I lost 38 pounds on Mounjaro. Then I couldn't lift my own suitcase into the overhead bin.

Nobody warned me about month six. If you're on Ozempic, Wegovy or Mounjaro, I'd really like you to read this before you get there.

Image slot 01 — Hero

A real woman, 45–50. Kitchen or airport. Ordinary clothes, no makeup team, phone-camera quality. She should look tired but well — not a model, not a "transformation." The reader must see herself.

I need to say the good part first, because I'm not here to scare you off your medication.

It worked. It worked better than eleven years of dieting ever did. The food noise stopped. The 3pm cravings stopped. For the first time in my adult life I wasn't negotiating with a bag of crisps at nine o'clock at night.

Thirty-eight pounds, gone. I have photographs of myself that I actually like now.

So I'm not one of those people who's going to tell you it's dangerous, or that you should be doing it "naturally." I'd do it again tomorrow.

But in March I was on a flight to Denver, and I could not lift my carry-on into the overhead bin.

I stood there with my arms up. Nothing. A man behind me eventually did it for me and he was very kind about it, and I sat down in seat 14C and felt something I had not expected to feel at the end of the most successful year of weight loss of my entire life.

I felt weak. Not sad. Not ungrateful. Weak.

And once I noticed it, I noticed everything

I'd quietly stopped taking the stairs at work. My arms didn't look slim, they looked empty. I'd lost my backside almost entirely — there's a pair of jeans I used to love and now they just hang off me in a way that isn't flattering, it's only sad.

My hairbrush was frightening me.

And I was tired. Not busy-mum tired. Tired like I could lie down on the office floor at two in the afternoon and go straight to sleep.

Image slot 02 — The moment

The suitcase and the overhead bin. Shot from behind or at her eye level — the reader should feel the reach. Alternative: her hand resting on a stair rail, halfway up.

What nobody tells you at the pharmacy

When you lose weight quickly, you don't only lose fat.

Research on people losing weight on these medications has found that a meaningful share of what comes off isn't fat at all — it's lean mass. Muscle. The thing holding you upright. The thing that gives your arms their shape, your face its structure, and your body the ability to put a suitcase over your head.

Doctors have a word for where that leads. They call it sarcopenia. The internet has a less clinical word for it.

Skinny fat.

Smaller. Softer. Weaker. Older-looking.

Which — and I'll be honest with you — is not what I signed up for. I wanted to lose the fat. I did not want to lose myself.

And here's the part that made me angry. It's reducible. Every serious piece of clinical guidance on these medications says the same two things:

Get enough protein. Pick something heavy up two or three times a week.

That's the whole defence. And nobody said a word of it to me. Not the prescriber. Not the pharmacist. Not the leaflet in the box.

"Just eat more protein" is the most useless advice on earth

Here is the joke, and it isn't funny.

The medication works by taking your appetite away.

Then the advice for protecting your muscle is: eat more.

Do you see the problem?

I'd sit down to a proper dinner. Chicken, the works. And after about five bites I was done. Not full in a pleasant way. Full in an "if I take one more bite of this I am going to be unwell" way.

I'd look at the plate. I'd look at the forty grams of protein still sitting on it. And I'd scrape it into the bin.

Then I read a woman say this in a forum, and I have not been able to get it out of my head since:

"I stopped thinking about meals and started thinking about bites. If I can only manage ten bites, those bites have to be protein."

— from a GLP-1 support group

That's it. That's the entire thing.

So I did what everybody does. I bought a protein shake.

The tub in my cupboard

It's still in there. About three-quarters full. It's been there since April.

Image slot 03 — The abandoned tub

★ One of the two most important images on this page. An open kitchen cupboard. A large tub of protein powder, obviously barely used, shoved to the back. Slightly unflattering light. This image is the competitor.

Because here is what nobody selling protein powder seems to understand about being on one of these medications: a thick, sweet, milky shake is not a solution to being unable to eat. It is eating.

It's a meal. It sits in your stomach like wet cement. It's 350ml of sugary milkshake, and the smell of it alone — on a Tuesday morning, two days after your shot — is enough to send you to the bathroom.

I bought a good one. I bought an expensive one. Thirty grams of protein. It might as well have been three hundred, because I could not finish it.

And that's when it finally landed.

The problem was never the protein.
The problem was finishing it.

Thirty grams that stays in the cupboard is zero grams. Ten grams that you actually drink is ten grams.

The number on the tub doesn't matter. The only number that matters is the one that gets into your body.

So I stopped looking for the most protein. I started looking for the protein I could finish.

On my worst day. Not my best one.

Which turned out to be a much harder thing to find than it should have been.

Slot 04a — Before

Thick, milky, beige shake in a shaker bottle. Half-drunk. Looks heavy. Looks like a chore.

Slot 04b — After

The clear drink. Tall glass, ice, cold condensation, light and pink/gold. Looks like a cold juice you'd actually want.

What I use now is a clear one. It isn't a shake. You stir it into cold water and it comes out looking like a juice — light, tart, cold. There is nothing creamy about it. It doesn't sit in your stomach, and it doesn't smell like a milkshake at eight in the morning when the very thought of a milkshake makes you want to lie down.

It's ten grams of complete protein in a glass. And I want to be straight with you about that number, because I'm not going to lie to you the way the tub in my cupboard lied to me.

Ten grams is not your whole day's protein. It was never meant to be.

It's a floor. It's what you get on the day the food simply doesn't happen — the day after your shot, the dose-increase week, the morning when the thought of eggs is unbearable. It's the difference between some and none.

And after eight months of this, I can tell you that the gap between some and none is the whole game.

It's also got collagen in it, and fibre, and electrolytes — which, if you've spent any time at all in the forums, you'll know is the other half of the conversation nobody has with you either. The constipation. The headaches. The four o'clock crash. Same root cause: not eating, and not drinking.

Image slot 05 — The ritual

Her actually drinking it. Morning kitchen light, casual, mid-conversation. Not posed with the label facing camera. This is a habit, not a product shot.

And then the second half — which I very nearly skipped

The protein gets the raw material in. But raw material isn't the same as keeping the muscle.

The clinical guidance on this is annoyingly consistent, and I resisted it for months: it's protein and resistance training that protects lean mass. Not one. Both.

So I started lifting. Twice a week. Badly. Two dumbbells in the spare room and a video on my phone.

And I started taking creatine.

I'll admit I had to be talked into that one. I thought creatine was for men in vests. It isn't. It's one of the most heavily studied supplements that exists, and the research on strength — particularly in women, particularly women our age — is genuinely good. Five grams a day. It isn't a stimulant. It doesn't make you bulky. It doesn't do anything dramatic at all.

It just quietly helps you hold on to the thing you are trying to hold on to.

I take it as a gummy, because I was never going to mix a second powder and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

Image slot 06 — The creatine

Gummies in her palm, or on the kitchen counter beside the glass. Understated, domestic. This plants the free gift before the offer appears.

That's it. That's the whole system.

• 01Protein I can actually finish, on the days I can't eat.
• 02Creatine, five grams, every day, no thinking about it.
• 03Two workouts a week that I am not remotely good at.

Where I am now

I'm not going to show you a transformation photo. You've seen enough of those, and it isn't what this is about.

Here's what I've got instead.

I can lift my own suitcase.

I took the stairs this morning and didn't notice until I sat down to write this sentence.

Those jeans fit the way they're supposed to fit.

And I'm still losing weight — that never stopped. The medication is still doing its job. I'm just not disappearing along with the fat any more.

The thing I actually wanted to say to you

I'm writing this because of one sentence I keep seeing, over and over, in these groups. It breaks my heart every single time:

"I wish I'd started protein and lifting from the beginning. Not month six."

— said, in some form, by almost everyone

I got to month six. It cost me something to get there, and I still don't entirely know how much of it I'll get back.

You don't have to do that. You're either at the start of this or you're somewhere in the middle of it, and either way there is still time to do it properly.

It isn't another diet. It isn't another rule. It isn't another thing to fail at.

Get some protein in on the days you can't eat. Pick something heavy up twice a week.

That is genuinely all it is.