Every Sunday evening I give myself a shot. It’s Zepbound, and at 5mg it’s been the easiest GLP-1 I’ve ever taken — no nausea, no GI fireworks, none of what made Ozempic and Wegovy feel like a bad trade. What is does instead is quiet the food noise. But here’s what I most want you to understand: it’s not a magic bullet. None of it is. It’s a tool. And the mistake I made the first time was treating a single tool like the whole solution.

There's a specific kind of bad that happens at 3:30 in the morning. It's not sadness exactly. It's not the flat, heavy stillness of depression. This was something different. This was movement. A descent. The sensation of falling into a hole that kept getting deeper — and the worst part wasn't the falling. It was the feeling that some part of me had sought the hole out in the first place.

The gym at 4 AM feels like a secret club. The same handful of cars, the same quiet nods, the same hum of equipment that hasn't woken up all the way yet. Nobody is there to socialize. Everyone is there to get in, get their work done, and get on with their life. This is what my mornings actually look like — and why the hardest part of a routine isn't the discipline. It's building it.

Five-twenty. That was the number on the scale the morning I finally looked. I had just been laid off. I was eating things I shouldn’t, drinking more than I should, and almost back to where I had started in 2023. I sat in the self-pity for a few days. And then something quiet and hard-eyed arrived underneath it — a thought I couldn’t argue with. Nobody was coming to save me.

The surgery worked. Within nine months I was down from over 570 pounds to 440, and I was ecstatic. But somewhere in that progress, the bad habits started creeping back — peanut butter and jelly, Starbucks pastries, almost no time in the gym. Then life came at me hard. A layoff. Weekly drinking. A hunger that returned. And one morning in January, a scale that told me a number I had sworn I'd never see again.

It was late summer in Houston. I was over 570 pounds, sweating through a hospital corridor, there every day for Melinda while she fought through a spinal fluid leak in the ICU. I was focused on her. But the hospital had a way of reminding me about myself anyway. Then came the MRI — and the two technicians who told me I was too heavy for their machine. I stood in the parking lot afterward and finally told myself the truth.