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That's me. Olivia. GP. Holding up the ring my daughter gave me for my birthday that I thought was the most pointless thing she could possibly have spent her money on. Especially since I was the one writing the MJ referrals. I'm 52. I'm a GP in Leeds. And for two years I was the one writing the MJ referrals for my patients. Then it happened to me. The meno belly… Not from eating badly. Not from stopping the gym. Just there one morning, sitting hard and solid above my waistband. The kind that doesn't move when you breathe in. The kind that made me look six months gone in everything I wore. The kind that was there when I woke up and still there when I went to sleep and had absolutely nothing to do with what I'd eaten that day. I know what the guidelines say to try first. So I did exactly what I tell my own patients to do. Lifestyle first. Calorie reduction. Increased movement. I cut back on everything. Tracked what I ate. Walked 45 minutes every morning before my surgeries. Six weeks of it. Lost a few pounds. Put them straight back on the moment I relaxed. Started Slimming World because my receptionist had been going on about it for months and I was desperate enough to sit in a village hall on a Tuesday night counting syns at 51 years old. Eight weeks. Nothing moved on my middle. Not once. Cut wine completely for five months. Started HRT — the hot flushes settled, the sleep improved, the 3am wake-ups eased. The belly did not move. Holland and Barrett. The magnesium. The ashwagandha. The sage complex. Three months of each. Nothing. I had done everything I would have told a patient to try before reaching for a prescription. None of it worked. Then one afternoon I was sitting at my desk between patients staring at my screen. A MJ referral form. I'd written hundreds of them. I knew exactly how they worked. I knew the weeks of nausea. The cost that climbs as the dose increases. And I knew what happened when women stopped. I had read the SURMOUNT-4 trial. Published in JAMA in 2023. The largest clinical study on weight loss jab maintenance. The finding was unambiguous: more than eight in ten people who stopped the medication regained significant weight within a year. Not some of them. Eight in ten. Published in the most widely read medical journal in the world. I had this data. I thought about it every time I sat across from a patient and reached for the referral form. I referred them anyway. Because that is my job. When a patient sits across from me having tried everything else and the belly won't move and they're out of options, I refer them. The guidelines support it. The drug works while they take it. I write the form. What I never said — what the guidelines don't ask me to say — is that eight in ten of them will regain significant weight within a year of stopping. That the cortisol driving the belly is still running underneath the entire time. That the moment the suppression stops the instruction takes back over immediately. That there is nothing in my prescribing toolkit aimed at the actual instruction. I knew all of this. I referred them anyway. Because I didn't have anything else to offer. So I went looking properly. Not as a GP. As a patient who was fed up. A few weeks later I was on a menopause forum at half eleven at night — not something I ever imagined doing — and a woman called Deborah had written a long post about cortisol. Not weight loss tips. Not diet advice. Just a clear explanation of what actually happens hormonally when oestrogen drops. I almost kept scrolling. I didn't. Here is what she explained. And here is what I, as a GP, had been underselling to my own patients for years. When oestrogen drops in perimenopause cortisol loses its regulator. It runs elevated constantly. It sends one instruction to the fat cells around your middle. Store. Do not let go. A famine is coming. It does not matter how little you eat. It does not matter how many syns you count or how many miles you walk. That instruction overrides all of it. The jabs work around this temporarily by suppressing the hunger the cortisol creates. They do not switch the signal off. The moment you stop, cortisol is still running exactly as it always was. The fat comes back because the instruction never stopped. That is why eight in ten women regain significant weight within a year of stopping. Not because they failed. Because the instruction was never addressed. It was just covered over. Then Deborah wrote about a ring. Specific acupressure points on the fingers connected to the parasympathetic nervous system. The part of the brain responsible for telling cortisol to stand down. Sustained continuous pressure on those points sending that signal around the clock. A ring engineered to maintain that pressure continuously while you work, while you sleep, without you having to think about it. I read the comments. Most of them were exactly what you'd expect. Scam. Must be fake. A ring is going to do what the jabs couldn't? Come on. I agreed with them. I'm a GP. I've spent twenty years watching what works and what doesn't. A copper ring was not going to address what pharmaceutical intervention couldn't. But then a few comments stopped me. Women who'd been in the thread for months. Who'd posted about their own failed diets and their own failed jab cycles. Who came back weeks later saying: I know how this looks. I thought the same. But I'm back in jeans I wore in 2022 and I haven't changed anything else. I read those comments several times. And then I closed the tab. I didn't order it. I was too sceptical. I was a GP. I wasn't going to spend money on something that every sensible part of my training told me was wishful thinking, however many women in a forum said otherwise. But I couldn't stop thinking about Deborah's post. I mentioned it to my daughter Emma a few weeks later — almost as a throwaway, the kind of thing you say when you've been thinking about something and need to say it out loud to someone. She's 26. She studies nutrition. She takes this stuff seriously. I told her about the cortisol explanation. About the forum. About the women who said it worked. About the comments calling it a scam. About the fact that I believed the scam comments more than the ones saying it worked, because that's what you do when you're a GP and you've spent two decades being appropriately sceptical about things that don't have a randomised controlled trial behind them. Emma listened to all of it. Then she said: so you've been thinking about it for weeks and you still haven't tried it. I said: I don't think it'll work. She said: but you don't know that. I said: I'm fairly confident. She left it there. I thought the conversation was over. Then it was my birthday. Small box. Inside it the ring. And a card in Emma's handwriting that said: you've talked about this for three months. Just try it. Love you. I read the card. I looked at her. She had that expression she gets when she's made a decision and isn't interested in debating it. I said: Emma. I write these referrals. I know what pharmaceutical appetite suppression does and what it doesn't do. A ring is not going to address what that couldn't. She said: Mum. Just wear it. Please. Just try it. I said: of course I will. And I put it in the drawer of my desk at the surgery and left it there for two weeks. It wasn't that I didn't 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 run out of road and I didn't want to spend the last of my credibility with myself on something I didn't believe in. But Emma kept asking. 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 drawer and put it on. And then I forgot about it. That is honestly the most accurate thing I can say about the first week. I wore it. I got on with my surgeries. I didn't think about it. I'd been managing the food noise every single day for three years. That constant low-level pull that meant I was always thinking about food, always negotiating with myself, always slightly hungry regardless of what I'd eaten. It was just part of life. I'd stopped noticing it was there the way you stop noticing a sound that's always running. Ten days in I noticed it wasn't there. Not gone completely. Just turned down. I didn't say anything to Emma. Too early. Month two. Getting dressed before an early surgery. My work trousers sat differently. I pressed my stomach the way I'd been pressing it every morning for three years and the quality of it had changed. That hard tight waterlogged feeling — it was softening. Without a plan. Without a meal tracker. Without anything I was following. This did not feel like when the jabs were working on my patients. The jabs felt like something pressing the problem down from outside — suppressing the hunger the cortisol was creating while the cortisol kept running underneath. This felt like something different. Like the source of it had changed. Day 34. I remembered the dress. Size 14. From Next. I'd bought it for my daughter's engagement party eighteen months ago. It fit perfectly in the shop. By the time the party came around I couldn't get the zip past my ribs. I wore something else and smiled all day and didn't tell anyone. I'd kept it on the shelf in my wardrobe. Couldn't send it to the charity shop. That felt too much like giving up on myself. I took it down. Put it on. Zipped it up. Stood in front of the mirror for a moment just standing there. Day 51. My colleague Sarah stopped me in the corridor. Hadn't seen me in about six weeks. She looked at me and said: Olivia. What are you doing differently. You look like yourself again. I showed her the ring. She laughed. Then she went quiet. Then she asked me to send her the link before we'd even got back to our offices. I called Emma that afternoon. I said: those jeans I haven't worn since 2022. They fit. She said: Mum. I said: I know. I still have the MJ referral form on my system. I haven't opened it. Here is what I understand now that I didn't understand then. The weight loss jabs suppress the hunger the cortisol creates. They don't address the cortisol. The moment you stop the cortisol takes back over immediately because it was running underneath the entire time. That is why the weight comes back. That is why eight in ten women regain significant weight within a year of stopping. That is why every patient I referred came back. Because nothing was aimed at the cortisol instruction. Everything was aimed at what the cortisol was creating. When oestrogen drops in perimenopause cortisol loses its regulator. It runs elevated constantly. It sends one instruction to the fat cells around your middle — store, do not let go, a famine is coming. No diet addresses that instruction. No jab addresses that instruction. Everything addresses the output of it. The acupressure points on the fingers that connect to the parasympathetic nervous system send the stand-down signal the cortisol lost when the oestrogen dropped. Sustained continuous pressure on those points — from a ring you wear like normal jewellery — sends that signal around the clock. The cortisol stands down. The fat storage instruction quiets. The body lets go. Not because something is pressing it down from outside. Because the source is finally being addressed. I know how that sounds. I am a GP and I know how that sounds. I was the person in the comments calling it a scam. I also know that I have just put on a dress I haven't been able to wear since my daughter's engagement party and I have not been on a plan and I have not been logging meals and the only thing I have done differently is wear a ring my daughter bought me for my birthday after three months of listening to me call it a scam. That's the photo at the top of this post. Me in my consultation room. Holding up the ring. If you are reading this having done everything your GP suggested and watched nothing change — I was your GP. I was writing those referrals. I was the one telling women to try lifestyle first and handing them the MJ paperwork when it didn't work. I never once offered anything that addressed the cortisol directly. Not because I was hiding it. Because I didn't know it existed. You are not weak. You are not lacking willpower. You are not broken. Your cortisol is elevated and your body is following an instruction that no diet and no jab was ever designed to turn off. The HealthRing by Verdana. £32. Ninety-day money-back guarantee. The link is in the comments. I wish someone had sent this to me before I spent two years being the worst patient I'd ever had.