Susan Smith Facebook ad: “What I Almost Quit GLP-1 Over”

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I hit my goal weight on a GLP-1 and I have never felt uglier in my entire life. I didn't know that was possible. Nobody warns you that it's possible. I'm Susan. 44. Two kids. And Tom, who has wanted me at every weight I have ever been. Twenty years of that. And twenty years of me turning the light off, moving his hand, wearing a t-shirt to bed in July and telling him I was cold. He never once complained about my body. I did all of that to him. So when I hit my goal weight, the first thing I felt wasn't pride. It was relief. For most of my adult life, I was heavy. Not "a few pounds off." Not "curvy." Heavy. Size 18 for most of my thirties and I have the driver's license photos to prove it. And the thing nobody tells you about being heavy for twenty years is that it isn't the weight. It's the arithmetic. It's checking whether a plastic chair will hold you before you sit down. It's booking the aisle seat and still feeling the man beside you shift toward the window. It's your husband putting a hand on your waist in your own kitchen and your whole body going rigid, because you are certain, absolutely certain, that he can feel exactly how much of you there is. Every room. Every day. Twenty years. I was 29 at my sister's wedding. She had the photos printed and framed, one for every family member, and in every single frame I am the thing your eye goes to first. I went into her downstairs bathroom and stayed in there for eleven minutes, because I counted. Then I came out and ate cake and told her she looked beautiful, and she did. That was fifteen years ago. I still angle myself away from that photo when I visit my mother. So I tried. God, I tried. WW. Three separate times. Optavia. Whole30. 75 Hard. I lost the same 30 pounds about eleven different times and gained back 35 every single round. And every round ended the same way. Not with a binge. With a Tuesday. Some ordinary Tuesday where I'd look at the tracker on my phone and understand I was going to be doing this for the rest of my life and it still wasn't going to work. You don't want to be thin. You want one day. One single day where you don't have to do the math. Then, two Aprils ago, my son asked me to put him down. He was four. Sound asleep on the couch, and I was carrying him up to bed the way I had a thousand times. I got to the landing and had to stop. Just for a second. Just to breathe. And he woke up a little and said, "you can put me down, Mom. It's okay." He said it kindly. The way you say something you've already decided not to ask for anymore. My four-year-old had been doing the math for me. I made an appointment the next morning. My doctor took my blood pressure twice and didn't say anything the second time, and I watched her decide something behind her eyes. Then she said, "I want to talk to you about a GLP-1." And I said no. I sat in that chair and told a physician that I didn't want the easy way out. That I hadn't earned it. That I'd just do it properly this time, the way I'd done it properly eleven times before. She let me finish. Then she said, "Susan, you've been doing it properly since you were twenty-four." Nobody had ever said that to me. Not once. I cried in my car for a while and then I filled the prescription. And it worked. By the third month, nothing fit. By the fifth, my doctor took me off the blood pressure medication I'd been on for six years. Fifty-three pounds. I crossed my legs at a parent-teacher conference without checking whether the chair in front of me was going to move. I bought a swimsuit. I wore the swimsuit. In public, in daylight, with my hair up. And one night, not long after, I picked my son up off that same couch and carried him up those same stairs and I didn't stop on the landing. He was heavier. I wasn't. I stood outside his door afterward and cried so hard I had to hold onto the doorframe. Because I'd stopped doing the math. Twenty years, and I had finally put it down. That's the part I need you to understand before I tell you what happened next. I wasn't thin. I was reachable. But then, five months in, Tom said something to me that I will hear for the rest of my life. I was at the sink. He came up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders, and then he was quiet for long enough that I turned the water off. "Sue," he said. "I don't want you to hear this from somebody at the school first." That's all he said. And I had no idea what he was talking about. I wasn't hiding anything. I was standing at my own sink at my goal weight, in a body I had waited twenty years for, and I genuinely did not know. He walked me to the bathroom, took the hand mirror out of the drawer, and held it up behind my head. Nobody looks at the back of their own head. You just trust it's there. Mine wasn't. There was a patch at the crown the size of an egg where I could see my own scalp. Pink and shining. My part had gone from a line to a road, and I had been walking around like that, at school pickup, at parent-teacher night, in that swimsuit with my hair up, for weeks. Everyone had seen it. Tom had seen it. He'd been seeing it for a month and deciding every single day not to say it, and I had never once wondered why he'd stopped putting his hand in my hair. I was losing my hair. Losing it. Fast enough that my husband had been rehearsing how to tell me. He put the mirror down and said, "it doesn't matter to me, you know that," which is the kindest thing anyone has ever said to me and the worst thing I have ever heard. Because I knew exactly what it was. I didn't need anyone to tell me. I'd spent five months watching what my body does when I stop feeding it. The shot had given me my body back, and this was the fee. I stood in that bathroom, twenty years of the arithmetic finally over, and felt the new math start. You can diet your way out of being heavy. I had just proved that. You cannot diet your way out of this. I bought a beanie the next morning. It was 81 degrees. That's how it starts. Not with a decision. With a hat you tell yourself is a look. Then you're wearing it to school pickup. Then your daughter asks why you've got a hat on indoors, and you say your head's cold, and she's fifteen, so she just looks at you. The swimsuit went back in the drawer it had lived in for twenty years. I went back to the end of the back row. I knew exactly where it was. I had the body. For the first time in my adult life I had collarbones. A jawline. Jeans in a size I hadn't worn since I was twenty-two, and I wore them under a coat in May with a hat pulled down to my eyebrows. Except now I was hiding the one part of me I'd never had to hide. I could manage a body. I'd managed one for twenty years. You learn the angles, the clothes, which chair. You cannot manage the back of your own head. There is no angle for it. Every person who has ever walked behind you has seen something you can't. My daughter posted a photo of us from behind at a soccer game with the caption "my mom is so fit now" and four fire emojis. I zoomed in on my own crown for twenty minutes. She meant it. That's what killed me. She was proud of me. And Tom. Three nights after the mirror he reached for me, and I moved his hand. I didn't decide to. My body did it the way it had for twenty years. The next night I turned the light off before he came upstairs. He let me. That was the worst part. He'd waited twenty years and he was going to wait again, over a thing he'd told me to my face didn't matter. Every morning I cleaned the drain, and every morning there was more. I started keeping it. A sandwich bag under the sink that I could not throw away and could not look at. I had spent twenty years paying for this body. Every diet, every Tuesday, every plastic chair. And I got it. I actually got it. And I couldn't stand to be looked at in it. Nine weeks of that. Then I made the appointment. I put the sandwich bag on her desk. Same doctor. Same chair I'd said no in. Same woman who'd told me I'd been doing it properly since I was twenty-four. She looked at the bag, and then at me, and I watched her decide something behind her eyes again. This time I didn't like it. "How long?" "Nine weeks." "Susan, I'm going to be straight with you. This happens far more than anyone tells you. About a third of the women I start on these are off within the year, and it's almost never the nausea. It's this. The ones who stay on just decide the trade-off is worth it." The trade-off. Not a side effect. A trade-off. Something with a price on it. And then she said the thing I'd walked in there praying she wouldn't. "It's a real choice. Some women decide it isn't worth it. I'll support you either way." Either way. I wasn't there to ask whether to quit. I was there to be told I didn't have to. Instead she gave me a choice. That voice had let me off a hook I'd hung on for twenty years. Now it was handing me a new one and telling me, kindly, it was up to me which way I hung. I sat in her parking lot for twenty minutes. Doing the math. The new math. Quit. Get the hair back. And watch it all go. The fifty-three pounds. The blood pressure medication. The landing on the stairs. Tom's hand on my waist. All of it sliding back into the water I'd just dragged myself out of, while I got to keep my ponytail. Or stay. Keep the body. Wear the hat. Keep the light off. And grieve quietly for a part of me I'd never had to think about, while everyone told me how amazing I looked. I went home and cried in the shower with the water running so nobody would hear. Because nobody talks about this. Not in the GLP-1 groups. Not in the threads I'd read at 2 AM for a year before I ever got the shot. Not one woman anywhere had said out loud: this is the price, and your doctor will tell you it's up to you whether to pay it. So I'm saying it. If you're on a GLP-1 and you have never heard this, I need you to hear it from me now. The choice she gave me was never real. That night I spent $88 on a bottle of Nutrafol at 1:40 in the morning. It wasn't research. It was panic. It was a woman sitting on a bathroom floor at her goal weight, with a sandwich bag of her own hair in the cabinet behind her, typing "hair loss GLP-1" into her phone with one hand over her mouth. I became the woman who tries everything again. There was no program this time. No points, no app, no weigh-in. Just a cabinet under the sink that kept filling up, and a drain that filled up faster. Nutrafol, because it's the one everyone tells you to try. Biotin, because it's in every gummy on every shelf. Women's Rogaine, because it felt like medicine. Viviscal, because a woman at pickup swore by it. Rosemary oil, because TikTok. And a red light cap that cost more than my first car and made me look, sitting on the edge of the tub at 6 AM with the door locked, like a low-budget supervillain. I hid the boxes in the trunk until Tom left for work. Twenty years of hiding food wrappers, and now I was hiding this. Every morning I took a photo of my part in the same spot in the same light and put it in a folder on my phone. I had a folder for the weight loss too. Same angle. Same light. One was the best thing that ever happened to me and one was the worst, and they sat three inches apart on my home screen. Fourteen hundred dollars in seven weeks. And the part in the photos just kept opening. None of it was even aimed at what was actually wrong with me. I didn't know that yet. I didn't know there was a different problem. My best friend did. My best friend Rachel is an OB-GYN, and I had been avoiding her for four months. Rachel looks at me like a chart, and I couldn't stand the thought of her reading this one. She showed up on a Thursday with a bottle of wine and didn't knock. I was at the sink. Of course I was. She came up behind me, stopped where Tom had stopped, and I said "don't" before she'd said a word. "I saw the soccer photo," she said. "Sue. Turn around." I didn't turn around. I put both hands on the edge of the sink and cried. Not the shower cry. The one where your knees go. When I could talk, I told her all of it with my back to her, because that was the only way I could get it out. And what my doctor said, word for word. Trade-off. Either way. Rachel set the wine down. Hard. "She said either way?" "She was being kind." "She was being lazy." Rachel's voice had gone very quiet. "She put you on a medication that sets this off in more women than anyone warns you about, and she didn't warn you. She didn't tell you why. She didn't tell you it has a name. And then she let you sit in a parking lot deciding whether to give your whole life back over something that has an answer." She took my hands off the sink and held them. "You don't have to pick. You never had to pick. It isn't the shot doing this, not the way she made it sound, and I could have told you that four months ago if you'd let me in the door." For four months I'd been standing in front of a door I'd been told I had to walk through. Body or hair. Reachable or whole. And my best friend had just told me the door was painted on the wall. I sat down on the kitchen floor. Rachel sat down next to me with the wine. "Okay. I'm going to explain this the way I'd explain it to a patient, because your doctor should have and didn't." "Have you ever heard of DHT?" I had not. "Every woman has a little bit of a hormone called DHT. You've had it your whole life. It's normal. It's not the shot." "Then what is it." "It's the reason your hair is leaving. DHT finds a follicle, sits on it, and shrinks it. Every hair that grows back comes in thinner and shorter than the one before, until you've got a road down your part." "Then why now?" "Because something was standing between DHT and your follicles your whole life. Estrogen. Think of it as the bouncer. As long as you've got enough of it, DHT can't get near the door. And do you know where a woman your age keeps a big share of her estrogen, Sue?" I shook my head. "In her fat." The kitchen went very quiet. "You didn't lose fifty-three pounds. You lost fifty-three pounds of the thing that was making the hormone guarding your hair. And you lost it fast. The bouncer walked off the door in about four months and DHT walked straight in. That's why it starts around month four. That's why it's happening to so many women on the shot." "So it is the shot." "No. The shot did exactly what you asked it to. It took the fat off. This is what happens to any woman whose estrogen drops that fast. Nobody warns them." "Now. Let me guess what's in the cabinet. Nutrafol. Biotin. Rogaine. Viviscal. Rosemary oil. And, God help me, a red light hat." I didn't say anything. I didn't have to. "Here's why none of it worked. Biotin builds the hair. Rogaine pushes blood at it. Viviscal feeds it. Every one of them is watering a plant that something is standing on. Until you get the hormone off the follicle, nothing you pour on top matters." "One more thing, and it's the part I hate telling people. By the time you can see thinning in a mirror, you've already lost close to half of what was there. Hair hides itself. By the time it's too much to hide, you've been losing it for months." "So if I'd started something at month four." "You'd have caught it before Tom ever had to hold up a mirror." "It's not your fault. You did something right, and nobody told you what it would cost, or that the cost was optional." "Optional." "You don't need to quit the shot. You don't need more protein or another gummy. You need to get the hormone off the follicle. And there are exactly two ways to do that." "Two ways," Rachel said. "And you want both." "One. You get your body to make less DHT in the first place. There's a plant oil that does that. Pumpkin seed oil. Cold-pressed, at a real dose. Not the stuff you cook with." "Two. You block the DHT that's already there from landing on the follicle. Different job, different plant. Saw palmetto." "One cuts the supply. One guards the door. Most products do one or the other, or they do one at a dose they won't print on the label. You need both, at doses somebody's willing to write down." "Why not a prescription?" "Because you're already on a prescription, and it's the most important one you've ever taken. You're not adding a second drug that can argue with it or hand your doctor a reason to pull you off. You're adding two plants. Nothing that touches the shot. Nothing that touches the scale." "So I just buy pumpkin seed oil on Amazon." "And get half the job at a dose nobody can vouch for. No. Both plants, one capsule, cold-pressed, milligrams on the label." She got her phone out. But she didn't search for anything. She opened her photos. A picture of her own bathroom counter. One bottle. Bloom & Bond. "I'm forty-five. My bouncer's been leaving for three years, slower than yours. I've taken this every morning for two of them. Pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto in one softgel, two thousand milligrams of the oil, dose printed on the front. I didn't want to be the OB-GYN who lectures about hormones and shows up with a widening part." She handed me the phone. "I don't recommend things to my friends. You know that. I'm recommending this." I ordered it from the kitchen floor on Rachel's phone. I didn't trust myself to wait. The first two weeks, nothing. I took it every morning with my coffee and decided quietly it was going in the cabinet with everything else. ✅ Week four, I was standing in the shower and realized I couldn't remember the last time I'd cleaned the drain. I got out, dripping, and opened the cabinet. I hadn't added to the bag in nine days. I sat on the edge of the tub in a towel and cried. A third kind of crying. The kind where you're not sure yet if you're allowed. ✅ Week six, I took the hand mirror out of the drawer and held it out to Tom. He held it up behind me, and I looked at the back of my own head for the first time since the night he'd shown me. The egg was still there. But it wasn't shining. It was covered in fuzz. Fine and dark and everywhere, like a lawn coming back after a drought. Tom put the mirror down. And then he put his hand in my hair. I didn't move it. I didn't turn the light off that night either. ✅ Month three, the fuzz had become a fringe. Baby hairs along my hairline that stood straight up no matter what I did. Ridiculous. The most beautiful thing I have ever seen on my own head. ✅ Month four, I took the hat off at pickup. Nobody said anything. Nobody looked. That was the point. ✅ Month five, my daughter took a photo of us at a game. From the front. I'm in the middle. Last week I got my first haircut in over a year. The stylist weighed my hair in her hands the way stylists do and said, "Whatever you're doing. Don't stop." I'm still on the shot. I've lost eleven more pounds. The folder on my phone is still there. I just don't open it anymore, because the part in the photos stopped opening, and then it started closing. And the swimsuit came back out of the drawer. The trade-off was a lie. It was never body or hair. It was never reachable or whole. It was a hormone sitting on my follicles, and two plants that get it off. So here's what I need to say, whichever version of me you are. If you're on a GLP-1 and it's already started. If there's a hat you tell yourself is a look, and someone in your house who's started being careful with their hands. You do not have to pick. Get the hormone off the follicle and keep your life. And if you're on a GLP-1 and it hasn't started. If you're three months in and your hair is fine and you're reading this thinking, thank God, not me. Listen harder than the first woman. Your bouncer is leaving right now. Month four is coming. By the time you can see it in a mirror, you'll already have lost close to half. You can be the woman who caught it before anyone had to hold up a mirror. I'd have given anything to be her. Picture yourself ninety days from now. You're still on the shot. The number's still going down. You reach back to pull your hair up and there's weight in your hand, and you don't check the back because you don't have to anymore. The light's on. His hand is where it's always wanted to be. You haven't moved it in weeks. Nobody at pickup asks what you're on. Nobody at pickup looks at all. That's the version of this I want for you. The one where you don't have to choose. The brand my friend takes is called Bloom & Bond. Pumpkin seed oil and saw palmetto, both, in one softgel, with the dose on the label. Link is below. I hit my goal weight on a GLP-1. And I have never felt better in my entire life.

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What I Almost Quit GLP-1 Over

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