The Sweet Spot: GLP-1s and the Fear of Weight Gain

There’s a phrase I still hear echoing from my work in eating disorder treatment settings: nothing tastes as good as anorexia feels. A statement less about food than about relief.

For many people taking GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic or Wegovy, the most striking shift isn’t only weight loss. It’s the way appetite recedes into the background. Food noise quiets and the constant internal negotiation around eating softens. There is less friction, and with that comes a sense, perhaps for the first time, that things are under control.

For some, this quiet makes it easier to inhabit their bodies at all. When appetite has always felt loud, unruly, or out of sync with how one wants to be seen in the world, simply existing can feel like a constant battle. Eating, being, and size never quite line up; there is always something to manage, correct, or override.

Appetite Suppression and the Relief of Quiet

And yet, for many people, the quiet is not experienced without an undercurrent of fear. Beneath the relief often sits a question that doesn’t quite get spoken: What happens when this ends? What if the appetite comes back? What if the weight does too?

For people whose relationship with appetite has long felt fraught, hunger has rarely registered as a neutral bodily signal. Instead, it has felt unruly, excessive, embarrassing—something that needs to be managed carefully in order to live a life that feels acceptable. In that context, the sweet spot offered by appetite suppression can feel like a reprieve from a lifelong struggle. But sweet spots, by definition, don’t hold forever.

Appetite is a biological and psychological inevitability. When it returns, the old anxieties can rush back in just as quickly: fears about excess, about desire, about losing ground that felt so hard-won. It can be useful to consider how our relationship to food often mirrors our relationship to people. Quieting food noise may also quiet our needs and dependencies more broadly.

When Appetite Returns: The Fear of Weight Regain

GLP-1 weight loss can offer a genuine and sometimes necessary pause in that conflict. For many people, it creates space to breathe, to think, to live with less constant tension. But it doesn’t resolve the underlying relationship to desire. It suspends it.

And suspensions can be useful. A quieter nervous system can make room for reflection rather than panic, for curiosity instead of control. It can open the possibility of asking a different question—not How do I keep this from coming back? but What has appetite come to represent for me in the first place?

And still, something returns. Hunger. Wanting. Desire—for food, for intimacy, for more life. Not as a failure, but as part of being in a body. What often returns with it is fear: the anxiety that the quiet will be lost, that wanting will once again feel unmanageable.

The sweet spot holds its power because it suspends that fear. There is real delight in that quiet, and real grief in its slippage. When the quiet lifts and something stirs, what becomes visible is not a problem to solve, but a familiar tension—between desire and control, aliveness and anxiety—that has long shaped the experience of being in a body.