What Happened When I Took a Prescription Weight Loss Drug: Jennifer Dent Brown

'cause a lot of you may be considering weight loss drugs. Some of you may be on weight loss drugs right now, and that's all well and good and fine. You do what you need to do for you. Here's one thing that a weight loss drug is not going to help you with, and it's not going to help you with creating a new relationship with food. So if you are an emotional eater and this is how you have gained your weight because you eat your emotions, you're feeling happy, yay, let's go out to eat to celebrate. You're feeling stressed out, oh my God, Oh my God, I'm feeling stressed out. Let me go get some chips. You're feeling sad. Oh my God, I need some comfort food. Somebody please give me some macaroni and cheese, right? If you're eating your emotions, a weight loss drug is not going to teach you how to separate your feelings from the food. Very simply, a weight loss drug is not going to teach you how to separate your feelings from the food. So a weight loss drug will kill your appetite. It will decrease your appetite, so you will eat less, but you will still have those emotions. You will still be feeling stressed out. You will still be feeling sad. You will still be feeling happy. You still will be feeling all the things. And if your go-to to cope with those feelings is eating, you've got to figure out another way to deal with those emotions. You will learn how to do that inside Stop Dieting Forever, whether you're taking a weight loss drug or not. That's what I teach. This is what I do. This is what I help countless number of clients do, is understand their emotional triggers of eating. And then it's like, okay, let's identify what the emotion is and how are we going to process this emotion? How are we going to deal with this emotion without going to food? So one of the things, because I've done weight loss drugs before, y'all, I have done Fen-Phen in the past and it killed my appetite so much so that I didn't want to eat. I do remember feeling very, like, disconcerted because you're at the restaurant. I remember I was out— my mom and I were— this was— okay, so going back now, story time. I just graduated from college and I had an internship. So I was accepted to Indiana University. I had a fellowship and I had an internship at a company that was sponsoring me with my fellowship. So I worked at NCR. National Cash Register in Dayton, Ohio. And I had my first internship the summer after I graduated from college. And that's when I started taking Fen-Phen after I graduated. And I remember I was so lethargic and I was so tired. Um, and I remember my mom and I drove from Philadelphia. We drove my car from Philadelphia to Ohio, to Dayton. To get settled in. And I remember we stopped to get something to eat. And normally I'm like, oh, give me the burger, give me the fries, like, whatever. Like, we're out to eat, it's a celebration, it's fun, give me the fun foods. And I remember I ordered, you know, probably a burger and fries. And I remember just like looking at the food like I really wanted to eat it, but I just couldn't. It was very disconcerting. Like, this is the food that I normally would chow down on. This is the food that I normally would— gives me pleasure and makes me happy. And I ate a bite and I was just like, uh, it just didn't do it for me. And I remember feeling very like almost sad, like, because you, you experience like this— I don't say, is it like a high? You experience this like, you know, I could— maybe it is a high, right? An eating high from eating a food that you love, french fries, and it's no longer giving you that high. And so it's sad. And so I remember like looking at the food and because we were driving, I couldn't take it with me. So I had to throw it away and let it go. And so that was a whole nother set of thoughts. Now, this is before I became a Coach. This is where I was still struggling with my weight because I was on a weight loss drug and I was just like, there has to be a better way. There has to be a better way. And so I very shortly after that, I stopped taking the weight loss drugs. My mom was like, you got to stop taking this because you're not yourself. And I, you know, was moving— I was moving to a new city. I had new roommates. I was starting it like an internship at a new company. I had new people. Like, I needed to be myself. So I stopped taking the drug. But I said all that to say, like, the weight loss drug will decrease your appetite, but you still need to learn how to deal with your emotions. So I told her, I said, you can, you know, lose the weight. You can take the drug, you'll lose the weight, but you're still going to still need to do this emotional work. If I were you, I would do— learn how to do the emotional work now. I would learn how to create a new relationship with food as I'm taking this weight loss drug so I know how to manage my mind when those moments come up when I'm feeling the emotion and I want to go eat but I don't have the appetite to eat. And I like— if I eat too much and I get sick, like dealing with all of that drama, like do that now with inside— inside of a community where you can get the support that you need. You will not be the only person on a weight loss drug. We have other people who are taking semaglutide inside the program. We've had people who have done surgery, weight loss surgery, who are inside the program. So they all understand that it's the mindset piece, the identity piece that needs to change in addition to eating less food. Taking a drug, doing the surgery is a way of it's a manual way of eating less food. But you still need to do the work on yourself of understanding why are you going to eat the food to deal with your emotions. So, so, so important. Otherwise, you're going to be a small person, and you're still going to have all the emotional drama, and you're not going to know what to do with those emotions. So you're potentially— let's just say, for an example— I'm not saying this has happened to anyone, but I can imagine. You do the weight loss drug and say you're— before, you would deal with stress by eating Doritos or tortilla chips, like your crunchy foods, your crunchy snacks. That's how you dealt with stress. And now you've done the weight loss drug, you don't have an appetite, you don't want to eat the chips anymore, but you still need some way to deal with the stress. And you may go to something else. You may be, you know, chewing the CBD gummies, you may be vaping, you may be Ooh, online shopping as a way to cope, right? And, and, and numb yourself from this emotion. Uh, you could be yelling at your kids or yelling at your teammates or your team because you're so stressed out and you don't know how to manage that stress. So I say if you're considering a weight loss drug, and you know that you definitely want to make that identity change and become a healthy person, not just a smaller person, but you really want to, like, be the person that loves to have a green smoothie, who, like, prefers to eat a big kale salad and gets joy out of eating a kale salad. If you want to become that person, then I highly suggest you do this program, Stop Dieting Forever, in conjunction with taking the drug.