If you’ve spent years cycling through diets, losing and regaining the same weight, stuck in a restrict-then-overeat loop, on a GLP-1 and worried about what happens if you stop, or scared these drugs are your only shot at a sane relationship with food, this one’s for you.
A quick note before we start. This isn’t really a post about losing weight, because my main focus with my clients is not weight loss. This is about why the usual approaches keep failing the people who try them, and what it actually takes to feel sane with food and at home in your own body. Weight loss/maintenance is a by-product of these approaches.
Most of what the diet industry sells works against your body’s systems rather than with them: eat less, move more, use willpower, count the calories, feel deprived, push through hunger.
AND this kind of dieting (especially the rigid, perfectionistic kind) ends up creating MORE cravings, more food noise, a higher propensity to get stuck in a restrict/binge cycle, and a decreased ability to work WITH outsized urges for eating for reasons other than a true biological need (like pleasure, emotions, boredom, habit, conditioning, etc.).
The good news is that there ARE other approaches — ones you don’t hear about very often, or maybe ever — that address the underlying issues and can shift them permanently.
Why this matters
Diets do not “work” long-term. The data shows that people regain weight they lose from traditional diets.
The GLP-1 trial data for sustained weight loss is also pretty clear. In the largest discontinuation studies of semaglutide and tirzepatide, people regained roughly two-thirds of the weight they’d lost within a year of stopping.
GLP-1s are everywhere right now, and many people are being told they’ll have to be on these drugs for life. It’s worth noting that for those taking GLP-1s, weight loss tends to plateau somewhere around 12 to 18 months, even at a maintained dose. Some barely lose weight, and a meaningful number of people are non-responders from the start. Side effects, like GI distress, fatigue, or the flatness toward pleasure I wrote about in the food-noise piece, can cause people to stop taking them. Supply shortages have forced people into unplanned pauses.
And then there’s the unsaid cost: I have to stay on this forever or I’ll regain it. That belief can be its own kind of suffering even while the medication is doing exactly what it’s supposed to. Underneath it is often a fear of never being able to trust yourself again without it. (You can. It takes building something first, but you can.) Also, that belief alone can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Here’s something else people aren’t often equipped to handle: on a GLP-1, a lot of people don’t just feel less hungry. They feel almost no hunger at all. So when the medication stops or pauses and normal hunger comes back, normal feels enormous after months without it. It can feel alarming, like your body has turned on you.
It hasn’t. What you’re feeling is a signal that was temporarily muted, now being un-muted. Hunger is information, and it’s part of your body keeping you alive. It’s supposed to be there. Outsized hunger is ALSO information. It is a symptom, like a check engine light on your car. Muting it is like covering the light with duct tape: it makes the signal go away, but doesn’t address why it was happening.
I’ll save the full version of this for another post, but there are different kinds of hunger: some are physiological. Some are nutritional, like craving an orange because your body wants vitamin C. Some are conditioned, some emotional, hedonistic, and others are reward center “pulls.”
In all of these cases, hunger is something to learn to understand and work with, not to silence or override. The fear that the return of (normal) hunger is something to fear or dread or willpower your way around is the same belief that made hunger difficult to handle in the first place. And, as someone who once had very loud food noise and would compulsively binge eat, I also understand that there are other forces at play. The good news is: for many people, those forces can also be seen as symptoms and can be “retrained.”
Chronic dieting tends to dull your ability to read these signals at all. Most people I work with who have yo-yo dieted have never learned how to understand and work WITH their hunger. This is also true for those with low interoceptive awareness, like in ADHD. Either way, it is harder to hear, interpret, and trust what your hunger and fullness are telling you.
When you’ve developed the skill to tell them apart and respond to each one skillfully, instead of trying to willpower your way through them, hunger stops being something to fear and starts working in your favor.
So if your fear is that GLP-1s or diets are your only hope, that fear is part of what’s keeping you stuck. It’s based on a story where overriding your body’s cues is the only option and hunger is the enemy.
Setpoint theory
The theory goes like this: your body defends a particular amount of fat through a coordinated system, and it works to pull you back toward the weight you were before you dieted. That defense seems to kick in harder after large losses (think 20% or more of body weight) than small ones, and it’s tied to energy stored in fat tissue, so it doesn’t fire the same way when the weight lost is lean muscle. The defense shows up across several mechanisms: hunger hormones, the energy you spend moving, how rewarding food feels, thyroid output, and the small unconscious movements (like fidgeting) that account for a big share of daily calorie burn. The theory says that if you drop below the weight your body has been holding, all of these shift to bring it back.
The old version of the theory treated this defended weight as a fixed number — the one your genes determined. The more current view is that it’s a range, and the range drifts over time in response to what you’re chronically exposed to. Ultra-processed food. Eating patterns that send blood sugar on a roller coaster. Disrupted sleep and circadian rhythm. A nervous system stuck in sympathetic overdrive. Insulin resistance. Changes in the gut microbiome. Early-life programming. The internal states that drive eating in the first place. The mental and behavioral grooves that dieting itself carves, including the fixation on food and body. And your beliefs and identity around all of it, to the point where believing your setpoint is fixed can become a little self-fulfilling.
The body defends where it has been, not where it “should” be. Which is the hopeful part: if the defended weight can drift up in response to its inputs, it can drift back down when those inputs change.
This is also where dieting and GLP-1s turn out to be more alike than they look. Both are override strategies. They work by suppressing the system’s output. A diet overrides hunger and reward behaviorally, through restriction and willpower. A GLP-1 overrides them chemically. But neither one by itself works on the inputs that set the defended weight in the first place.
How the setpoint actually moves
If it drifts up in response to chronic inputs, it can drift down when you change them. This is slower than restriction or a medication, months rather than weeks, but it can actually shift.
The inputs that shape where your body settles include nervous system regulation, sleep and circadian quality, interoceptive awareness (the skill, which you can rebuild, of actually feeling hunger, fullness, energy, and satisfaction, all of which get scrambled by chronic dieting and stress), the gut ecosystem, and the conditioned reward patterns around hyperpalatable food, which can be retrained. Steady, balanced, well-fueled meals belong on that list too, because how and what you eat feeds directly into hormonal signaling.
None of these get addressed by a diet or a GLP-1.
This is the whole reason skill-building matters, because losing weight and keeping it off are not the same skill set.
Maintenance, and honestly any sustainable approach to weight in the first place, comes down to relational skills: with food, with hunger, with fullness, with satisfaction, with energy, with your own body’s signals. It also means learning to handle emotions in healthy ways instead of eating to numb them, and learning to skillfully surf the urge of cravings so that, over time, your brain stops generating them.
When someone stops a diet or a GLP-1 without ever building any of this, they’re trying to hold onto an outcome without the capacity that produced it. No wonder it slips.
Mindfulness-based training is one of the main ways this gets rebuilt. It restores interoceptive awareness, shifts activity in the brain’s reward circuitry, improves your stress response, helps regulate blood sugar, and retrains both thought patterns and behavior. It supports digestion, immune function, metabolic health, and sleep. And it teaches you to meet emotions skillfully instead of bee-lining to the fridge.
Fueling your body properly changes hormonal signaling. Eating proper balanced meals consistently helps regulate blood sugar and insulin. And when you pair this with addressing the underlying dysregulations — looking at how the systems interact (hormones, gut, blood sugar, micronutrient status) through functional labs — you can start to see what’s actually driving the defended weight, rather than just muffling its outputs.
I won’t pretend it’s effortless. The skill-building takes real, concentrated effort up front, and in the early weeks it can feel like as much work as a diet. The difference, in my experience, is that the work itself is more pleasant and more regulating. People tend to feel calmer and more grounded because they’re doing it, not in spite of it.
And eventually the skills stop being work. You create muscle memory, like with any skill. It becomes the default, then second nature. At that point you’re not fighting your physiology to hold a behavior in place. You’ve recalibrated the physiology, and the behavior follows. Restriction has to be maintained forever to keep working. New skills and new neural patterns don’t.
This is exactly what I do with clients inside my 1:1 coaching and group programs. We work input by input — how to fuel yourself, mindfulness-building, skill development around hunger cues, working with the “pull” toward eating when not hungry, and the other underlying inputs — so that you BECOME someone who feels sane around food. It’s an inside-out approach, not an outside-in one. And unlike a diet that only works while you’re actively forcing it, once you’ve built these skills, you have them.
If this is resonating, book a call (or send me a message) and we’ll have a chat to see if it’s a good fit.
Related: You don’t need a GLP-1 to quiet food noise → · How mindfulness rewires food noise → · How I stopped binge eating peanut butter → · What people get wrong about intuitive eating →
