I can do is vet the supporting cast). They use pharmaceutical grade magnesium bisglycinate at the full clinical dose, not some half-measured amount that technically lets them put "magnesium" on the label. They test every batch through a third party lab twice. They're NSF certified. They have over 120,061 women using them, 12,470+ verified reviews. And they do a 90 day money back guarantee which at that point I was like okay, I literally have nothing to lose. Sixty days. If I feel the same or worse I get my money back. Fine. Two raspberry gummies before bed. Fine. Let's see. The first thing I noticed, maybe four or five days in, was that I didn't wake up with cramps. Not "the cramps were milder." They were just gone. I actually didn't even notice it at first because you don't notice the absence of something that's been waking you up. I just realized one morning that I'd slept through the night and my legs didn't hurt. And then it happened the next night. And the next. By the end of the second week, the 3AM thing stopped. I don't know how else to describe it. That heavy anxious feeling that had been sitting on my chest every night just... wasn't there anymore. I was falling asleep and staying asleep. I was waking up feeling like a person again. Not wired. Not groggy. Just normal. The way I used to feel before all of this. The fatigue took a little longer, maybe three or four weeks total. But it lifted. I started having energy in the afternoons again, which sounds like such a small stupid thing but when you have three little kids and you've been running on fumes for months, getting your energy back feels like getting your entire personality back. I was playing with my daughter again. I was cooking dinner again instead of staring at my phone trying to summon the will to open the fridge. My hair is still thinner than it was. I'm being honest about that. I don't think magnesium is a magic fix for every single thing. But it stopped getting worse, which at this point I'll take. My husband started taking them too after he saw what happened with me. Same thing. His cramps stopped, his sleep improved. He won't post about it on Facebook obviously but he did tell his brother, which for him is basically a TED talk. I'm still on my GLP-1. I'm still losing weight. But I actually feel like myself while it's happening, and for a while there I didn't think that was possible. I thought the side effects were just the cost of finally getting to be thin and I had to decide if I was willing to pay it. I'm really glad I was wrong about that. I don't know if this will help anyone else. I know everyone's body is different and I'm not a doctor and all that. But if you're on one of these medications and you're dealing with the cramps, the sleep stuff, the anxiety, the fatigue that doesn't make any sense, look into magnesium bisglycinate. The SPNutrition ones specifically. They have the 60 day guarantee so if it does nothing for you, you're not out anything. But I don't think that's going to happen. I'll drop the link below for the exact ones I take. ❤️ 👉 https://spnutrition-us.com/pages/advertorial-magnesium ]

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I finally started a GLP-1 and nobody warned me what happens at month 3 👇

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