The Price of Peace. Claim Denied.
I’ve done it all.
I used to be the master of reinvention, a chameleon of diet culture. Name it, I conquered it. Keto? I became a mathematician of macros. Whole30? I purged my pantry and fridge from carbs with fervor. Intermittent fasting? I turned my body into a precise clock. Weight Watchers, Noom, MyFitnessPal — I danced to their digital rhythms, tracking every morsel, every step, every ounce.
And they worked. Temporarily. The numbers dropped, the clothes fit, and compliments flowed. On the surface, it was great. Yet, I kept drowning in a nightmare of my own success. Each victory came with a shadow price, paid in the currency of my sanity.
The guilt became my constant companion — a frenemy, more faithful than any diet plan. It sat with me in restaurants, whispering calorie calculations while friends laughed over drinks. It followed me to parties, turning celebrations into battlefields of hidden anxiety. It stood guard in my kitchen after 7 PM, a merciless timekeeper of arbitrary rules. Every bite of dessert carried the aftertaste of shame. Every social invitation became a strategic warfare of excuses and compromises.
I was the “good” dieter — no shortcuts, no pills, no surgeon’s knife. Just endless cycles of discipline and deprivation, wearing my “clean” eating like a badge of honor. I knew the game, played it well, and wrote its rules in my literal sweat and tears. I did it all and I did it mostly well.
Then forty hit — that magical number when biology laughs at willpower. Suddenly, my body crashed into chaos. With a personal trainer and calorie restriction for 6 months, I lost three measly pounds. Then, as if my body was seeking revenge, fifteen pounds crashed back, a tidal wave of rebellion against decades of restriction.
The numbers on the scale became harbingers, each tick upward a grim reminder of what genetics had in store. My family’s medical history wasn’t just data in a chart — it was a preview of coming attractions, playing in vivid detail across my mind. The weight wasn’t just about appearance (although some of it undoubtedly was — I am vain); it was also about not spending the next chapters of my life disabled by obesity.
I broke down in my doctor’s office and cried in frustration. Her response — to “embrace my body’s size” — felt like a beautifully gift-wrapped empty box. While body acceptance has its place, it wasn’t a solution to the very real medical concerns casting shadows over my future. I didn’t need platitudes about self-love — I love myself plenty; I needed someone to hear the fear behind my tears. I walked out of her office and straight into finding a new doctor, my desperation amplified by her well-meaning but tone-deaf response.
My entire life I lived in a world where food was never just food. Every meal was a mathematical equation, every snack a moral decision, every bite weighted with consequence. Like living beside railroad tracks, the constant roar of food-related thoughts had become my normal. The cacophony of dietary advice (the endless stream of information, opinions, and messages about what, when, and how we should eat), food trends, and nutritional claims were an incessant backdrop to my daily life, significantly influencing my relationship with food and eating. Constant exposure to food-related content and knowing I gain weight by simply being in the same room as cake have had profound psychological implications on me.
Food noise transformed every meal into a battlefield of virtue and sin, where forks became weapons and plates became judgment grounds. Each bite carried the burden of morality, turning simple sustenance into a complex web of ethical decisions. The world of eating split into stark extremes: “clean” versus “dirty,” “pure” versus “sinful,” “virtuous” versus “corrupt.” A simple sandwich wasn’t lunch — it was a moral failing or an achievement, depending on its ingredients.
This twisted theology of eating spawned its own dark ritual: the daily cycle of shame. Each morning began with iron-clad promises of restriction. By afternoon, human hunger would crack these vows, leading to the inevitable surrender to cravings. Evening brought the familiar flood of guilt, and night closed with promises of stricter restrictions tomorrow — a form of dietary self-flagellation. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Forever and ever.
And then there was the language, an entire lexicon of self-abuse: “cheat meals” (as if eating was infidelity), “earning food” (as if nourishment was a wage to be worked for), “being good” (as if food choices determined our moral worth), “falling off the wagon” (as if eating was sobriety), “deserving a treat” (as if pleasure required justification). These weren’t just phrases; they were verbal punishments, each word reinforcing the prison of food shame I had built around my life.
I assumed everyone’s mind was this way, riddled with food rules, guilt, and shame. This was just how brains worked, wasn’t it?
Then came November 17th, 2024. My first Zepbound injection. And suddenly… silence.
The silence was jarring at first — like stepping into a familiar room where all the ambient sounds had suddenly ceased. Gone were the endless mental negotiations, the exhausting calculations, the crushing weight of guilt. The cacophony and guilt that have been my constant companions for decades had vanished, leaving behind an unfamiliar but profound peace.
In that silence, I began to hear something I hadn’t heard in years: my own voice. Not the voice of diet culture, not the voice of shame, not the voice of fear — just mine. Simple, clear, honest hunger. Genuine satisfaction. True fullness. The loudest lessons weren’t in the crash of diet culture or the roar of restriction, but in the quiet moments when my body finally had space to whisper its truth.
Peace — it turns out — isn’t in the perfect meal plan or the ideal number on the scale. It is in the silence between the thoughts, in the space where food could just be food again. The medication didn’t just change my appetite — it turned down the volume on years of internalized noise, allowing me to finally hear what my body had been trying to tell me all along.
Recently, while out to lunch with some friends, one of them looked at me and said, “Wow, you look really happy. Like really happy. I love this for you.”
Her words struck me with the force of truth. She wasn’t seeing my weight, my food choices, or judging what was on my plate. She was seeing me — truly seeing me. In that moment I realized I had been wearing invisible chains for so long that I’d forgotten they were there until they finally fell away. The constant mental arithmetic of calories, the weighted guilt of every bite, the endless internal negotiations — all gone.
What she saw was freedom. Freedom from the prison of food guilt I’d built around myself brick by brick over decades. Freedom from the constant background radiation of shame that had colored every meal, every social gathering, every celebration. She saw what I felt but hadn’t yet named: the lightness of simply being present, of eating without questioning, of existing without apologizing.
In her reflection, I saw myself clearly — a woman liberated from the exhausting performance of food anxiety, experiencing perhaps for the first time in my adult life what it meant to simply be. Not calculating, not compensating, not hiding — just being. Really happy. Genuinely, unencumbered, authentically happy. And she was right — I loved this for me too.
On December 27th I received a letter from IBX: “Zepbound will no longer be covered.” Period. End of story. No exceptions.
I was shattered. Devastated. I cried for days. The cruelest part isn’t just losing the medication — it’s knowing exactly what I’m losing. Because once you’ve experienced the silence, once you’ve heard your own voice again, the noise becomes unbearable. How dare they offer liberation from food’s tyranny only to cruelly snatch it away?
But of course, I knew exactly why they could — and would. Their greed trumps health every time. From a coldly calculating financial perspective, a healthy population means fewer claims, leading to lower revenue. Why would they continue covering life-changing weight loss medications when they made only $31 billion last year? Clearly, that’s not enough to satisfy their shareholders’ insatiable appetite for profit. Perhaps their CEO wouldn’t be able to afford another house in the Hamptons.
The reality is bitter but one many of us have known for a long time: Insurance companies have always put a price tag on health, on silence, on peace, and now on freedom.
