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That's me. Olivia. NHS nurse. Twenty-three years on the wards. 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. I'd been on MJ for eight months. The hunger had started coming back even on the highest dose. I work in healthcare. I know exactly what that means. A £32 copper ring was not going to be the thing. Except it was. And I'm standing here in jeans I haven't been able to wear since 2022. My name is Olivia Jones. I'm 53. I live in Wakefield. I've worked as a nurse at Pinderfields for twenty-three years. I have two kids — my daughter Chloe who is 26 and my son who is 23. I want to tell you what happened before Chloe gave me that ring. Because I want you to understand that I am not someone who buys into things easily. I am someone who spent twenty-three years watching what works and what doesn't and I have absolutely no patience for anything that doesn't work. The belly arrived when I was 50. I know exactly when because I remember the morning I looked down and thought what is that. Not weight gain I'd missed creeping up. Just there. Overnight. Solid and round above the waistband of my scrubs. Like someone had inflated something and left it there. I know what meno belly is. I'm a nurse. I've had patients describe it to me for years. Knowing what it was called did not make it go anywhere. I tried everything. Slimming World for four months. Lost six pounds. Put eight back on. All of it went straight back to the middle. Holland and Barrett supplements — the magnesium, the ashwagandha, the sage complex. Three months of each. Nothing. Cut wine completely for five months. Walked every morning before my shifts. Started HRT — the hot flushes settled and the sleep improved but the belly did not move. Then I started MJ through a colleague at the practice we work with. I want to be honest about this because I knew the risks going in. I'm a nurse. I'd seen what happened when patients came off it. I did it anyway because I was three years in and out of options. It worked. The food noise switched off within two weeks. The belly started shifting around week six. I lost fourteen pounds. I thought: this is it. Finally. Then something happened that I recognised immediately because I had watched it happen to patients. The hunger started coming back. Not all at once. Creeping back in. Evenings first. Then mornings. I was on the highest dose. I am a nurse. I know exactly what hunger returning at the highest dose means. The drug had reached its ceiling effect on my body. The cortisol instruction running underneath was pushing back through even the maximum suppression. I was not losing weight anymore. I was maintaining an expensive dependency that was beginning to fail. I sat in my car in the hospital car park one afternoon and just sat there. That was October. In March Chloe came home for my birthday. She'd been reading about cortisol and perimenopause — she studies nutrition, she's always sending me articles I don't have time to read — and she'd bought me a ring. The HealthRing by Verdana. Small box. Gold band. Card explaining that it was engineered on the inside to maintain pressure on specific acupressure points connected to the parasympathetic nervous system. That it sends a continuous stand-down signal to cortisol. That it addresses the fat storage instruction at the source rather than working on top of it. I read the card. I looked at Chloe. She was watching me with that expression she has when she's very hopeful about something. I said: I've been on medication that suppresses hunger at a pharmaceutical level and the hunger came back anyway at the highest dose. A ring is not going to do 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 box on my bedside table and I left it there for two weeks. I want to be honest about why. It wasn't that I didn't appreciate it. It was that I had been trying things for three years and I had got to the point where I genuinely could not face the specific feeling of something not working again. The deflation of it. The going back to square one. I had run out of road and I didn't want to use up the last bit of hope I had on something I didn't believe in. But Chloe kept asking had I tried it yet and eventually I felt worse about lying to her than about trying it and failing. So on a Thursday evening I took it out of the box and put it on. And then I forgot about it. Which is honestly the most accurate thing I can say about the first week. I wore it. I got on with my shifts. I didn't think about it. Then about ten days in I noticed something on the ward. 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. Even on MJ it had been starting to creep back. That familiar pull I thought I'd left behind. It was just part of life now. 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. But here is the thing that stopped me. This felt different from MJ quiet. MJ quiet felt like something pressing down on the hunger from outside. Like a hand over a tap. The hunger was still there underneath. Waiting. Which is why it had started pushing back through even at the highest dose. This felt like the source of it had turned down. Like the tap itself was closing rather than something holding it shut from outside. I didn't say anything to Chloe. Too early. Month two. Getting dressed one morning before an early shift. 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 feeling — it was softening. Without a plan. Without a meal tracker. Without anything I was following. And without the hunger that had been creeping back despite the highest dose of the most effective appetite suppressant available. Month three. A Sunday. I was getting ready to go to my sister's for lunch. I went to the wardrobe and without really thinking about it I pulled out the M&S jeans. UK 12. I'd bought them in 2021. I'd stopped wearing them in 2022. I'd kept them at the back of the wardrobe because getting rid of them felt like giving up. I put them on. They went over my hips. They buttoned. They sat at my waist the way they used to. I stood in the bedroom for quite a long time. Then I took a photo. Went downstairs. My husband was in the kitchen. He looked at me and then looked again. He said: are those your old jeans. I said: yes. He didn't say anything for a moment. Then he said: Olivia. You look like yourself again. I called Chloe that afternoon. She picked up immediately. I said: the ring. She said: I know. I've been waiting for this call. I said: you should have given it to me three years ago. She laughed. Then she said: I didn't know about it three years ago. I only found out this year. I'm a nurse. I have twenty-three years of watching what works and what doesn't. I know what hunger returning at the highest dose means. I have watched that happen to patients. I watched it happen to me. And I put this ring in a box for two weeks because I could not face another thing not working. Here is what I understand now that I didn't understand then. MJ suppresses the hunger the cortisol creates. It does not address the cortisol. Which is why the hunger starts coming back even at the highest dose. The cortisol is still running underneath at every dose. At every week. The moment the drug loses its ceiling effect cortisol pushes back through. Not because the drug has failed. Because the drug was never designed to address what was driving the hunger. Only the hunger itself. 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. MJ does not address that instruction. Everything addresses the output of it. Never the instruction itself. 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, over time, stands down. The fat storage instruction quiets. The hunger quiets. Not because something is pressing it down from outside. Because the source is finally being addressed. The hunger that was coming back through the highest dose has not come back. Because this is not pressing down on top of the cortisol. This is telling the cortisol to stand down. I know how that sounds. I am a nurse and I know how that sounds. I also know that I have just put on jeans I haven't worn since 2022. That the hunger that was defeating the highest dose of the most effective appetite suppressant I had access to has gone quiet. And that the only thing I have done differently is wear a ring my daughter gave me for my birthday that I left in a box for two weeks because I didn't believe it would work. That's the photo at the top of this post. Me on the ward. Showing Chloe the ring on my phone because she asked me to send her a picture of me wearing it. The HealthRing by Verdana. My daughter gave it to me for my birthday and I thought she was sweet and naive and completely wasting her money. If you are on MJ and the hunger is coming back even at the highest dose — I was you six months ago. The hunger is coming back because the cortisol was never addressed. MJ suppresses what cortisol creates. It never once switches the cortisol off. And the thing that switches the cortisol off costs £32. The link is in the comments.